Nonprofit Partners With Six Universities to Address Gender Inequality in Artificial Intelligence

This summer, Boston University hosted AI-4-ALL, a program designed to promote greater gender diversity and inclusion in the overwhelmingly male artificial intelligence (AI) field. AI-4-ALL is a nonprofit organization launched by some of the country’s leading AI technologists such as Fei-Fei Li, chief AI scientist at Google Cloud. The effort is funded by philanthropists such as Melinda Gates, of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Jensen Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia. In addition to Boston University, AI-4-ALL has five other university partners: Stanford University, Princeton University, the University of California, Berkley, Carnegie Mellon University, and Simon Fraser University in Canada.

The three-week summer program educated rising juniors and seniors from the Boston area about AI through a series of projects, field trips, guest speakers, and a group research project and presentation. Kate Saenko, an associate professor of computer science at Boston University hosted the summer program. Dr. Saenko earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and a master’s degree and a Ph.D in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Cynthia Brossman, director of STEM outreach and diversity and director of the university’s Learning Resource Network also participated in the effort. Brossman has launched multiple programs to encourage high school women to pursue careers in STEM. These programs included the Artemis Project, a five-week computer program for ninth grade girls, Greater Boston Research Opportunities for Young Women, which gives high school girls a chance to spend six weeks in a research lab and earn a stipend, Summer Pathways, a week-long residential program that exposes participants to a broad array of STEM careers and meet women professionals in the field, and Codebreakers, a three-week cybersecurity program for sophomores and junior girls.

Director Brossman holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a master’s degree in mass communication from Boston University.