Award for Inclusion Research Program

Accessibility research is critical in its opportunity to advance inclusive technology that can enable and improve access for diverse user populations. Google's mission to "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful emphasizes the importance of accessibility at the company-level. Google works on a broad range of topics in accessibility to ensure that our technology is accessible and that it empowers people with disabilities to be socially engaged, productive, and independent. We are committed to research that advances the state-of-the-art in usable, useful, inclusive, and accessible technology.

Google strives for broad inclusion through support for assistive technologies, and research and development that aid people with vision, hearing, speech, motor, and/or cognitive disabilities.

For our 2022 program, we call for proposals specifically in the areas of:

• Wearable computing and augmentative technology
• Inclusive remote communication and telepresence to aid in collaboration among people with and without disabilities
• Transportation and mobility
• Tools and techniques for cognitive inclusion

Algorithmic fairness is an interdisciplinary research area focused on understanding how the development, use, and impacts of algorithmic systems intersect with varying forms of social inequality. Some of the fundamental research topics in this area revolve around critically examining current development practices and developing new techniques to enable algorithmic and machine learning systems to better serve the people, particularly those from underserved communities, who interact with these systems.

For our 2022 program, we call for proposals specifically in the areas of:

• Novel algorithm or dataset development frameworks that promote responsible development practices
• Novel algorithmic techniques that support the development of more robust, fair, explainable, and/or inclusive algorithmic systems
• Quantitative or qualitative studies or methods that examine datasets and/or methods of dataset development. We encourage research that will serve historically marginalized or underserved data subjects, dataset laborers, and downstream stakeholders of models derived from datasets.
• Quantitative or qualitative studies or methods that examine how historically marginalized or underserved communities are impacted by a particular technology.

Climate change is one of the most significant risks our society faces, with particularly significant impacts on the most marginalized communities, and research on how to mitigate and adapt to climate change is critical for both current and future generations. Google has a deep commitment to its own sustainability goals as well as enabling partners and users to mitigate and adapt to climate change in order to benefit everyone, both through Google products and through a number of state-of-the-art research efforts.

For our 2022 program, we call for proposals in these categories:

• Mitigation – avoiding and reducing CO2 emissions to avoid the significant and unequal impact that climate change will have. We encourage research about sustainable and fair mitigation techniques that empower vulnerable communities. Categories of interest include:

  • Reducing emissions through decarbonization and efficiency

  • Carbon sequestration and removal

  • Informing policy

• Adaptation – helping communities, especially the most vulnerable geographic areas, respond to climate change by altering our behavior, systems, and ways of life to protect our families, our economies, and the environment in which we live. We’ll be most interested in proposals that measure potential lives saved and impacts to people affected.

Collaboration is responsible for far-reaching advances in computing. For example, such collaboration can occur in online communities like Wikipedia, open source software development projects, or teams of information workers in companies. Diverse and inclusive collaborations can create technology and products that are more inclusive of all users.

For our 2022 program, we call for proposals specifically in the areas of:

• Collaboration strategies to ensure that technological solutions meet the needs of a diverse set of users
• Scalable and repeatable interventions to help avoid technological solutions that might cause harm to historically marginalized and underserved communities
• Mitigating bias among collaborative teams
• Increasing belonging in collaborative teams

Digital safety is an interdisciplinary research area focused on ensuring that everyone can more equitably and comfortably participate online. Fundamental topics in this space include understanding inequities in security, privacy, and safety for historically marginalized or underserved communities, or how emerging threats such as hate and harassment, misinformation, or extremism can acutely impact communities.

For our 2022 program, we call for proposals specifically in the areas of:

• Quantitative or qualitative studies that improve the security, privacy, or safety of historically marginalized or underserved communities, including:

  • Identifying contextual factors or emerging threats that reduce a community’s digital safety

  • Evaluating existing protections or developing novel protective practices, tools, and solutions for a community

  • Rich explorations of barriers that curtail existing protections within a community

• Impacts of misinformation, hate and harassment, or extremism affecting historically marginalized or underserved communities

• Equitable content moderation, limiting unfair bias to historically marginalized or underserved communities

Higher education serves as both the touchstone of the computing community and the developmental environment for new talent. Any biases or discrepancies within higher education can spread to other places that computing touches and feed back into future generations of students in higher education and people in industry where it may further reinforce systemic biases in technology and products. Google is committed to advancing research on how to improve the culture, teaching, learning, and implementation of computer science in higher education.

For our 2022 program, we call for proposals specifically in the areas of:

• Reimagining admissions with an eye toward equity
• Creating a more equitable and inclusive curriculum
• Making pedagogy and assessment more equitable
• Making student (and faculty) experiences more equitable

Participatory Machine Learning (ML) brings the tradition of participatory and community-based design, which actively involves all stakeholders throughout the product or service design process to ensure their needs are met, to the specific requirements and processes of building ML and artificial intelligence (AI) systems. We believe a participatory approach that treats ML and AI system developers and their stakeholders as equals in the process of choosing which problems to solve, selecting data for model building, defining the success criteria for solutions, and ensuring solutions meet the needs of all stakeholders in a sustainable manner is essential for a fair and equitable future.

The field of participatory ML is new and growing. More research that employs participatory techniques and research on those techniques themselves is needed.

For our 2022 program, we call for proposals specifically in the areas of:

• How to increase participation of stakeholders from historically marginalized or underserved communities in the development and deployment of ML and AI systems and policies
• Boundary objects - e.g. open source tools, industry guidelines, simulations and visualizations, art or installations - that bring disparate stakeholder groups together
• New ways to contextualize and examine the applications of ML and AI systems in local cultural and regulatory realities
• Examining the power dynamics and their implications between ML and AI developers and policy makers and the communities affected by what they build

Research in this area will inform how Google and the tech industry can work with communities and policy makers to create AI and ML systems and policies that enable fair, equitable, and sustainable solutions that benefit all stakeholders.

We welcome researchers from any field who prioritize participation and co-creation with stakeholders in their work to apply.