What a journey! We have recently launched the <AI & Equality> Human Rights course, galvanizing a community committed to having an all-of-society discussion about the AI we want, the AI we deserve, and the tech future we want to create together!
As Marshall McLuhan is famously quoted “We shape our Tools, and thereafter our tools shape us”
The initial birth of this radical project
The <AI & Equality> Human Rights Toolbox began in 2017 as a luncheon that Women At The Table co-convened in Geneva on Gender & AI with the Women’s Rights Division of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), their colleagues, and professors from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ), and the University of Geneva.
After a prescient and chilling presentation on bias in data sets and the implications for machine learning from brilliant EPFL Professors Nisheeth Vishnoi and Elisa Celis (both now at Yale University), another Professor stood up and exclaimed:
“I am so glad I am a mathematician!
I only deal with numbers! Numbers are pure! Numbers have no such bias!”
There was a small silence when another professor replied,
“But Professor, who picks the 3, and who picks the y?”
It is a common belief in the engineering and data science community, as well as with public and policy makers, (as well as some Professors) that data presents neutrality and truth untouched by human bias. In fact data and AI systems are both relative and contextual. The mechanisms and culture around AI development which need data to thrive can carry and transfer biases and inequalities into AI systems.
The Process
Shortly after the launch, we began looking at AI systems with an intersectional gender and human rights perspective and created a first AI & Gender workshop at EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne). Workshops at EPFL in 2019 & 2020 with collaboration with the EPFL Equalities office followed in the hope that we could share insights and an intersectional and human rights-based approach to AI with computer and data science students.
Our 2021 Women At The Table Tech Fellow, Sofia Kypraiou, (now leader of our data science work ) did her EPFL Masters Thesis on our topic and expanded the technical portions of the AI & Gender workshop, blending our basic human rights workshop with technical tools to directly see how human rights principles could, with critical analysis, be applied to code.
In 2021 & 2022 Women At The Table + Sofia delivered the Toolbox at EPFL and University College Dublin/ School of Information & Communication as workshops for a proof of methodology for the <AI & Equality> Human Rights Toolbox.
Further workshops were held at University of Lausanne Critical Data Studies as part of the Masters on Applied Research. In 2022, Workshops at Cambridge University Learning for Purpose Gates Council Scholars Masters & Phd cohort, a three part series at Eindhoven University of Technology (Tu/e), and at Sorbonne Center for Artificial Intelligence (SCAI).
We began to see the need for policy makers and any and all other concerned folks to be able to interact with the Toolbox so that we could build community around the issues.
The Toolbox was presented at MOZFEST, the Mozilla Foundation event gathering activists in diverse global movements for a more humane digital world, and at the United Nations High Level Political Forum (HLPF).
In 2023, with the generous support of the Swiss FDFA Human Rights Division, the Oak Foundation and Canada’s International Research Development Centre, we wanted to become more global and more virtual workshops were given at:
- KNUST Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology/ RAIL Responsible AI Lab (Ghana) ;
- Makerere University/ HASH – Hub for Artificial Intelligence in Maternal Sexual and Reproductive Health (Uganda);
- Emory University Quantitative Methods & Theory (Atlanta, USA);
- Smith College Data Science Clinic (Northampton, USA);
- Responsible Artificial Intelligence Network for Climate Action in Africa RAINCA (all grantees Africa);
- National Center for Artificial Intelligence CENIA (Chile);
- AfricAI (Conference convening all African AI researchers) (Rwanda);
- American University Cairo (Egypt);
- Dept Computer Sciences, Faculty of Science, University of Lagos/ EduAI Hub Responsible AI for Education Innovation Research Network in Africa (Nigeria);
- African Center For Technology Studies (Kenya et al);
- University of Trieste(Italy);
- Queen Mary University (UK);
- Chulalongkorn University (Thailand);
- The Sorbonne Center for AI – SCAI (France)
It became necessary to make the course available online and accessible to a wider audience! We signed an MOU with SCAI – the Sorbonne Center for AI.
The team:
- Emma Kallina, PhD candidate in Responsible AI, Cambridge University
- Anna-Maria Georguieva, UC Berkeley Data Science major
- Sofia Kypraiou, Women at the Table, Data Science Lead
- Pilar Grant, Women at the Table, Strategic Designer
- Caitlin Buchman-Kraft, Women at the Table, CEO / Founder