As we celebrated our growing community, we considered the goal of the programme – to contribute to building a stronger and more inclusive AI ecosystem – and we reflected on who was excluded from it.
Our scholarships aim to support underrepresented students – spanning gender, race, ethnicity, and socio-economic background. But imbalances in the field aren’t just social, they’re also geographical. Last year, 70% of all AI-related research was published in Europe, the US, and China, while many other important regions and countries are significantly underrepresented. For instance, only 0.3% of AI journal citations came from sub-Saharan Africa between 2014-2018, and a number of Eastern European countries are entirely absent from publication figures. This imbalance risks creating a technology that only accounts for the values, hopes and concerns of a narrow group, entrenching global inequalities while seeing large parts of the world miss out on the potential of AI to improve people’s lives through innovation in science, healthcare, and education.
That’s why today, we’re delighted to announce that we’re expanding our programme to support scholars in many more countries currently underrepresented in AI, including – Bulgaria, Colombia, Greece, Poland, Romania, South Africa, and Turkey. We are also establishing new scholarships in Canada and France, and continuing our support for scholars in the UK and the US. The full list of universities partnering in our scholarships programme is here.
There are many initiatives actively working to increase regional participation in AI, such as the Deep Learning Indaba, Khipu AI, and the Eastern European Machine Learning summer school. We hope to complement these efforts by enabling students to pursue further education in these regions with fewer financial barriers – contributing to regional hubs of excellence, while benefiting from the guidance of a DeepMind mentor and an international community of scholar peers.
To ensure AI is of global benefit, talent must be nurtured in regions which are currently underrepresented in AI research, and space for geographically and socially diverse, local contributions to the field must be made. We know that increasing access to further education is only one part of addressing the deep-seated structural imbalances in AI, but it is an important one and we are happy to be able to contribute.
So this week, as we reflect on the achievements of scholars past and present, and welcome the new 2020 cohort, we also look to the future, as we hope others will be inspired to take the next step on their AI career journeys too. To quote DeepMind alumna Benedetta, who studied at Oxford University: “Don’t underestimate the value of your unique background.” It’s these unique backgrounds and perspectives that will help make the AI community stronger, more diverse, and more inclusive in years to come.
Source: https://deepmind.com/blog/article/breaking-down-global-barriers-to-access
