AI-based technologies have significant potential to enhance inclusive education and clinical-rehabilitative contexts for children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities. AI can enhance learning experiences, empower students, and support both teachers and rehabilitators. However, their usage presents challenges that require a systemic-ecological vision, ethical considerations, and participatory research. Therefore, research and technological development must be rooted in a strong ethical-theoretical framework. The Capability Approach - a theoretical model of disability, human vulnerability, and inclusion - offers a more relevant perspective on functionality, effectiveness, and technological adequacy in inclusive learning environments. In this paper, we propose a participatory research strategy with different stakeholders through a case study on the ARTIS Project, which develops an AI-enriched interface to support children with text comprehension difficulties. Our research strategy integrates ethical, educational, clinical, and technological expertise in designing and implementing AI-based technologies for children's learning environments through focus groups and collaborative design sessions. We believe that this holistic approach to AI adoption in education can help bridge the gap between technological innovation and ethical responsibility.

The global rise in homelessness calls for urgent and alternative policy solutions. Non-profits and governmental organizations alert about the many challenges faced by people experiencing homelessness (PEH), which include not only the lack of shelter but also the lack of opportunities for personal development. In this context, the capability approach (CA), which underpins the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), provides a comprehensive framework to assess inequity in terms of real opportunities. This paper explores how the CA can be combined with agent-based modelling and reinforcement learning. The goals are: (1) implementing the CA as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), (2) building on such MDP to develop a rich decision-making model that accounts for more complex motivators of behaviour, such as values and needs, and (3) developing an agent-based simulation framework that allows to assess alternative policies aiming to expand or restore people's capabilities. The framework is developed in a real case study of health inequity and homelessness, working in collaboration with stakeholders, non-profits and domain experts. The ultimate goal of the project is to develop a novel agent-based simulation framework, rooted in the CA, which can be replicated in a diversity of social contexts to assess policies in a non-invasive way.

We propose a conceptualization and implementation of AI ethics via the capability approach. We aim to show that conceptualizing AI ethics through the capability approach has two main advantages for AI ethics as a discipline. First, it helps clarify the ethical dimension of AI tools. Second, it provides guidance to implementing ethical considerations within the design of AI tools. We illustrate these advantages in the context of AI tools in medicine, by showing how ethics-based auditing of AI tools in medicine can greatly benefit from our capability-based approach.

In moving from excluding the majority of the world's languages to blindly adopting what we make for English, we first risk importing the same harms we have at best mitigated and at least measured for English. For instance, Yong et al. [15] showed how prompting GPT-4 in low-resource languages circumvents guardrails that are effective in English. However, in evaluating and mitigating harms arising from adopting new technologies into such contexts, we often disregard (1) the actual community needs of Language Technologies, and (2) biases and fairness issues within the context of the communities. Here, we consider fairness, bias, and inclusion in Language Technologies through the lens of the Capabilities Approach [12]. The Capabilities Approach centers what people are capable of achieving, given their intersectional social, political, and economic contexts instead of what resources are (theoretically) available to them. In the following sections, we detail the Capabilities Approach, its relationship to multilingual and multicultural evaluation, and how the framework affords meaningful collaboration with community members in defining and measuring harms of Language Technologies. 2 THE CAPABILITIES APPROACH The Capabilities Approach is a framework in developmental economic studies proposed by Amartya Sen in a series of articles published as far back as 1974 [1]. It has been applied to varied fields including environmental justice [e.g.

Research in artificial intelligence (AI) for social good presupposes some definition of social good, but potential definitions have been seldom suggested and never agreed upon. The normative question of what AI for social good research should be "for" is not thoughtfully elaborated, or is frequently addressed with a utilitarian outlook that prioritizes the needs of the majority over those who have been historically marginalized, brushing aside realities of injustice and inequity. We argue that AI for social good ought to be assessed by the communities that the AI system will impact, using as a guide the capabilities approach, a framework to measure the ability of different policies to improve human welfare equity. Furthermore, we lay out how AI research has the potential to catalyze social progress by expanding and equalizing capabilities. We show how the capabilities approach aligns with a participatory approach for the design and implementation of AI for social good research in a framework we introduce called PACT, in which community members affected should be brought in as partners and their input prioritized throughout the project. We conclude by providing an incomplete set of guiding questions for carrying out such participatory AI research in a way that elicits and respects a community's own definition of social good.

Automated decision making comes of age.