Expanding the AI Undergraduate Pipeline
Artificial intelligence (AI) represents the dawn of an unprecedented and rapidly evolving technological era. With the rapid rate of advancement, there is a fierce urgency now to address the startling lack of diversity in the rooms where world-changing tech decisions are happening.
Today, women comprise less than 25 percent of the AI workforce, and Black and Hispanic representation in AI remains in the single digits. This disparity isn’t just a matter of statistics; it’s a looming crisis that threatens to embed biases into the infrastructure of our tomorrows. We know that the lack of diversity in AI is dangerous; that’s why we’re working to democratize AI education.
With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Break Through Tech is expanding the undergraduate AI pipeline through a network of instructional hubs. This project offers prospective Instructional Hubs a turn-key programmatic opportunity that contributes to their Computer Science (or related discipline) departments while providing faculty and graduate students with training on how to teach applied, industry-relevant ML coursework using inclusive education and virtual best practices. The goal of our instructional hub network is to expand our model to a network of partners who will deliver our Machine Learning Foundations curriculum to a greatly expanded population of women, female-identifying and non-binary students, and others underserved in the tech ecosystem.
Over the course of three years we will:
- Extend our existing hubs at Cornell Tech, the University of Illinois-Urbana Champagne, and Hofstra University;
- Expand our network through new collaborations with a total of five new hubs over the course of three years;
- And successfully develop and execute a “Train the Trainer” program to facilitate inclusive AI/ML programs to participants.
As the network expands, we will evaluate the effectiveness of the expanded ML Foundations training program and the viability of the Instructional Hub model for democratizing access to resources of better-equipped institutions. Our Co-PIs include Break Through Tech’s founder and CEO Dr. Judith Spitz, Dr. Jule Schatz from the University of Illinois- Urbana Champagne and Dr. Krishnan Pillaipakkamnatt from Hofstra University.
By democratizing access to high-quality AI education through a network of Instructional Hubs, this project aims to double the number of students served annually, ultimately broadening participation for a new generation of diverse AI leaders who will help ensure advances in responsible AI that address issues of fairness, ethics, and algorithmic bias and promote US competitiveness in this exploding technical field.
This project is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (Award # 2434321).