AI for Good: Computer Science Helping the World

Abstract:  According to a recent report from Nesta on gender diversity in AI research, “Only 13.83 per cent of authors are women and, in relative terms, the proportion of AI papers co-authored by at least one woman has not improved since the 1990s.”
This serious lack of gender diversity is happening despite the fact that AI has the potential to help in many ways to solve some of the society’s biggest challenges, such as improving the health and well being of people, supporting education for all children, and protecting the environment, just to name a few.

Why we do not see more women doing research in AI? What can we do to change this?

Bio:  Maria Gini is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. She studies decision making for autonomous agents in applications ranging from distributed methods for allocation of tasks to robots, to methods for robots to explore an unknown environment, teamwork for search and rescue, and navigation in dense crowds.

She is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, of the ACM, and of the IEEE. She is Editor in Chief of Robotics and Autonomous Systems, and is on the editorial board of numerous journals, including Artificial Intelligence, and Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.