AI conferences play a crucial role in education by providing a platform for knowledge sharing, networking, and collaboration, shaping the future of AI research and applications, and informing curricula and teaching practices. This work-in-progress, innovative practice paper presents preliminary findings from textual analysis of mission statements from select artificial intelligence (AI) conferences to uncover information gaps and opportunities that hinder inclusivity and accessibility in the emerging institutional field of AI. By examining language and focus, we identify potential barriers to entry for individuals interested in the AI domain, including educators, researchers, practitioners, and students from underrepresented groups. Our paper employs the use of the Language as Symbolic Action (LSA) framework [1] to reveal information gaps in areas such as no explicit emphasis on DEI, undefined promises of business and personal empowerment and power, and occasional elitism. These preliminary findings uncover opportunities for improvement, including the need for more inclusive language, an explicit commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, clearer communications about conference goals and expectations, and emphasis on strategies to address power imbalances and promote equal opportunities for participation. The impact of our work is bi-fold: 1) we demonstrate preliminary results from using the Language as Symbolic Action framework to text-analysis of mission statements, and 2) our preliminary findings will be valuable to the education community in understanding gaps in current AI conferences and consequently, outreach. Our work is thus of practical use for conference organizers, engineering and CS educators and other AI-related domains, researchers, and the broader AI community. Our paper highlights the need for more intentional and inclusive conference design to foster a diverse and vibrant community and community of AI professionals.
Category: Sector: Inclusion
Hard Questions: Inclusion
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Exploring and Expanding Support for International Students in Engineering: Faculty Reflections Beyond Academic Boundaries
This is a student paper:
Expanding upon our previous work in the blinded for review paper, this research seeks to delve into the realm of self-reflection among engineering faculty members who regularly interact with international students. The primary objective is to investigate how these faculty members address the unique needs of the international student community. The Challenge and Support model by Nevitt Sanford serves as our guiding framework for this research, and we employ narrative analysis due to its potential in analyzing differences in cases and describing the dynamics of individual narratives within their distinct contexts (Floersch et al., 2010; Simons et al., 2008).
This paper aims to answer the following research question: How do engineering faculty members address the multifaceted and distinct needs of international students? It is important to understand these perspectives when considering how to support international engineering students given that each student has unique and intricate experiences in both academic and non-academic aspects.
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(Multi-disciplinary) Teamwork makes the (real) dream work: Pragmatic recommendations from industry for engineering classrooms
Many students choose to major in engineering to join the community of professional engineers and gain exposure to the field through their college experience. However, research suggests that engineering graduates may not be adequately prepared for the workplace due to the complexities of engineering work. Engineering work involves complexity, ambiguity, and contradictions, and developing innovation skills requires analyzing real-world problems that are often ill-defined and multifaceted. Therefore, it is essential for engineering students to have opportunities to work in multi-disciplinary teams to develop their skills in problem-solving and innovation. This emphasis on the need for exposure to multi-disciplinary problem solving holds true not only for undergraduate engineers in training, but also for graduate students focused on engineering education.
This paper draws from experiences of a multi-disciplinary team (including engineers, scientists, UX researchers, Industrial-Organization (I-O) psychologists, economists, and program and product managers) studying talent management in the tech industry, to present lessons learned from leading with science to understand, inform, and improve employee experiences at a large private technology company. Our paper exemplifies how projects in industry leverage multi-disciplinary expertise and presents recommendations for new graduates and engineering professionals. Ultimately, this paper affords an opportunity for educators to expand on examples of how multiple disciplines come together to study engineers in the workforce.
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Leveraging AI in education
To stay ahead, it is essential to adapt to the rise of AI by intelligently incorporating it into all levels of the education process
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A Global South Perspective on Explainable AI
A context-driven approach is necessary to translate principles like explainability into practice globally. These vignettes illustrate how AI can be made more trustworthy for users in the Global South through more creative, context-rooted approaches to legibility.
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Preconference workshop for International AI Policy Conference at MILA.
Aula Fellows presented a pre-workshop on asking hard questions on AI. Participants practiced identifying key chaarceristics of hard questions and discussing them together. During the conference that followed, several participants stood and asked hard questions, and several presenters were very happy to receive support and feedback on their most pernicious problems. We were able to build on existing collaborations and continue with or bridge-building between all the people and the people in decision-making roles on AI in society.
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Unveiling AI Concerns for Sub-Saharan Africa and its Vulnerable Groups
In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), artificial intelligence is still in its early stages of adoption. To ensure that the already existing class imbalance in SSA communities does not hinder the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals, such as data security, safety, and equitable access to AI technologies, acceptable reliability measures must be put in place (as policies). This paper identifies some of the vulnerabilities in AI and adds a voice to the risks and ethical concerns surrounding the use of AI and its impact on SSA and its vulnerable groups. Our systematic literature review of related research between January 2014 and June 2024 shows the current state of AI adoption in SSA and the socio-political challenges that impact its development, revealing key concerns in data Governance, safety privacy, educational and skill gaps, socioeconomic impacts, and stakeholder influence on AI adoption in SSA. We propose a framework for designing data governance policies for the inclusive use of AI in SSA.
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The missing voices at AI conferences
Policymaking should be a society-wide effort, including elected officials, government employees, academics, business leaders, civil society groups and individuals. In theory, each of us should be able to participate.
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Do They Really Care about Us? On the Limits of State Intervention
This paper examines the limits of state intervention through the relationship between freedom and equality, the rule of law and social justice, as well as through two highly contradictory concepts regarding the scope of government action – the concepts of minimal state and paternalistic state. Accordingly, we seek to identify a model capable of outlining the extent to which the state can intervene in the light of socially beneficial goals, but without compromising individual freedom. Since we cannot find such a model within the extreme positions of liberalism and socialism, this paper seeks to offer a satisfactory solution by mitigating some of the ideologically exclusive positions. It embraces Aristotle’s teaching about the middle as a virtue and proposes sophisticated neoliberalism as a potential alternative to the status quo. Still, as insisted, the government should never be allowed to assume uncontrollable powers and create conditions for collectivist doctrines that recognize no individual freedom.
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Several presentations, including “Taking the Lead in SWE: An Asian Perspective.”
Dr. Bhaduri will be presenting at the Society of Women Engineers, with whom she is a Senator. Several events are online for interested persons. Dr. Bhaduri is an accomplished technologist and educator, as well as being excellent speaker and is appreciated for her wit, her precision, and her kindness.
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Board 192: Identifying and addressing the barriers to advancement for women in the engineering professoriate: A systematic review of literature
This work-in-progress paper shares ongoing findings from a mixed-methods systematic literature review that seeks to examine the retention of women in the engineering professoriate. We identified literature from EBSCOHost and Engineering Village that discussed women in the engineering professoriate in relation to either retention or persistence or both, as explicitly stated in their abstract. Following an initial review of 191 titles, 48 papers passed our inclusion criteria; further qualitative analysis of abstracts yielded 31 papers, which underwent a full paper review. Our ongoing findings suggest the following: a) research on the retention of women in engineering professoriate is being supported by grants and funding opportunities; b) the reviewed literature documented six barriers faced by women in the engineering professoriate: isolation of women faculty, work/life balance, inequitable distribution of service, underrepresentation of women faculty, implicit bias, and departmental resources; and c) although journal scholarship on this topic is not limited to popular engineering education publishing venues, conference scholarship are mainly from those popular in the field, such as the ASEE Annual Conference and the Frontiers in Education Conference. Future work will share the extent to which the reviewed literature discussed interventions to recruit or retain women in the engineering professoriate, and whether these interventions vary by the type of institution.
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Excellence, Belonging, and the American Dream: An Auto-ethnography on Being International in Engineering
This research paper uses an auto-ethnographic approach to highlight experiences of women of color who are international in U.S. engineering workforce and classrooms. Three preliminary themes are highlighted in this paper. The first is the theme related to the notion of Excellence, and how the definitions of success for immigrating or international engineers may be tied to maintaining visa status. The second theme centers around the lack of Sense of Belonging expressed by participant-authors. The final theme was around Chasing the American Dream and the resultant sacrifices. We hope this paper not only provides an overview of some of the unique challenges faced by international women of color, but also drives more interest in better understanding this oft-overlooked group in engineering.