Leveraging technology for societal benefit.
The Center for Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality is dedicated to the social sciences and working towards the betterment of society. One of the ways in which we do this is through leveraging technology. This includes the use of big data; enter: computational social science. The use of large data sets (regarding women’s empowerment, education, health, social issues, politics, the environment, economics, and so many other fields) combined with the processing powers of machine learning will enable us to understand at greater depths the larger forces at play.
By unlocking these insights we will be able to better target our social interventions to have the greatest impact upon society, as well as potentially predict both negative and positive outcomes of various interventions. As our goal has to do with women and gender, specifically, we hope to be able to utilize large data sets to understand the elements at play in inequality, lack of equity, and to also neutralize the negative events of violence against women, sexual assault, sex trafficking, and child pornography (to name a few of the many).
AI for social good
These days, Artificial Intelligence is perceived as a threat to gainful employment and for a few, even as a threat to human well being. While AI needs to be used carefully,this misunderstanding of AI’s potentials as a tool limits its applications for social good. At the CWEGE, an interdisciplinary team of computer scientists and social science researchers are combining advances in AI and Machine Learning to create a suite of technologies to understand social vulnerabilities in rural communities, especially surrounding women.
“I am a computer scientist with a focus on AI. I was very impressed both by the quality of the scientific work done by the team and the general direction being driven by the needs of the Indian Villages. This work contains many challenges to AI research.”