Ka pai Siouxsie!

Ka pai Siouxsie!

The 2018 Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year Gala Awards were held in Auckland last night, with much-admired Kristine Bartlett, rest-home carer and pay equity campaigner in the healthcare sector, taking out the top honour. Kristine’s fellow nominees included Mike...
Māori and Pacific Island women in science

Māori and Pacific Island women in science

Before I started working as a research assistant on the Hidden Networks project, the only woman from the history of New Zealand science I could name was Joan Wiffen, the “dinosaur lady” who discovered New Zealand’s first dinosaur fossils in Hawke’s Bay. She was a...
How machine learning can perpetuate racism

How machine learning can perpetuate racism

I wrote this algorithm to classify people by gender, but one of the biggest things I learned was how machine learning can reinforce racism and perform poorly on ethnic minorities. Machine learning – or programs that are able to learn from and improve on past...