[5][6][7] AJL founder Buolamwini collaborated with AI ethicist Timnit Gebru to release a 2018 study on racial and gender bias in facial recognition algorithms used by commercial systems from Microsoft, IBM, and Face++.

[11] The Gender Shades project and subsequent advocacy undertaken by AJL and similar groups led multiple tech companies, including Amazon and IBM, to address biases in the development of their algorithms and even temporarily ban the use of their products by police in 2020.

[4][15] A research collaboration involving AJL released a white paper in May 2020 calling for the creation of a new United States federal government office to regulate the development and deployment of facial recognition technologies.

[16] The white paper proposed that creating a new federal government office for this area would help reduce the risks of mass surveillance and bias posed by facial recognition technologies towards vulnerable populations.

[17] The AJL has run initiatives to increase public awareness of algorithmic bias and inequities in the performance of AI systems for speech and language modeling across gender and racial populations.

[18][19][20] In March 2020, AJL released a spoken word artistic piece, titled Voicing Erasure, that increased public awareness of racial bias in automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems.

[23][24] Buolamwini served as a witness at the hearing and spoke on underperformance of facial recognition technologies in identifying people with darker skin and feminine features and supported her position with research from the AJL project "Gender Shades".

[32] This project began in 2019 when Buolamwini and digital security researcher Camille François met at the Bellagio Center Residency Program, hosted by The Rockefeller Foundation.

The CRASH project focused on creating the framework for the development of bug-bounty programs (BBPs) that would incentivize individuals to uncover and report instances of algorithmic bias in AI technologies.