Bi-Monthly f < a + i >r Research Cohort #1 Meeting

*Feminist AI= Algorithmic Decision-Making Systems and Artificial Intelligence harnessed to deliver equality outcomes, designed with inclusion at the core, creating new opportunities and proactive, innovative correction of inequities.

<A+> Alliance seeks to collaborate with communities, practitioners, researchers, scholars and innovators working to springboard from the established ‘what’ of describing harm and ‘why’ harms exist socially or technically, to research focussed on ‘how’ course correcting future harms can happen, and most urgently ‘how’ new data, algorithms, models, policies + systems could be created, then prototyped, and piloted. The 2021 call for proposals from multi-disciplinary, global south teams of feminist thinkers is intended to create opportunities for new research engagement. Novel approaches and new models, with a focus on practical application in prototype and pilot phases will be prioritized. Papers will focus on multi-disciplinary work researching, creating, or iterating new AI framework models and designs for new or current social policy allocations in order to re-engineer system thinking and algorithmic solving for proxy problems and old assumptions buried in the data and now active in the new technology. This may include research on the efficacy of including or hiding protected characteristics, or finding social and economic models of allocation/distribution now made more possible and equitable through the creation or innovative use of new or big data in Algorithmic Decision-Making (ADM).

We are interested particularly in how Algorithmic Decision-Making systems (ADM) in developing countries function to inhibit rights and amplify unequal power relations, and how AI and ADM can be harnessed to deliver equality outcomes and new opportunities. How can feminist methodologies and approaches be applied when developing AI systems? How can AI innovation and social systems innovation be catalyzed concomitantly to create a positive movement for social change larger than the sum of the data science or social science parts. Some indicative areas that intersect with core public policy agendas in the Global South such as Economic / Social Allocation: Health, Education, Justice, Social Protection/Benefits (including Subsidy, Digital ID, Land Tenure/Use, Pensions, Conditional Cash Transfer, Housing Lotteries), new algorithmic applications of Indigenous, Decolonial, Traditional models, etc, Geospatial Mapping,Climate Change, and Feminist Data collection or community-driven data stewardship models, Accountable Local, National or Regional AI Policy or Governance models are foreseen.