Inioluwa Deborah Raji (born 1996 in Port Harcourt, Nigeria) is a Nigerian-Canadian computer scientist, educated at the University of Toronto, and a socio-tech leader who works in the fields of algorithmic bias, fairness in machine learning, AI accountability, and algorithmic auditing and evaluation. A current Mozilla fellow who has been affiliated with the Mozilla Foundation, Partnership on AI, AI Now Institute, Google, and the MIT Media Lab, she has been recognized by MIT Technology Review and Forbes as one of the world's top young innovators.^[18,5]

Raji began her work addressing racial bias in technology during an internship with Clarifai, where she was working on a computer vision model to help clients flag inappropriate images as NSFW and recognized that people of colour were tagged as NSFW more often than white people.^[6] She has previously collaborated with Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru, and the Algorithmic Justice League to research gender and racial bias in facial recognition technology, work that ultimately forced companies to change their practices.^[22,4] She has also worked with Google's Ethical AI team and served as a research fellow at the Partnership on AI and the AI Now Institute at New York University, working on how to operationalize ethical considerations in machine learning engineering practice.^[7]

Raji was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and moved to Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, when she was four years old. Eventually her family moved to Ottawa. She attended Colonel By Secondary School and completed the International Baccalaureate programme. She studied Engineering Science at the University of Toronto, graduating in 2019. In 2015, she founded Project Include, a nonprofit providing increased student access to engineering education, mentorship, and resources in low income and immigrant communities in the Greater Toronto Area.^[9,24] She started a Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in Aug 2021.

Raji worked with Joy Buolamwini at the MIT Media Lab and Algorithmic Justice League, where she audited commercial facial recognition technologies from Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Face++, and Kairos.^[11,10] They found that these technologies were significantly less accurate for darker-skinned women than for white men.^[23,12] With support from other top AI researchers and increased public pressure and campaigning, their work led IBM and Amazon to agree to support facial recognition regulation and later halt the sale of their product to police for at least a year.

Raji also interned at machine learning startup Clarifai, where she worked on a computer vision model for flagging images.^[3,25] She participated in a research mentorship program at Google and worked with their Ethical AI team on creating model cards, a documentation framework for more transparent machine learning model reporting. She also co-led the development of internal auditing practices at Google. Her contributions at Google were separately presented and published at the AAAI conference and ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency.^[26,27,28] In 2019, Raji was a summer research fellow at The Partnership on AI working on setting industry machine learning transparency standards and benchmarking norms.^[16,29] Raji was a Tech Fellow at the AI Now Institute worked on algorithmic and AI auditing. Currently, she is a fellow at the Mozilla Foundation researching algorithmic auditing and evaluation.^[7]

Raji's work on bias in facial recognition systems has been highlighted in the 2020 documentary Coded Bias directed by Shalini Kantayya.^[19] She also took part in the 2026 documentary The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist directed by Daniel Roher.

In 2019, they received the Venture Beat AI Innovations Award in the AI for Good category alongside Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru. In 2020, they received the MIT Technology Review 35 Under 35 Innovator Award and the EFF Pioneer Award, which was shared with Buolamwini and Gebru. In 2021, they were honored with the Forbes 30 Under 30 Award in Enterprise Technology and recognized as a 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics Hall of Fame Honoree. In 2023, they were named to Time magazine's list of the 100 Most Influential People in AI.