Growing up in a traditional blue-collar family in one of the most conservative counties in Maryland, Morgan Klaus Scheuerman knew early on what it鈥檚 like to feel marginalized.
He opted to wait until his mid-20s to come out. High school, he recalls, was filled with dark days.
鈥淭here were things said, without knowing I was queer, that were really upsetting. I felt pretty hopeless at times.鈥�
Four-year college seemed out of reach, as no one in his family had gone before and money was tight. So, after graduation, Scheuerman took a customer service job at the local Best Buy, started saving, and tried to imagine a future beyond a hometown that many peers never left.
鈥淚 honestly thought that would be me,鈥� he says.
Instead, Scheuerman, now 29, is among the most coveted young minds in the field of social computing. With stints at Google and Facebook already under his belt, and his facial analysis research earning international accolades, he was just awarded Microsoft鈥檚 prestigious 2021 Research Fellowship. That includes two paid years to finish his PhD in Information Science at 彩民宝典 and a chance to collaborate with Microsoft researchers.
His work, as he puts it, seeks one fundamental goal: to show tech companies marginalized people matter.
To do so, he studies, literally, how computers see us, focusing on the facial analysis software ubiquitous in everything from cell phones and computers to surveillance cameras at airports and malls. Already, his work and that of others has found such platforms frequently misidentify those who are not white, male and cisgender. He wants to understand why.
Where in the making of such products do things go wrong? Can they be improved? And should, he dares to ask, some technologies not be made at all?
鈥淲e have labor laws and advertising laws and housing laws against racial and gender discrimination, but there are no laws specific to embedding discrimination into algorithms,鈥� Scheuerman says. 鈥淭he only way we discover such discrimination is when it happens to us.鈥�
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