A+ Alliance

Who Gets to Speak? Who Gets Heard? The Deadly Data Gap: Gender, Age, Region
2022-10-31
Who Gets to Speak on behalf of a changing world in crisis? At this critical moment in history we see the stark divisions on who helps make the decisions that will affect the generations to come. *Register here*: https://whova.com/portal/registration/ecoso_202202 **Date: 2 February 2022 @ 8:00-8:50 EST** Why is it important to be quantitative about ‘Who gets to speak & heard?’ We will discuss this issue, and share a newly developed open source app – The G-app – that does just that, and is **designed to measure the active participation of women and youth in international conferences capturing the proportion of time, the topics, the capacity and delegated authority women and youth speak in the conference chamber** to provide concrete metrics to evaluate representation, participation and influence. We believe it is critical to **highlight these figures in order to catalyze the outcome of more women and youth in leading positions corresponding to their proportion in the population.** The open source G-app premiered at the Paris Peace Forum 2021 and could be used throughout the UN System and beyond. #### Speakers: – Hon. Patricia Torsney, Permanent Observer of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) to the United Nations – Satish Viswanathan, Thoughtworks, Head of Social Impact, India #### Moderator: – Caitlin Kraft-Buchman, Women@theTable, CEO/Founder* * The <A+> Alliance for Inclusive Algorithms led by Women@theTable and Tecnologico de Costa Rica are leaders of UN Women’s Generation Equality Forum **Action Coalition for Technology & Innovation for Gender Equality.** The 2022 ECOSOC Partnership Forum will be fully virtual and hosted on the Whova Event Platform, which provides all-in-one access to all sessions of the Forum (opening and closing, plenary sessions, spotlight sessions, partnership exchanges, and side events) as well as networking opportunities. Registered attendees will be able to: * Browse latest event programme, speaker profiles and add to personal schedule; * Access live streaming of sessions and utilize the session Q&A to share comments; * Set up virtual meet-ups with other attendees to connect and network; * Create and converse through various discussion topics in the Community Board; * Receive updates such as last-minute session changes from organizers. *Register here*: https://whova.com/portal/registration/ecoso_202202 To access the virtual forum, log in with the registered email address either from web (https://2022partnershipforum.events.whova.com) or through Whova’s free mobile app (Download from here or search “Whova” in the App Store on iPhones or in Google Play on Android phones.).

Encuentro equipo A+
2022-10-19 08:00 - 17:00 UTC
Todos cordialmente invitados.

Lanzamiento website
2022-10-10 08:00 - 2022-10-12 17:00
Finalemente nuestro nuevo sitio estará listo.

Incubating Feminist AI: Call for Proposals
2022-08-20
Incubating Feminist AI: Call for Proposals
Overview
This decade there is a unique opportunity to not only mitigate, but correct for historic inequities buried in the data, put in the algorithm, implicit in the model, embedded in machine learning, then wired intricately in neural networks. The opportunity, as new systems proliferate and are being designed, is to revisit old assumptions and conceive of social services with ideas of efficacy and equity at the core–to go beyond only digitizing old programs for ‘efficiency’, which enable a more effective Patriarchy 4.0. Feminist AI‘s goal is AI harnessed to deliver equality outcomes; designed with inclusion at the core; creating new opportunities & proactive, innovative correction of inequities.
The f<a+i>r network focuses on bringing social programs in line with 21st research and values, dedicated to finding ways to make AI technology more effective, inclusive and transformational, not only more ‘efficient’. <A+> Alliance seeks to collaborate with communities, practitioners, researchers, scholars and innovators working to springboard from the established ‘what’ of describing harm and ‘why’ harms exist socially or technically, to research focused on ‘how’ course-correcting future harms can happen, and most urgently ‘how’ new data, algorithms, models, policies + systems could be created, then prototyped, and piloted.
The 2021 call for proposals from multi-disciplinary, global south teams of feminist thinkers is intended to create opportunities for new research engagement. Novel approaches and new models, with a focus on practical application in prototype and pilot phases will be prioritized.
Papers will focus on multi-disciplinary work researching, creating, or iterating new AI framework models and designs for new or current social policy allocations in order to re-engineer system thinking and algorithmic solving for proxy problems and old assumptions buried in the data and now active in the new technology. This may include research on the efficacy of including or hiding protected characteristics, or finding social and economic models of allocation/distribution now made more possible and equitable through the creation or innovative use of new or big data in Algorithmic Decision-Making (ADM).
Some indicative areas: Social Policy & Protection Design (p.ex., Social insurance, social assistance and safety nets: from Subsidy, Digital ID, Land Tenure/Use, Pensions, Conditional Cash Transfer, Lotteries), Health, Housing and Education services, Labour activation policies, Social Welfare, Justice, new algorithmic applications of Indigenous, Decolonial, Traditional models, etc, Geospatial Mapping, and Climate Change.
Papers, Models, Prototypes, Pilots

9 proposals will be selected to be developed into papers each year of the three-year project, with 9 papers focused on the regions of eligible low-and middle-income countries in South and Southeast Asia, Central and South America, and the Middle East and North Africa.
Out of the 9 papers delivered each year, 3 will be selected to go to Prototype.
One of those 3 prototypes will go to an official pilot. The process will be repeated each year through 2024.

F<a+i>r is dedicated to helping untraditional academic teams or community groups find partners and will support teams with capacity-building where appropriate. Principal Investigators from each selected paper team will be required to attend bi-weekly meetings to discuss their approaches, insights and research progress throughout the duration of the project (including prototyping and pilot phases if selected). In addition to this South-South network knowledge sharing, teams (and selected applicants) will be invited to attend f<a+i>r regional and/or global meetings happening bi-monthly.
Link to Criteria
Link to Research Directions
Submission Deadlines Round One

Opens: 15 September 2021.
Closes: 31 October 2021 (Anywhere on Earth).
Determination: 15 November 2021.
Bi-Weekly Meetings throughout the process
Delivery: 15 May 2022

Successful papers chosen for Round One Prototypes: 30 May 2022 Prototyping Workshops: week of 6 June 2022 Prototype delivery: 6 January 2023.
Grants

CAD 8,000 per paper to the team with 2 Principal Investigators from 2 different disciplines, both based in the Global South.
Prototype if selected: CAD 75,000 per prototype plus partner funding.
Pilot if selected: CAD 50,000 to seed each partnered pilot.

The f<a+i>r Global Launch on January 26, 2022.
2022-01-26
What do benchmark datasets mean for Feminist AI, and where do we go from here in our collective work? At our Global Launch, Emily Denton, Research Scientist at Google and co-author of NeuroIPS 2021 paper Reduced, Reused and Recycled: The Life of a Dataset in Machine Learning Research presented their work, and engaged in conversation with Raejetse Sefala of DAIR (whose talk on Spatial Apartheid is posted separately). Paper Abstract: “Benchmark datasets play a central role in the organization of machine learning research. They coordinate researchers around shared research problems and serve as a measure of progress towards shared goals. Despite the foundational role of benchmarking practices in this field, relatively little attention has been paid to the dynamics of benchmark dataset use and reuse, within or across machine learning subcommunities. In this paper, we dig into these dynamics. We study how dataset usage patterns differ across machine learning subcommunities and across time from 2015-2020. We find increasing concentration on fewer and fewer datasets within task communities, significant adoption of datasets from other tasks, and concentration across the field on datasets that have been introduced by researchers situated within a small number of elite institutions. Our results have implications for scientific evaluation, AI ethics, and equity/access within the field.”
