Meet the Mother of Software and the Conscience of the AI Revolution
Introduction to Margaret Hamilton
**Margaret Hamilton** is an American computer scientist and is known as the ‘mother of software,’ in other words, the set of instructions and programs used to operate computers. In 1960, together with her team at MIT, she wrote the computer code and onboard flight software for the Apollo moon landings in the late 1960s and early ‘70s.
Hamilton was born in 1936, in Indiana, U.S.A., but grew up in Michigan where she graduated from Hancock High School in 1954. She earned her BA in mathematics with a minor in Philosophy from Earlham College in 1958.
In 2003, she was given NASA’s Exceptional Space Act Award in 2003 for her scientific and technical contributions, which included $37,200, the largest sum awarded to any individual in NASA’s history.
Hamilton’s Career
After graduating from Earlham College in 1958, Hamilton accepted a job at MIT, programming software to predict the weather, while doing some postgraduate work in meteorology.
In the early 1960s, she joined the **Semi-Automatic Ground Environment** project at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. SAGE was the first U.S. air defense system and Hamilton wrote software for it aimed at identifying enemy aircraft. From there, Hamilton joined MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory, which provided aeronautical technology for NASA.
Hamilton & the Apollo Code
In 1961, MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory entered into a contract with NASA to develop the **Apollo program’s flight software** and guidance system that would eventually land humans on the moon for the first time in 1969.
Hamilton led the Software Engineering Division at the Instrumentation Laboratory and, together with her team, developed the on-board flight software for the Lunar Module and Command Module of the Apollo program. Hamilton felt that the work she and her team were doing involved just as much engineering as the other work on the Apollo spacecraft that she coined the term software engineer to describe their work.
Up to that point, the term engineering had purely been associated in science with the design and building of engines, machines, and structures. However, during her work on the Apollo program, Hamilton realized that building data programs for computers to execute specific tasks involved equally complex design and, hence, was a different form of engineering.
In a 2009 interview for MIT News, Hamilton described her contribution: “There was no second chance. …We took our work seriously, many of us beginning this journey while still in our 20s. … Because software was a mystery, a black box, upper management gave us total freedom and trust. We had to find a way and we did.”
Against the Trends & Against the Odds
When Hamilton accepted the job at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, she was 24 years old, and the plan was to support her husband during his 3 years at Harvard Law. At the time, women were not encouraged to go after intense technical work, let alone lead whole teams of scientists.
To put it into perspective, this was 10 years before Microsoft. Not only were the technology and engineering fields dominated by men, but computer programming and software were hardly a concept. **The original document outlining the requirements for the Apollo mission didn’t even include software**. As Hamilton once said: “When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West. There was no course in it. They didn’t teach it.”
Hamilton pioneered the concept of software engineering which has now become a **$400 billion** industry, and her epic success changed the world and what was humanly and digitally possible.
Hamilton’s Post-MIT Career
Hamilton left MIT in the mid-1970s to start and lead multiple software companies. In 1976, she cofounded a company called Higher Order Software (HOS) whose main goal was to **prevent errors in software and develop fault tolerances**. One of the products created at HOS was called USE.IT which was successfully used by the U.S. Air Force in the Integrated Computer-Aided Manufacturing (ICAM) project.
Hamilton left HOS in 1985 and, in 1986, founded Hamilton Technologies, Inc. (HTI) which is headquartered a few blocks from MIT. At HTI, Hamilton developed the Universal Systems Language (USL) in order to combine mathematical perfection with engineering precision.
USL is different from traditional software approaches because it is **preventive and does not allow errors in the first place**. According to HTI, USL was largely derived from “lessons learned from the Apollo onboard flight software effort” and is based on the company’s Development Before the Fact (DBTF) theory which eliminates errors before the fact.
USL is currently used by NASA, the U.S. Army/Navy/Air Force, other governments around the world, as well as major banks, companies, and universities.
Introduction to Joy Buolamwini
**Joy Buolamwini** is a Ghanaian-Canadian computer scientist and digital activist based at the MIT Media Lab in Boston. Her research in computer vision systems during her MIT thesis uncovered large r**acial and gender bias in AI services** from companies like Microsoft and Amazon. In 2016, Buolamwini founded the Algorithmic Justice League whose goal is to create a world with more ethical and inclusive technology.
Buolamwini is a Rhodes Scholar and Fulbright Fellow and has written several op-eds on the impact of AI for publications such as TIME magazine and the New York Times. She has championed the need for algorithmic justice at the World Economic Forum and the United Nations, with Fortune magazine naming her “the conscience of the AI revolution.”
Buolamwini’s Early Life & Education
Buolamwini was born in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1989 and grew up in Ghana, and then in Mississippi. The Kismet robot developed by MIT in the 1990s inspired her to follow a career in computer science and she taught herself coding, including JavaScript and XHTML.
Her mother was an artist and her father a professor of medicinal chemistry and pharmaceutical sciences. “Growing up I saw art and science as one, and I think that’s what drew me to computer science,” Buolamwini has said.
She earned her BSc in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology graduating as a Stamps President’s Scholar in 2012. The Stamps President Scholarship is “offered annually to the 1% of high school seniors from across the United States who enroll at Georgia Tech.”
Buolamwini went on to receive her MSc in Education Learning & Technology from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. During her years in Oxford, she took part in the first Rhodes Scholar ‘Service Year,’ working on community projects.
Next came an MS in Media Arts & Sciences from MIT in 2017, with Buolamwini’s thesis focused on **large racial and gender biases she discovered in artificial intelligence (AI) services offered by companies including Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon**.
In 2022, Buolamwini was awarded a PhD in Media Arts & Sciences from the MIT Media Lab for her thesis titled Facing the Coded Gaze with Evocative Audits and Algorithmic Audits which zeroed in on algorithmic bias in computer vision systems.
Gender Shades
While researching her MIT thesis, titled **Gender Shades**, Buolamwini’s methodology uncovered large racial and gender biases in AI services. In her initial experiments, she noticed that certain facial recognition software systems didn’t detect her face until she put on a white mask, while others misgendered her.
Wanting to understand how classification systems worked and if results changed based on people’s gender and skin type, Buolamwini decided to delve deeper. She gathered a data set of 1000 images of parliament members from the top 10 countries in the world based on their representation of women in power. From those, she then chose 3 African countries and 3 European countries to compare how the classification systems performed with darker and lighter skin tones.
She decided to evaluate Microsoft, IBM and ‘Face ++’ and run tests on the accuracy of their classification systems. She discovered that, **while these companies appeared to have high accuracy overall, all companies performed better on males than females, and on lighter subjects compared to darker ones**. All companies performed worst on darker females.
Following Buolamwini’s discovery and the awareness she raised, these companies stepped back from selling facial recognition technology to law enforcement in 2020.
Buolamwini as a Poet of Code
While at MIT, and as a result of her thesis research, Buolamwini founded the Algorithmic Justice League (AJL), an organization combining art and research to highlight social implications and harms of artificial intelligence. AJL’s mission is to raise public awareness about the impacts of AI and encourage equitable and accountable AI.
Through documentaries like **Coded Bias** which investigates the harms that AI can pose over people’s lives, and exhibitions such as The Coded Gaze: Unmasking Algorithmic Bias, which is comprised of 4 video works, AJL attempts to produce actionable critique for the improved use of AI.
Buolamwini is also a ‘poet of code,’ and her spoken word visual audit called _AI, Ain’t I A Woman_ shows fundamental AI failures on facial recognition for iconic women like Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, and Serena Williams. It has been part of exhibitions around the world, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Barbican Center in the UK.
Fulbright Fellowship & Rhodes Scholar Service
In 2012, Buolamwini went to Zambia as a Fulbright Fellow, where she launched Zamrize, an initiative providing Zambian youth with the expertise to create technology through lab-based experiences.
“I just knew that I saw the power in these computational tools and, being from Ghana, I wanted to use these tools and opportunities to help others,” she said at the time.
While at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, Buolamwini piloted the first ‘Service Year’ of the Rhodes project which offered scholars an opportunity to use their residence in Oxford to pilot a community service-oriented project.
During her Service Year, Buolamwini launched Code4Rights, a technology education initiative that built upon her work on Zamrize and whose goal was to promote human rights through technology education. One of the first successful projects of Code4Rights was the First Response Oxford App, which was created by over 30 young women to address sexual violence at Oxford University. The app provides survivors of sexual violence with essential information including optional ways to respond, support resources, and critical contact details.
