The Award for Inclusion Research (AIR) Program supported innovative research and professors working to create positive societal impact.
Previous years:
2023
2022
2021
2020
Andrew Begel, Carnegie Mellon University: Inclusive Remote Communication Tools for Blind and Sighted Collaborators
Bilge Mutlu, University of Wisconsin Madison: Supporting Social Participation for Older Adults through Robotic Telepresence
Eric Nalisnick, University of Amsterdam, Floris Roelofsen, University of Amsterdam: Adaptive, Efficient Collection of Sign Language Data
Gary W Behm, Rochester Institute of Technology: NTID Announcements: A Dataset for Aligning English Captions and Speech with American Sign Language Video
Julian Brinkley, Clemson University: Exploring The Design of Accessible Self-Driving Vehicles with Trained Co-Designers with Disabilities
Jennifer Mankoff, University of Washington: Assessing the accessibility of AI generated artifacts
Takeo Igarashi, The University of Tokyo: Enhance E-Learning Accessibility: Exploring AI Supported Temporal Approaches for Inclusive Online Education
Xin Yu, University of Queensland, Jessica Korte, University of Queensland: Breaking the Communication Barrier for the Australian Deaf Community: Vision Based Australian Sign Language Translation and Production
Xiaojun Bi, State University of New York Stony Brook, IV Ramakrishnan, State University of New York: Accessible Touchscreen Keyboards for People with Visual Impairments
Yvonne Tran, Macquarie University, Kelly Miles, Macquarie University: Enhancing Inclusion and Communication for Adults with Hearing Loss through Sensor-Fusion Empowerment Networks
Angelique Taylor, Cornell University, Hee Rin Lee, Michigan State University: Towards Robots for Inclusive Clinical Teamwork: Empowering Nurses to Promote Patient Safety
Chinmay Kulkarni, Emory University: Encouraging Expression of Appreciation to Improve Inclusion in Open Source
Edwin Ip, University of Exeter, Loukas Balafoutas, University of Exeter: Harnessing Behavioral Insights to Design and Test Inclusive AI Practice in Hiring
Golnoosh Farnadi, McGill University: Collaboration Strategies for Marginalized Communities with Data, Value and Resource Heterogeneity in Federated Learning
Rafael Prikladnicki, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Andre van der Hoek, University of California, Irvine: How do blind and low vision developers co-create software design artifacts?
Sridhar Chimalakonda, Indian Institute of Technology Tirupati: No One Is Left Behind - Fostering DEI and Nurturing Communication, Collaboration and Computing skills in Underrepresented Rural Students of India through a Collaborative Game
Azra Ismail, Emory University: Towards culturally-sensitive design of conversational AI for community health
Ben Green, University of Michigan, Tawanna Dillahunt, University of Michigan: Community-Driven Anticipation of AI Impacts
Bryan Ranger, Boston College: Toward multimodal generalist AI for portable ultrasound to support frontline healthcare workers in Ethiopia
Carl DiSalvo, Georgia Institute of Technology: Secondhand Economies and their Algorithmic Ecosystems
Chris Biemann, University of Hamburg, Adem Chenie Ali, Bahir Dar University, Ethiopia: AI-driven Monitoring of Attitude Polarization in Conflict-Affected Countries for Inclusive Peace Process and Women’s Empowermen
Dr. Morgan Wack, Clemson University, Sukrit Venkatagiri, University of Washington: Understanding and Co-Designing Responsible Generative AI Tools with Historically Marginalized Communities in South Africa and Kenya
Dr Guanjin Wang, Murdoch University, Dr Jayne Kotz, Murdoch University: Bridging Service Gaps in Aboriginal Perinatal Mental Health: An Embeddable Interpretable Generative AI
Gillian R. Hayes, University of California, Irvine: Youth Perceptions and Use of AI Using a Nationally Representative Sample
Hannah Kerner, Arizona State University: A Data-Centric Approach to Improve Geographic Equity in Geospatial ML
Johannes Bjerva, Aalborg University, Heather Christine Lent, Aalborg University: CREOLE: Creating Resources for Disadvantaged Language Communities
John Bradley, Monash University, Lele Sha, Monash University: Empowering Indigenous Language Learning through Co-created Knowledge Graph
Kurt Squire, University of California, Irvine: Designing Equitable MR Computing Futures with Recently Incarcerated and Gang Affiliated Black and Latino/a youth - Community Based Participatory Design at Homeboy Industries Art Academy
Magdalena Fuentes, New York University: Including Latin American Culture in Music Information Research
Melissa Densmore, University of Cape Town, Naveen Bagalkot, Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Manimal Academy of Higher Education: Collectively Reimagining Chatbots and Voice-based automation for Content Creation tools from the “Margins” in South Africa and India
Maristella Matera, Politecnico di Milano Dep. Electronics, Information and Bioengineering Italy, Salvatore Andolina, Politecnico di Milano: Conversational Patterns for Inclusive Prompt Engineering
Rahman Sanya, Makerere University, Stella Achen, Makerere University: Collaborative Development of AI Solution for Scaling Up Adolescent Access to Sexual and Reproductive Health Education and Services in Uganda
Sandip Chakraborty, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur: AI-assisted Distributed Collaborative Indoor Pollution Meters: A Case Study, Requirement Analysis, and Low-cost Healthy Home Solution for Indian Slums
Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, University of Toronto: Developing a Community-Centered Culturally-Aligned Data Visualization Framework in Rural Bangladesh
David Weintrop, University of Maryland College Park, Joel Chan, University of Maryland: "Computer, Help Me With My Code!": Understanding the Impact of Conversational Large Language Models in Introductory Programming Courses for Students from Historically Excluded Populations in Computing
Ibrahim Osman Adam, University for Development Studies: Integrating Generative AI Tools in Ghanaian Higher Education for Advancing Computing Education: A Constructivist Learning Approach
Jake Renzella, University of New South Wales, Sasha Vassar, University of New South Wales: Generating Adaptive Compiler Error Explanations with Large Language Models to Support Underrepresented CS1 Cohorts
James Prather, Abilene Christian University, Brent Reeves, Abilene Christian University: Supporting Novice Programmers Through Large Language Models
Leo Porter, University of California, San Diego, Daniel Zingaro, University of Toronto: Exploring the Value of LLMs in Teaching Introductory Programming
Narges Norouzi, University of California, Berkeley, John DeNero, University of California, Berkeley: Conversational Programming with LLM: An Automated Assistant in Introductory Programming Courses
Polo Chau, Georgia Institute of Technology: Scaling Up Educators' Capacities: Automating Visualization Assessment via Generative AI
Therese Keane, La Trobe University, Tianchong Wang, Swinburne University of Technology: Managing the double-edged sword: A framework for harnessing generative AI towards female inclusion in primary and secondary schools (K-12)
Andrea Parker, Georgia Institute of Technology: Combating Mental Health Inequities Amongst Perinatal Black Women Through Digital Health Innovation
Josiah Poon, University of Sydney, Caren Han, University of Sydney: Multimodal Mental Illness Detection and Explanation
Prof. Emmanuel Adetiba, Covenant University, Ota, Ogun State, Nigeria: A Generative Natural Language Processing Model for Transcription of an Indigenous African Language Towards Inclusive Public Health Education
Yang Song, University of New South Wales, Maurice Pagnucco, University of New South Wales: Interactive Concept Learning for Debiasing in Biomedical Imaging
Aakash Gautam, San Francisco State University: Community-Driven Socio-Technical Approach to Language Preservation and Promotion in Nepal
Aditya Grover, University of California, Los Angeles: Characterizing & Mitigating Geographical Bias in Climate Downscaling
Andrea Bellucci, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Jason Nolan, Toronto Metropolitan University: Radical Accessibility Tools for Extended Reality Musicking (RATERM)
Angela D. R. Smith, University of Texas at Austin, Christina N. Harrington, Carnegie Mellon University: Transforming theory into practice: eliciting cultural imaginaries and design thinking to understand Black-Centered Design
Apryl Williams, University of Michigan, Jenny Davis, The Australian National University: Algorithmic Reparations + Participatory ML
Bianca Kremer, Caitlin Sampaio Mulholland, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro: Mitigating racial algorithmic bias in Brazil: building equitable and accountable AI
Bogdan Vasilescu, Carnegie Mellon University: Understanding the Relationship Between Team Diversity and Innovation in Open Source
Chris Brown, Sang Won Lee, Virginia Tech: Supporting Under-Resourced Software Engineering Job Seekers through Facilitating Online Collaboration in Technical Interview Preparation
Daniela Rosner, University of Washington: Toward Equitable and Community-Collaborative Approaches to Mitigating Racial Disparities in Automated Speech Recognition and Language Technologies Alongside African American Speakers of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE)
Enzo Ferrante, Universidad Nacional del Litoral - CONICET: Unsupervised bias discovery: anticipating fairness issues in machine learning models for medical imaging without ground-truth annotations
Felipe Tobar, Universidad de Chile, Darinka Radovic, Universidad de Chile: Data Science at the service of gender equality in STEM education: A case study at Universidad de Chile’s School of Engineering
Gireeja Ranade, University of California, Berkeley: Inclusive study groups at scale
Gizeaddis Lamesgin Simegn, Jimma Institute of Technology: AI based Integrated English and Amharic Text-to-speech Synthesis with OCR: Hardcopy text reader for visually impaired people
Jason Wiese, University of Utah: Designing and Building Personal Informatics Systems with and for Power Wheelchair Users
Jinjuan Feng, Towson University: Making Health Data Accessible to People with Down Syndrome
Joanne Evans, Monash University, Misita Anwar, Monash University: Cultivating multicultural approaches to diversity and inclusion in IT education
John Grundy, Monash University, Tanjila Kanij, Monash University: Towards a More Inclusive Computer Science Teaching and Learning Environment
Juan M Banda, Georgia State University: Towards more equitable representation of Latin American Spanish natural language processing resources for social media mining of health-related applications
Kangning Huang, New York University: Future Heat Stress in Urban Slums: Projections and Mitigations
Laura Sikstrom, University of Toronto, Sean Hill, University of Toronto: A Computational Ethnographic Approach to Building Fair Models of Inpatient Violence in Emergency Psychiatry
Leysia Palen, University of Colorado: Investigating the Emergent Data Practices of a Marginalized Community Fighting Enviro-Racial Injustice to Co-Create an Information Infrastructure for Wider Mobilization
Lighton Phiri, University of Zambia: Exploring the Use of Enterprise Medical Imaging and Artificial Intelligence for Efficient and Effective Radiological Workflows in Public Health Facilities in Zambia
Matthias Ihme, Stanford University: Forecasting of wildfire pollutant transport using physics-informed machine learning to mitigate long-term health ef-fects from wildfire smoke on vulnerable communities
Michelle Mazurek, University of Maryland: Toward Principled Semi-Customized Security and Privacy Advice for At-Risk Populations
Morteza Dehghani, University of Southern California, Ellie Graeden, Georgetown University: Police Communication During Traffic Stops: Annotator Diversity in the Study of Multi-Modal Communication
Nicola Dell, Cornell University, Tom Ristenpart, Cornell University: Digital Safety for LGBTQ+ Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence
Patricia Garcia, University of Michigan: Examining Algorithmic Decision-Making in Homeless Service Systems
Pedro Lopes, University of Chicago: Designing & Engineering Glove-based Exoskeletons From the Ground Up for Accessible Communication
Rodrigo Coelho Barros, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul: Bidirectional Neural Machine Translation for the Brazilian Sign Language
Sandra Eliza Fontes de Avila, Universidade Estadual de Campinas: Dark Skin Matters: Fair and Unbiased Skin Lesion Models
Shiri Azenkot, Cornell University, Brian Smith, Columbia University: Designing Interactive Scene Description Abilities for People with Visual Impairments
Stefano Zacchiroli, Télécom Paris, Davide Rossi, University of Bologna: What Causes the Lack of Diversity in Open Source?
Surangika Ranathunga, University of Moratuwa, Nisansa de Silva, University of Moratuwa: Multi-domain Neural Machine Translation (NMT) System for Sinhala, Tamil and English
Tiffanie R. Smith, Lincoln University (PA): The POUNC2E (Preparing Our Undergrads New to Computing and College Environments) Program
Vicente Ordonez, Rice University: Measuring and Mitigating Societal Biases in Vision and Language Models for Open Recognition
Wenjie Zhang, University of New South Wales: Accessible Learning Analytics for Students with Cognitive Deficits in TAFE Australia
Wilkerson de Lucena Andrade, Universidade Federal de Campina Grande: Including People with Cognitive Disabilities in Programming Teaching
Xinru Zhu, Tokyo Institute of Technology: Development and Practical Application of Typefaces and Typeface Customization System for Readers with Developmental Dyslexia in East Asian Languages
Yasin Silva, Loyola University of Chicago, Deborah Hall, Arizona State University: Toward Safer Online Experiences for LGBTQ+ Communities
Yoshihiro Kawahara, The University of Tokyo: Augmenting Spatial Hearing of People with Unilateral Hearing Loss for Inclusive AR/VR Communication
Anita Sarma, Oregon State University: Improving A Sense of Belonging in Open Source by Supporting Diverse Roles
Arya Farahi, University of Texas at Austin, Danai Koutra, University of Michigan: Reducing Disparity in Resource Allocation: The Case of Mobility Infrastructure in the City of Detroit
Chris Creed, Birmingham City University, Sayan Sarcar, Birmingham City University: Collaborative Multimodal Coding for Developers with Physical Impairments
Christina Harrington, Carnegie Mellon University: Establishing a Speculative Design Toolkit to Support Technology Futuring among Marginalized Communities
Christopher Brooks, University of Michigan, Rene Kizilcec, Cornell University: Investigating How to Mitigate Bias in Predictive Models of Student Success Across Diverse Institutions
Daniel L. Chen, Toulouse School of Economics: Predicting and Remedying Gender and Ethnic Biases in the Kenyan Judiciary through AI
Daniela Damian, University of Victoria: Understanding Barriers and Designing Guidelines for Effective Collaboration in Diverse technology teams that are Inclusive of Indigenous People
Darakhshan Mir, Bucknell University, Vanessa Massaro, Bucknell University: Experiences of Algorithmic (Un)Fairness: Integrating qualitative and quantitative analysis to understand experiences of incarcerated individuals in Pennsylvania.
Gema Rodriguez-Perez, University of British Columbia, Meiyappan Nagappan, University of Waterloo: To understand the sources of discrimination faced by Hispanic and Black open-source developers in online social-coding platforms
Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende, Makerere University, Andrew Katumba, Makerere University: Using Machine Learning for Localised and Targeted Agricultural Advisory to Smallholder Farmers in Uganda
Manmohan Chandraker, University of California, San Diego: Computer Vision for Road Safety in Low and Mid-Income Geographies: Data Equity, Algorithmic Fairness and Educational Access
Marine Carpuat, University of Maryland - College Park: Auditing Low-Resource Machine Translation for Computational Harms
Miguel Nussbaum, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Isabel Hilliger, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile: Predictive learning analytics to provide socioeconomically disadvantaged students with timely support
Nandana Sengupta, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India, Aditya Medury, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India: The Road Less Travelled: Contextualizing and Measuring Bias in Crowdsourced Street Safety Ratings in India
Philip S. Thomas, University of Massachusetts - Amherst, Yuriy Brun, University of Massachusetts - Amherst: Supervised Learning with Long-Term Fairness Guarantees
Renata Borovica-Gajic, University of Melbourne, Marion Zalk, University of Melbourne: Improving the learning environment through bias awareness in curriculum design and assessment tasks
Sarita Schoenebeck, University of Michigan, Robin Brewer, University of Michigan: Designing Interpretable AI for People with Disabilities
Sheena Erete, DePaul University: Designing Community-centered, Data-driven Technologies and Processes to Support the Transformation of Local Learning Ecosystems
Simon J. L. Billinge, Columbia University, Dinsefa Mensur, Adama Science and Technology University: Developing Accessible Educational and Research Resources for East African Graduate Students in Computational Materials Science and Sustainability
Vandana Singh Avasty, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Jeffrey Carver, University of Alabama: Educating Students to be Better Citizens of Tech Communities: DEI Focus
Zhen Bai, University of Rochester: Augmenting Immersive Language Environment for Deaf Children in Early Childhood
Anicia Peters, University of Namibia, Shaimaa Lazem, City for Scientific Research and Technological Applications, Egypt: Human Centred Technology Design for Social Justice in Africa
Antonios Anastasopoulos, George Mason University: Modern NLP for Regional and Dialectal Language Variants
Aqueasha Martin-Hammond, Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis, Tanjala S. Purnell, Johns Hopkins University: Culturally Relevant Collaborative Health Tracking Tools for Motivating Heart-Healthy Behaviors Among African Americans
Destenie Nock, Carnegie Mellon University, Constantine Samaras, Carnegie Mellon University,: Characterizing Energy Equity in the United States
Erin Walker, University of Pittsburgh Leshell Hatley, Coppin State University: Developing a Dialogue System for a Culturally-Responsive Social Programmable Robot
Hinrich Schuetze, LMU Munich: Eliminating Gender Bias in NLP Beyond English
Jacob O. Wobbrock, University of Washington: The Ability-Based Design Mobile Toolkit: Enabling Accessible Mobile Interactions through Advanced Sensing and Modeling
Jasmine McNealy, University of Florida: Mutual aid and community engagement: Community-based mechanisms against algorithmic bias
Karen Elizabeth Fisher, University of Washington, Yacine Ghamri-Doudane, University of La Rochelle: Empowering Syrian Girls through Culturally Sensitive Mobile Technology and Media Literacy
Latifa Jackson, Hasan Jackson, Howard University: Broadening participation in data science through examining the health, social, and economic impacts of gentrification
Legand Burge, Howard University, Marlon Mejias, University of North Carolina at Charlotte: Understanding How Peer and Near Peer Mentors co-Facilitating the Active Learning Process of Introductory Data Structures Within an Immersive Summer Experience Effected Rising Sophomore Computer Science Student Persistence and Preparedness for Careers in Silicon Valley
Maria De-Arteaga, University of Texas at Austin: Who is Most Likely to Advocate for this Case? A Machine Learning Approach
Meenakshi Balakrishnan, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India, Volker Sorge, University of Birmingham: Contextual Rendering of Equations for Visually Impaired Persons
Nicki Washington, Duke University: Measuring the Cultural Competence of Computing Students and Faculty Nationwide to Improve Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Steve Oney, University of Michigan: Designing and Building Collaborative Tools for Mixed-Ability Programming Teams
Timothy Sherwood, Sharon Tettegah, University of California, Santa Barbara: Iterative Design of a Black Studies Research Computing Initiative through "Flipped Research"