Promoting Meaningful, Beneficial and Informed Participation of African Communities in the Development and Utilization of AI Solutions. 

23rd February 2024


Overview 


Background 

Communities (educators, traders, business, healthcare workers, travelers, social media users, farmers as well as ethnic or language groups among others) in Africa continue to participate in the development of AI solutions actively or passively, knowingly or unknowingly through the submission of their data on multiple research projects as well as during application use. However, they are generally not aware of pertinent underlying issues related to the AI that they help to develop and use. These issues include but are not limited to bias, privacy, data harvesting, fairness, Intellectual Property (IP) and informed consent. The outcome of this thereof are biased and unfair AI solutions, data exploitation, IP exploitation and loss of privacy among other adverse outcomes. This situation is a pointer on the lack of an in-depth and competent awareness of these issues in the first place and subsequently the lack of the means and structures necessary to address them at a community and individual level.

On the other hand, the number of AI developers in Africa is on an upward trend courtesy of numerous efforts to build capacity and development communities on the continent. As a result there are now a significant number of established and upcoming developers on the continent. While technical skills abound and are continually emphasized, there isn’t sufficient awareness and skill among established and upcoming developers on how to identify and address pertinent underlying issues such as community engagement, bias, ethics, data protection, fairness, IP and informed consent among others in AI development. The outcome thereof are AI solutions that perpetuate bias and unfairness, violate ethical principles, engage in data exploitation and lack sufficient community engagement that is necessary to ensure adoption.

There are also multiple initiatives by large global technology corporations to collect crowd sourced data on issues such as languages, locations and objects. Some of these initiatives are not very transparent on the use of the data as well as on the benefits to be accrued by the communities that contribute them. Taking cue from these corporations a significant number of developers have now adopted the free service-for-data model in order to collect data for commercial and research use.

Objectives

The objective of the workshop is to bring together stakeholders such as in AI development in the AI development space in Africa in order to discuss and share knowledge around the following key issues:

Format  

The workshop will provide for a 10 – 15 mins presentations from accepted participants followed by a panel Q&A session aligned to the following tracks.

Program (Vancouver time)

Call for Submissions

Interested authors and participants are requested to submit their case studies, empirical works, literature reviews and thought papers for presentation at the workshop on https://conferences.kabarak.ac.ke/index.php/dsai/issue/view/di-2024 by 15th December 2023

Mode of Participation

Output

The envisaged output of the workshop are proceedings.

Workshop Chair

Dr Moses M Thiga – Snr Lecturer in IT, AI and Health Informatics. mthiga@kabarak.ac.ke

Conference Website - https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/