The Robert Bosch Center for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBCDSAI) at Indian Institute of Technology Madras and SuperBloom Studios, a business consultancy, are launching an initiative called ‘Hidden Voices’ to reduce the gender gap in digital resources. In collaboration with IITM Alumni Association, this initiative starts with Wikipedia.
According to the institute, the founders of the initiative have set themselves the goal of automatically generating biographies of several notable women within the next year, until March 8, 2023 (International Women’s Day), thereby making a positive impact on the representation of men and women. in digital sources.
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The intent is for Hidden Voices to begin generating biographies of women from North America and India who have made notable contributions in STEMM areas and technology-adjacent business domains. The team strives to expand areas of expertise, geography and other underrepresented communities over time.
Those interested in volunteering for this initiative can register at the following link, http://hiddenvoices.xyz/
Some of the major barriers to addressing the data gap are editors’ gender and interest, as well as contributions from outside sources. The project therefore aims to develop information theory approaches, ML-supported auto-identification and validation from external sources and textual analysis methods to automatically generate the first version of Wikipedia-style biography. The models developed will use this approach to generate Wikipedia articles for notable women in STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine and Management), the institute added.
Prof. dr. Balaraman Ravindran, head of RBCDSAI-IIT Madras, explained how this initiative would be implemented: “The project will be an example of human-allied AI implementation. While the state-of-the-art of automated language processing has progressed significantly , there are situations where the AI will make mistakes. This is especially the case when processing documents on underrepresented populations, the very fact that this project is trying to address, so we will take advantage of AI solutions whenever possible and use it judiciously of human oversight and verification to produce high-quality output.”
The gender data gap is seen as a major barrier to more equitable solutions across all domains. The spoken and written impressions on the web (text, audio and video) vastly surpass any other form of data. Online curated content is also the building block data source of many AI/ML solutions such as automated speech recognition and language models that form the basis of many products and services. But there is a measurable quantitative lack of representation of gender-diverse voices in these key digital data sources. The Hidden Voices initiative aims to tackle this problem, says the institute.
dr. Raji Baskaran, founder of SuperBloom Studios, went on to talk about this project, saying, “The lack of availability of the right information often creates and reinforces unintended biases. This is nowhere more prominent than in the widening digital gender data gap. ‘Hidden Voices’ packs a punch. building a critical data gap and building tools to systematically reduce this gap at scale. Building products and services that are inclusive is at the heart of our business strategy.”
Speaking about IITM Alumni’s role in this groundbreaking initiative, Krishnan Narayanan, President, IIT Madras Alumni Association (IITMAA), said: “This project falls under our Mission Million Smiles and Women-in-STEM program. Many of our alumni, especially the younger ones, are digitally skilled and want to volunteer for such a wonderful cause.”
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