One Year of Building Responsible AI Across Borders: Reflecting on Our Journey, Impact, and Future
One year ago, we founded Responsible AI Across Borders (RAIxB) with a simple yet ambitious vision: to create an inclusive global community where researchers, practitioners, policymakers, industry leaders, and students could collaborate to shape the future of responsible artificial intelligence. We recognised that AI governance should not be designed in isolation or from a single cultural perspective, but through dialogue that reflects diverse communities, disciplines, and lived experiences. As we celebrate our first anniversary, this milestone presents an opportunity to reflect on what we have accomplished together, the partnerships we have formed, the conversations we have sparked, and the exciting opportunities that lie ahead as we continue to advance trustworthy, human-centred, and globally inclusive AI.
In September 2025, we convened the RAIxB inaugural panel at the UKAIR symposium at Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK, where we brought together experts from different fields, including human-computer interaction, pervasive computing, responsible AI, law, and AI policy and governance, to explore common themes in the responsible AI domain and how we can co-create common futures. Emerging themes discussed centred around:
Rethinking responsible AI via data ethics, responsible innovation, and inclusive governance
AI agency and autonomy
Human-centred AI design approaches and methods
Cultural AI research and innovation across jurisdictions
Legal regulation and compliance
Community-driven HCI-AI efforts
In April 2026, we joined the programme committee of the Responsible and Human-centred AI meet-up at the CHI2026 conference in Barcelona. The ACM conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) is the leading international conference on Human-Computer Interaction. Anchored on the RAI UK, the meet-up adopts an interactive town hall format featuring community standups and structured roundtable discussions to generate actionable outcomes, build new networks and collaborations, and share knowledge opportunities for the CHI and RAI community. Overall, the meet-up served as a foundational response from communities seeking to establish common priorities, forge connections, and catalyse the next generation of RAI research and innovation that centres human values, promotes fairness, and advances democratic principles.
In terms of knowledge exchange and engagement, we attended the Cambridge Centre for Human-Inspired Artificial Intelligence (CHIA) “AI for Global Development” Conference. Under the theme of the Cambridge Global Challenge - “From Scientific Innovation to Sustainable Impact” - the conference emphasised the challenges and opportunities of AI4SD, the complexities of social development and socio-technical AI, and pathways for translation and impact across borders. The critical question that stayed with us from the conference is: what makes AI a promising use case for sustainable development?
On the sidelines of the ACM Creativity and Cognition conference, we met up with our friend and colleague Dr Jay L. Cunningham in London to explore blind spots between Responsible AI Across Borders and DePaul University’s Responsible AI Systems and Societal Experiences (RAISE) Lab. Our discussion touched on the need to bridge innovative research and practice across HCI and AI, fields divided by a shared focus. We plan a summer international exchange with the RAISE Lab, DePaul University, USA, and the Persuasive Computing Lab, Dalhousie University, Canada, focusing on the theme of “Human-Centred AI or AI-Enabled HCI”.
As interdisciplinary researchers and reflective practitioners, we have contributed significantly to advancing responsible and trustworthy AI scholarship. Below are a few examples related to the RAIxB:
diid industrial design journal open debate: AI in Africa. Preliminary Notes on Design and Adoption
2nd edition of the Global Forum on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (GFEAI 2024) position paper: AI Ethics Shopping and Governance Shrinking in Africa: A Critical Opinion.
Palgrave Macmillan Trustworthy AI - African Perspective book collection: Trust Me, I Am an Intelligent and Autonomous System: Trustworthy AI in Africa as Distributed Concern.
Springer Nature Usability for the World book collection: Exploring Usability of AI Systems in the Global South—Toward Responsible Human-Centered AI for Sustainable Cities and Communities.
Springer Nature AI & Ethics Journal: Rethinking responsible AI from ethical pillars to sociotechnical practice.
Springer Nature AI & Ethics Journal: UX experts vs. AI: exploring the performance of large language models and humans on detecting dark patterns.
Springer Nature AI & Ethics Journal: Challenges, paradoxes and lessons for inclusive AI governance: an interdisciplinary analysis of corporate initiatives.
Many more are under review.
Moving forward, we have identified actionable and deliverable pathways for championing Responsible AI as the combination of sociotechnical solutions and human efforts that are ongoing and evolving. Thus, we plan to engage with the AI community (via AAAI 2027, ACM FAccT 2027, Deep Learning Indaba 2027), and subsequently the HCI community (via ACM CHI 2028, etc) to bridge two existing academic powerhouses, SIGCHI/SIGAI and AAAI. This is a collective community-led effort, akin to the Human-Computer Interaction Across Borders (HCIxB), thus soliciting collaborators, champions, and volunteers across industry and institutions. In summary, we hold the position that RAI as a sociotechnical system is a combination of resources, opportunities and decisions - thus raising questions of equitable participation, pluralistic alignment and inclusive governance.
We’re doing our little part via the RAIxB initiative; what are you and your communities doing to ensure AI serves everyone?