There is now a dial-in link to our seminar on AI and Inclusion
To support the Alan Turing Institute’s statement that ‘promoting and embedding equality, diversity and inclusion is integral to achieving our mission’ the research question addressed by this proposed new Challenge is ‘How can AI overcome barriers to inclusion’?
Of the nine protected characteristics identified by the Equality Act 2010, AI would appear to have the greatest potential to help overcome barriers to inclusion for disabled people in terms of practical strategies for digital accessibility and assistive technology support. Examples of how innovative uses of AI can support those with disabilities include:
- image and video description, independent navigation (vision);
- captioning for words sounds and emotions, sign language translation, adaptive hearing aids (hearing);
- symbol generation communication and translation, speech synthesis (communication);
- text summarization and simplification (cognition);
- smart monitoring and support (care);
- web accessibility checking and correction (all)
Disabled people need to be involved in the design of Assistive or Augmentative Intelligence for ‘edge cases/outliers’ and as Disability is not a single homogeneous characteristic, algorithms need to work for all disabilities in the multitude of different settings and situations in which people find themselves and this also applies to ethical and fairness issues related to data gathering and algorithms affecting protected characteristics.