Professor Watchlist

Morgan Klaus Scheuerman is a teaching assistant and researcher in Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. According to Morgan’s website, his interests include “identity theory, infrastructure studies, AI ethics, and digital identity. In particular, the real-world implications of machine learning for those with historically marginalized identities.”

An article by Young America’s Foundation reports that Scheuerman “expressed concerns regarding new facial recognition technology being implemented by the Transportation Safety Agency (TSA) in airports throughout the nation.

In an interview published by CU’s associate director of strategic relations, Sheuerman was asked for the reasoning behind the study; he responded saying:

“[T]he concerns are around areas of bias… For nonbinary people, the system can’t accurately classify them because all the commercially released systems have historically used a gender binary.”

Sheuerman, who claims to be “nonbinary,” noted the 2019 study found that artificial intelligence models had a 0% accuracy rate for identifying “nonbinary” individuals as having no gender.

Beyond this study, Scheuerman has also released other publications including:

• “Do Datasets Have Politics? Disciplinary Values in Computer Vision Dataset Development.”
• “How We’ve Taught Algorithms to See Identity: Constructing Race and Gender in Image Databases for Facial Analysis.”
• “How Computers See Gender: An Evaluation of Gender Classification in Commercial Facial Analysis and Image Labeling Services.”
• “Gender Recognition or Gender Reductionism? The Social Implications of Automatic Gender Recognition Systems.”