Team: Laila Shereen Sakr (UC Santa Barbara); Azza El Masri (University of Texas at Austin); Mai ElSherief (Khoury College, Northeastern University); Ranwa Yehia (Arab Digital Expression Foundation); Nadine Moawad (Feminist Principles of the Internet; Take Back the Tech campaigns & Mozilla Fellow).
The Network of Arab Women in AI (NAWAI) made up of five principal investigators is currently leading a groundbreaking techno-feminist research as part of the 4th cohort of the F<A+i>r Feminist AI projects.
The first of its kind, this study titled “Feminist Data and MENA Languages: Towards Building Feminist AI Tools” will examine the presence or lack of principles of data feminism in LLMs in MENA.
The research is led by two significantly important queries: What is a feminist language-based dataset? In what ways might LLMs embody or not embody principles of data feminism? And emphasizes the principles of dismantling bias, intersectionality, accountability, and inclusive, responsible, transparent use of power in social systems and algorithms.
Currently in its research phase, the team plans on highlighting the linguistic and computational biases inherent in generative AI Systems and co-creating feminist datasets, laying the groundwork for prototype software development geared toward the situated realities of gender-based inequities across the MENA Region. The paper will use a mixed-methodological approach reliant on feminist principles which Sakr describes as:
“Feminists firmly locate such creative and critical aesthetic engagements in the politics of the contemporary moment, an age marked by the proliferation of new media that have radically reconstituted the character of visual culture and its channels of transmission and circulation. Lauren Klein and Catherine D’Ignazio offer a procedural method that examines and challenges power, elevates emotion and embodiment, rethinks boundaries and hierarchies, embraces pluralism, attends to context, and renders occluded labor visible.” *
Based in California, Texas, Massachusetts, Egypt, and Lebanon, respectively, the co-Principal Investigators are Laila Shereen Sakr, an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara; Azza El-Masri, a doctoral student in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin; and Mai ElSherief, an Assistant Professor at Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University and Director of the Computing for Social Good Lab; Ranwa Yehia, Co-Founder/Chairperson at Arab Digital Expression Foundation, a multidimensional organization that creates spaces and fosters environments for expression and progressive learning; and Nadine Moawad, an organizer around feminist technology in MENA for fifteen years, including co-creating the Feminist Principles of the Internet, running Take Back the Tech campaigns, and recent Mozilla Fellow.
*Laila Shereen Sakr is the author of the recently published book Arabic Glitch: Technolocultures, Data Bodies, and Archives. Stanford University Press (2023) || Watch the book launch