Black in AI

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As we continue to transform into an organization that strives to create an equitable #AI future through education, advocacy, and policy, our work always comes back to you, the members of our community. This past year, we’ve been working behind the scenes to create a digital home for Black in AI that puts what we do, who we are, and how you can engage with us just a click away. Now you can easily sign up for our new quarterly newsletter, register for our programming, keep up with Black in AI in the news, and so much more! Explore the new website, and keep your eyes on these spaces in the coming weeks. We have a lot of exciting things on the horizon, and your voice will help shape the future of Black in AI. ?? https://www.blackinai.org

Jamelle Watson-Daniels, Ph.D. in applied mathematics, will work as a research scientist in algorithmic fairness and artificial intelligence in society at Meta. Watson-Daniels arrived at SEAS as an applied physics student under Marko Loncar before switching to applied math under Dean David Parkes. “When I was being admitted in applied physics, there were just a handful of Black women in physics across the country, and at the time two of them were here as grad students,” she said. “The diversity of the student body was really important to me. switched fields and advisors, and had a great experience with both. I feel like I’ve gotten so much guidance, and it was a really ideal experience.”

I’m thrilled to announce the collaboration between Kwame AI and Deloitte Switzerland through which we’ve received a generous donation to create the "Deloitte-SuaCode Scholars Program" which will sponsor 1,000 young Africans to partake in SuaCode.ai, our AI-powered smartphone-based introductory coding course, and receive exclusive mentoring from professionals at Deloitte! In 2017, we had an issue where most of the 27 learners in our in-person coding course didn’t have computers but all had smartphones. In addressing the challenge, we pioneered smartphone-based online coding education across Africa. Next, our course grew exponentially over the years making it difficult to provide scalable learning support to our over 1K English and French-speaking learners. So we built the world’s first bilingual AI teaching assistant for coding education in 2020 long before AI assistants were cool and popular. Now, our AI, Kwame, deployed in a human-in-the-loop context helps students when they get stuck. As a good teaching assistant, it helps learners start on assignments, and figure out solutions but never complete them. Our forum enables collaboration between learners, facilitating a spirit of Ubuntu. We used the learnings to build a scalable, AI-powered platform that can train over a million learners in English and French! SuaCode has had over 2.5K learners across 43 African countries and 117 global. SuaCode's impact over the past years has been unreal! Several of my past students are doing amazingly well in the tech space and they credit SuaCode for making coding so fun and easy to get into with only their smartphones. Some of our alums have gone ahead to study computer science and engineering at Dartmouth, MIT, Columbia (Imelda Adjei), Yale (Abraham Mensah), and work at Google (Isaac Attuah, Andrew Thankson), Microsoft (Sylvester E. Coch), Amazon (Pamela Abede). The coolest part is that I’ve hired some of our alums for roles at Kwame AI such as Machine Learning Engineer (Samuel John, Samuel Ansah, Nathaniel Asiak) and Developer (Frank Duah), reaping where I sowed many years ago. I’m super grateful to Madeleine Kahn whom I met at One Young World Switzerland National Board for being our advocate within Deloitte to get us this sponsorship. I’m also grateful to the Deloitte Purpose, and Social Impact team — Matt Juden-Bloomfield, Nike Azuma, Stasha Santifort — for the opportunity to share our SuaCode work at One Young World last year in Belfast. If your company or organization like Deloitte would be interested in sponsoring learners via a custom scholarship program where your employees could also mentor our learners, please message me. Kindly share this opportunity with interested learners and partner with us as we provide personalized, high-quality coding education to millions, training the next generation of African programmers, engineers, innovators, and entrepreneurs! #MotivationMonday #SuaCode #KwameAI #AI #TeachingAssistant #Coding #Education

I love how my mother is featured in the first episode of Pioneers of AI. Dr. Joy Buolamwini shares how Dr. Cynthia Breazeal, creator of Massachusetts Institute of Technology robot ‘Kismet’, inspired her to pursue robotics. My mother has been a similar inspiration to me. She was one of the first female programmers in the Middle East and continued teaching computer science for years - so many of her students are now making waves in the field. She has always been my role model. Mammy, words can't express how much I love and admire you. Thank you. Randa Sabry Full Episode: https://lnkd.in/etpNt__b

I'm excited to share that Rulebase (YC F24) is now backed by Y Combinator! We're joining the Fall Batch this year to continue building AI tools that help financial compliance teams flag, audit, and automatically remediate issues across all customer interactions. Thanks to all our friends and early backers over the past few months. Please reach out if you work as a QA, customer services, or compliance lead in financial services. We'd love to speak with you! https://rulebase.co

Open dialogue between researchers and global communities creates opportunities for innovation that brings us closer to an equitable technological future for all. Black in AI board president and Stanford professor Dr. Sanmi Koyejo co-led a panel discussion on #artificialintelligence research and regulation in Siem Reap, Cambodia this summer. Hosted by The Asia Foundation and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), the workshop provided a platform for delegates of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and Stanford researchers to talk about concerns for AI adoption in the region, including trustworthiness, job stability and data infrastructure. Southeast Asia accounts for 8.5% of the global population, and their voices are critical to developing technology and policy that benefits everyone. Our leadership team continues to uplift all voices, and we’re thrilled to have Dr. Koyejo and the rest of our leaders with us to forward our mission. ??Learn more: https://lnkd.in/ggweSTU2

Welcome new SEAS Profs. Yilun Du, Kianté Brantley, Juncheng Yang and Michael Albergo! https://buff.ly/4dkoixX

Greece ???? was super hot ??, but it was refreshing ?? to meet 13+ black researchers ?????? at #interspeech2024 this year, up from 4 last year! Progress!!! ???? At this year’s edition of the world’s foremost gathering of speech researchers, we got to share some of our latest work with the world! Through an exhausting 5hrs standing and talking, Sewade and I presented 2 posters back-to-back: [1] 1000 African Voices (Afro-TTS): the world’s first speech synthesis model that generates speech in 86 African accents, with nearly 1000 distinct African voices. [2]Clinical Named Entity Recognition from speech: providing insight into differential performance of several ASR models on medical entity categories like medications, procedures, and PHI across 70+ accents. Really cool research from Bio-RAMP Labs and Intron Health that stimulated a ton of interesting conversations. It was great to meet Jinzuomu Zhong, Wei Chu from Olewave, Rogier van Dalen as mentor, Victor A., Javier Latorre from Apple, Allahsera Auguste Tapo, Simon King from Edinburg NLP, Nicole Holliday at Berkeley, Carol Espy-Wilson at UMD, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed at UBC, Yerbolat Khassanov at Tiktok, Sravya Popuri at Meta, Andrew Rosenberg at Google and too many cool people to mention. As with such large academic conferences, it was a firehose of new information, drowning in papers on Anti-spoofing, speech synthesis, multimodal models, context-biasing, NLU, etc. Looking forward to collaborating and contributing more to global speech research and seeing even more black people at Interspeech next year! Papers: ASR: https://lnkd.in/gJPJwYfT TTS: https://lnkd.in/gcZFEi7i #speech #speechresearch #asr #tts #speechrecognition #health #ai4health #conference #nlp #globalhealth #aiml #llm #accents

We’re thrilled to share that our CEO Gelyn Watkins and Black in AI were featured in the Ford Foundation's Make It Count. Make It Count highlights an organization and the social justice number that people should know based on their work. Our number is 117, to highlight the 117 countries (more than 60% of the world’s nations!) that Black in AI’s global membership of more than 5,900 AI technologists, researchers, founders and policy experts represent. Technology is reflective of those who make it. With artificial intelligence rapidly transforming both industry and daily life, an ethical and equitable future for all depends on #AI research, innovation, and policy that prioritizes global perspectives. ?? Read our full feature here: https://lnkd.in/gDGgDp8w