Empowering Global South AI
Bridging Gaps for Underrepresented Researchers in AI
AAAI 2026 Community Activity 📍 Singapore
🗓 Saturday, January 24, 2026 ⏰ 8:30 AM – 12:30 PM
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This AAAI-26 Community Activity aims to empower researchers and students from the Global South by addressing disparities in AI education, mentorship, and global collaboration. The two-hour, in-person session will bring together students, early-career researchers, and academics for mentoring, networking, and skill development in AI research.
The workshop features a keynote talk, a panel discussion on inclusive research ecosystems, and a 3-Minute Presentation (3MT) competition for selected abstracts. Participants will gain exposure to cutting-edge work in efficient deep learning, model compression, and AI for social good, while also discussing actionable strategies to enhance participation and equity in AI research. Underrepresented researchers, including women, early-career scientists, and participants from low-resource or marginalized backgrounds, are strongly encouraged to participate.
Topics of Interest
Topics of Interest
The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
Practical AI applications for real-world challenges in resource-constrained and low-data environments
Efficient deep learning techniques, including model compression techniques
Efficient strategies for deployment on low-power and edge devices
Coreset selection methods for fair, representative, and data-efficient training
Generative approaches for anomaly detection, such as defect synthesis in imbalanced datasets for manufacturing
Computer Vision for social impact and low-resource environments, including efficient image recognition, scene understanding, and visual quality assessment in constrained settings
Natural Language Processing (NLP) for multilingual/low-resource languages, cultural diversity in LLMs, equitable language technologies, and AI-driven governance tools
Socioeconomic and gender disparities in AI participation and representation
Cultural factors shaping AI adoption and technology perception across diverse communities
Data-efficient learning paradigms for underrepresented and emerging domains
Remote sensing applications for sustainable development
Algorithmic fairness and bias mitigation for equitable outcomes in marginalized communities
Human-AI collaboration and participatory AI design for local or community-driven contexts
Transfer, continual, and meta-learning for adaptability in dynamic low-data environments
Applications in healthcare, agriculture, education, environmental monitoring, disaster management, climate, and maritime etc.
Submission Requirements
Submission Requirements
We strongly encourage students, postdocs, and researchers from all areas of AI and machine learning to submit a 1-2 page PDF abstract (of main content, excluding references and appendix) describing ideas, experiences, or community initiatives related to inclusive AI, mentorship, and low-resource learning. Submissions may include technical contributions, case studies, or actionable strategies that advance equitable AI research. Accepted abstracts will be presented in interactive sessions.
Presentation Information:
All accepted works will be presented during the Poster Session at AAAI 2026 EGSAI.
A subset of works will be selected to participate in the 3-Minute Presentation (3MT) Contest.
3-Minute Presentation (3MT) Contest
A subset of authors will be selected to participate in a 3-Minute Presentation (3MT) Contest, following the global 3MT format: one static slide, no transitions or animations, and a strict three-minute limit.
A special prize committee will recognize the most impactful presentations through the following awards:
🥇 3MT Winner Award
🥈 3MT Runner-up Award
🌍 3MT People’s Choice Award
🎓 Best Poster Award
🎓 Best Student Poster Award
🎖️ All presented works will receive certificates of recognition and appreciation.
Submissions should be best-effort anonymized and follow the AAAI 2026 submission format. The review process will be double-blind. Submissions are non-archival and may describe completed research, ongoing projects, or community initiatives.
All submissions should be made via OpenReview: Empowering Global South AI Community Activity Workshop (AAAI-26)
Important Dates
Important Dates
November 5, 2025 – Abstract Submission Opens
November 20, 2025 – Abstract Submission Deadline
December 1, 2025 December 5, 2025 – Decision Notification
January 24, 2026 – EGSAI AAAI 2026, Singapore
Registration Details
Registration Details
The Community Activities program is included under the AAAI Main Track registration. Participants wishing to attend Community Activities must register for the main conference. No separate registration is required for Community Activities if already registered for the Main Track.
The Community Activities program is included under the AAAI Main Track registration. Participants wishing to attend Community Activities must register for the main conference. No separate registration is required for Community Activities if already registered for the Main Track.
https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-26/registration/
Travel Funding
Travel Funding
Travel support (subject to sponsor funding*) can be available for students and early-career researchers, with priority given to participants from underrepresented groups and low-resource institutions. Awards may also cover registration fees.
How to Apply: A separate form for financial aid will be shared for accepted abstracts (*as soon as we get confirmation from the sponsors).
Participants (whose works have been accepted for AAAI 2026) may also apply for the AAAI Student Scholar Volunteer Program, which offers additional travel assistance for full-time undergraduate and graduate students. More information and application: AAAI Student Scholar Volunteer Program
Call for Sponsors
Call for Sponsors
We welcome organizations and individuals to support travel grants, 3MT Competition Prizes and workshop activities, helping empower underrepresented AI researchers. Sponsors will be recognized on the website, during the event, and in all workshop materials.
Keynote Speakers
Keynote Speakers
Weiyao Lin
Professor, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
Weiyao Lin is a Distinguished Professor with the School of Electrical, Electronic and Information Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. He received the B.E. and M.E degrees from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, in 2003 and 2005 respectively, and the Ph.D degree from the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, in 2010. He has authored or coauthored 150+ technical papers on flagship journals/conferences. He holds 30+ patents and has authored three books published by Springer and VDM Verlag. His research interests include AI and multimedia processing & understanding, with special interests on visual signal compression and action & event understanding. Dr. Lin served as an associate editor for a couple journals including TIP, TCSVT, T-ITS, JVCI. He is a TPC chair of ICME’2026 and PRCV’2025, and an organizing committee member for 5+ conferences. He served as an area chair for 10+ conferences including AAAI, ICLR, MM, ICME, ICIP, ICASSP, ICPR, ISCAS, and organized 10+ workshops & challenges. He also served as a member for IEEE ICIP strategic growth committee in 2022-2023. He received the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars in 2023, IEEE TCMC Mid-Career award in 2021, IEEE ICME Rising Star award in 2019, and the Outstanding Area Chair award for ICME in 2018. He is a fellow of IET, a senior member of IEEE, and an APSIPA Distinguished Lecturer (2025-2026).
Balaraman Ravindran
Professor, IIT Madras, India
Balaraman Ravindran is the founding head of the Wadhwani School of Data Science and AI, the Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science & AI and the Centre for Responsible AI (CeRAI) at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India. He has more than three decades of experience working in reinforcement learning, and his research interest spans responsible AI and deep RL. He is a member of the Government of India’s advisory group on AI and chaired the national committee that drafted India’s AI Governance Guidelines 2025. He was also part of the committee that authored the FREE-AI (Framework for Responsible and Ethical Enablement of AI) report for the RBI. He has played major roles in the Government of India’s task forces on AI & cybersecurity and defence applications of AI, the WEF’s AI for India 2030 initiative, and the UK’s Expert Advisory Panel on Advanced AI Safety. He also served as a Global Commissioner in the Responsible AI for Military Applications (REAIM) council. He serves on the editorial boards of top journals and has helped organize some of the premier conferences in this area, such as AAAI, KDD, PAKDD and IJCAI. He has published more than 150 papers in premier journals and conferences. He is an ACM Distinguished Member and a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) and of Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).
Organizing and Program Committee
Organizing and Program Committee
Nakul Jain
CEO
Wadhwani AI Global, India
Girmaw Abebe Tadesse
Principal Research Scientist
Microsoft AI, Kenya
Maria G. Martini
Professor
Kingston University London, UK
Patrick Le Callet
Professor
Nantes Université, France
Monojit Choudhury
Professor
MBZUAI, UAE
Mohammed El Hassouni
Professor
Mohammed V University, Morocco
Bibhas Adhikari
Fujitsu Research of America, Inc., USA
Sunayana Sitaram
Principal Researcher
Microsoft Research India
Kumar Rahul
Senior Research Scientist
Amazon Prime Video, USA
Jonathan Shock
Associate Professor, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Lim Chern Hong
Senior Lecturer
Monash University Malaysia
Divya Sharma
Assistant Professor
York University, Canada
Ankit Agarwal
Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA
Avinash Kumar Sharma
Researcher, WSAI,
IIT Madras, India
Aisha Hamad Hassan
Researcher, MIDAS Lab,
IIT Madras Zanzibar, Tanzania
Program Schedule
Program Schedule
Accepted works:
Accepted works:
3-Minute Presentation (3MT) Contest Finalists:
[9] When Foundation Models Fall Short: Insights from Ecological AI
[11] Bridging the Multilingual Safety Divide: Efficient, Culturally-Aware Alignment for Global South Languages
[19] AdiBhashaa: A Community-Curated Benchmark for Machine Translation into Indian Tribal Languages
[24] EdgeRAG: Packable, Offline, and Fair Retrieval-Augmented Micro‑Models for Low‑Connectivity Regions
[33] METEOR 2.5D: An Open Geospatial Dataset of the Spatiotemporal Evolution of Physical Vulnerability in UN-recognized Least Developed Countries (as of 2020) at Five-year Intervals, 1975-2030
[38] Agentic Framework for Culturally Grounded Visual Story Generation
[47] NewsLensAI: NER-Guided Summarization for Mitigating Hallucination and Bias in LLM-Based News Summaries (Student Abstract)
[48] AI Sovereignty in the Global South: Power, Dependency, and Strategic Futures
[50] Decomposing Direct and Indirect Biases in Linear Models
[58] Robust Jigsaw Reconstruction via Vision-Language Alignment for Scenes with Large Eroded Gaps
[71] IndiCASA: A Dataset and Bias Evaluation Framework in LLMs Using Contrastive Embedding Similarity in the Indian Context
[72] Adaptive AI for Personalized Intercultural Communication Education: A Conversational Agent Powered by Retrieval-Augmented Generation
[78] TUNE++: Topology-Guided Uncertainty Estimation for Reliable 3D Medical Image Segmentation
[102] HumaN: Hybrid Causal-Temporal Dynamic Routing for CPU-Efficient Cloud Workload Prediction
[110] PARTNERS: Public Policy/Scheme Assessment & Recommendation System for Tribal States and Entities Based On Census Using LLMs
Poster Session Paper IDs:
9, 11, 19, 24, 33, 38, 47, 48, 50, 58, 71, 72, 78, 102, 110,
8, 34, 35, 39, 43, 49, 56, 64, 67, 70, 80, 85, 87, 88, 104, 112
Contact Email
Contact Email
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us: globalsouthai-aaai-26@googlegroups.com
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