Ensuring diversity and inclusion (D&I) in artificial intelligence (AI) is crucial for mitigating biases and promoting equitable decision-making. However, existing AI risk assessment frameworks often overlook inclusivity, lacking standardized tools to measure an AI system's alignment with D&I principles. This paper introduces a structured AI inclusivity question bank, a comprehensive set of 253 questions designed to evaluate AI inclusivity across five pillars: Humans, Data, Process, System, and Governance. The development of the question bank involved an iterative, multi-source approach, incorporating insights from literature reviews, D&I guidelines, Responsible AI frameworks, and a simulated user study. The simulated evaluation, conducted with 70 AI-generated personas related to different AI jobs, assessed the question bank's relevance and effectiveness for AI inclusivity across diverse roles and application domains. The findings highlight the importance of integrating D&I principles into AI development workflows and governance structures. The question bank provides an actionable tool for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to systematically assess and enhance the inclusivity of AI systems, paving the way for more equitable and responsible AI technologies.

In this paper, we elaborate on how AI can support diversity and inclusion and exemplify research projects conducted in that direction. We start by looking at the challenges and progress in making large language models (LLMs) more transparent, inclusive, and aware of social biases. Even though LLMs like ChatGPT have impressive abilities, they struggle to understand different cultural contexts and engage in meaningful, human like conversations. A key issue is that biases in language processing, especially in machine translation, can reinforce inequality. Tackling these biases requires a multidisciplinary approach to ensure AI promotes diversity, fairness, and inclusion. We also highlight AI's role in identifying biased content in media, which is important for improving representation. By detecting unequal portrayals of social groups, AI can help challenge stereotypes and create more inclusive technologies. Transparent AI algorithms, which clearly explain their decisions, are essential for building trust and reducing bias in AI systems. We also stress AI systems need diverse and inclusive training data. Projects like the Child Growth Monitor show how using a wide range of data can help address real world problems like malnutrition and poverty. We present a project that demonstrates how AI can be applied to monitor the role of search engines in spreading disinformation about the LGBTQ+ community. Moreover, we discuss the SignON project as an example of how technology can bridge communication gaps between hearing and deaf people, emphasizing the importance of collaboration and mutual trust in developing inclusive AI. Overall, with this paper, we advocate for AI systems that are not only effective but also socially responsible, promoting fair and inclusive interactions between humans and machines.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems for online recruitment markets have the potential to significantly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of job placements and even promote fairness or inclusive hiring practices. Neglecting Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) in these systems, however, can perpetuate biases, leading to unfair hiring practices and decreased workplace diversity, while exposing organisations to legal and reputational risks. Despite the acknowledged importance of D&I in AI, there is a gap in research on effectively implementing D&I guidelines in real-world recruitment systems. Challenges include a lack of awareness and framework for operationalising D&I in a cost-effective, context-sensitive manner. This study aims to investigate the practical application of D&I guidelines in AI-driven online job-seeking systems, specifically exploring how these principles can be operationalised to create more inclusive recruitment processes. We conducted a co-design workshop with a large multinational recruitment company focusing on two AI-driven recruitment use cases. User stories and personas were applied to evaluate the impacts of AI on diverse stakeholders. Follow-up interviews were conducted to assess the workshop's long-term effects on participants' awareness and application of D&I principles. The co-design workshop successfully increased participants' understanding of D&I in AI. However, translating awareness into operational practice posed challenges, particularly in balancing D&I with business goals. The results suggest developing tailored D&I guidelines and ongoing support to ensure the effective adoption of inclusive AI practices.

The rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies has introduced both significant advancements and challenges, with diversity and inclusion (D&I) emerging as a critical concern. Addressing D&I in AI is essential to reduce biases and discrimination, enhance fairness, and prevent adverse societal impacts. Despite its importance, D&I considerations are often overlooked, resulting in incidents marked by built-in biases and ethical dilemmas. Analyzing AI incidents through a D&I lens is crucial for identifying causes of biases and developing strategies to mitigate them, ensuring fairer and more equitable AI technologies. However, systematic investigations of D&I-related AI incidents are scarce. This study addresses these challenges by identifying and understanding D&I issues within AI systems through a manual analysis of AI incident databases (AIID and AIAAIC). The research develops a decision tree to investigate D&I issues tied to AI incidents and populate a public repository of D&I-related AI incidents. The decision tree was validated through a card sorting exercise and focus group discussions. The research demonstrates that almost half of the analyzed AI incidents are related to D&I, with a notable predominance of racial, gender, and age discrimination. The decision tree and resulting public repository aim to foster further research and responsible AI practices, promoting the development of inclusive and equitable AI systems.

This paper describes our homophobia/transphobia in social media comments detection system developed as part of the shared task at LT-EDI-2024. We took a transformer-based approach to develop our multiclass classification model for ten language conditions (English, Spanish, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Tulu, and Telugu). We introduced synthetic and organic instances of script-switched language data during domain adaptation to mirror the linguistic realities of social media language as seen in the labelled training data. Our system ranked second for Gujarati and Telugu with varying levels of performance for other language conditions. The results suggest incorporating elements of paralinguistic behaviour such as script-switching may improve the performance of language detection systems especially in the cases of under-resourced languages conditions.

Yiwen Lin, University of California, Irvine Lauren Snow, University of California, Irvine Acknowledgments: This work was partially supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant Number 1535300), and National Institutes of Health (Grant Number 5UC2NS128361-02). Abstract Collaboration is key to STEM, where multidisciplinary team research can solve complex problems. However, inequality in STEM fields hinders their full potential, due to persistent psychological barriers in underrepresented students' experience. This paper documents teamwork in STEM and explores the transformative potential of computational modeling and generative AI in promoting STEM-team diversity and inclusion. Leveraging generative AI, this paper outlines two primary areas for advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion. First, formalizing collaboration assessment with inclusive analytics can capture fine-grained learner behavior. Second, adaptive, personalized AI systems can support diversity and inclusion in STEM teams. Four policy recommendations highlight AI's capacity: formalized collaborative skill assessment, inclusive analytics, funding for socio-cognitive research, human-AI teaming for inclusion training.

The growing presence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in various sectors necessitates systems that accurately reflect societal diversity. This study seeks to envision the operationalization of the ethical imperatives of diversity and inclusion (D&I) within AI ecosystems, addressing the current disconnect between ethical guidelines and their practical implementation. A significant challenge in AI development is the effective operationalization of D&I principles, which is critical to prevent the reinforcement of existing biases and ensure equity across AI applications. This paper proposes a vision of a framework for developing a tool utilizing persona-based simulation by Generative AI (GenAI). The approach aims to facilitate the representation of the needs of diverse users in the requirements analysis process for AI software. The proposed framework is expected to lead to a comprehensive persona repository with diverse attributes that inform the development process with detailed user narratives. This research contributes to the development of an inclusive AI paradigm that ensures future technological advances are designed with a commitment to the diverse fabric of humanity.

In this paper, we delineate the strategy employed by our team, DeepLearningBrasil, which secured us the first place in the shared task DepSign-LT-EDI@RANLP-2023, achieving a 47.0% Macro F1-Score and a notable 2.4% advantage. The task was to classify social media texts into three distinct levels of depression - "not depressed," "moderately depressed," and "severely depressed." Leveraging the power of the RoBERTa and DeBERTa models, we further pre-trained them on a collected Reddit dataset, specifically curated from mental health-related Reddit's communities (Subreddits), leading to an enhanced understanding of nuanced mental health discourse. To address lengthy textual data, we used truncation techniques that retained the essence of the content by focusing on its beginnings and endings. Our model was robust against unbalanced data by incorporating sample weights into the loss. Cross-validation and ensemble techniques were then employed to combine our k-fold trained models, delivering an optimal solution. The accompanying code is made available for transparency and further development.

The pervasive role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in social interactions, from generating and recommending contents, to Our research methodology encompasses three stages: 1) data processing images and voices, brings numerous benefits but collection and analysis from the published literature on D&I in also necessitates addressing ethical implications and risks, such AI to extract relevant themes, 2) proposing a tailored user story as ensuring equitable and non-discriminatory decision-making, template, and 3) focus group exercise to explore the use of the and preventing the amplification of existing inequalities and extracted themes and user story template to specify D&I biases [1]. Diversity and inclusion (D&I) in AI involves requirements for AI systems. Furthermore, given that involving considering differences and underrepresented perspectives in many stakeholders with diverse attributes in requirements AI development and deployment while addressing potential elicitation is challenging and time-consuming, we decided to biases and promoting equitable outcomes for all concerned explore the utility of Large Language Models in generating user stakeholders [1]. Incorporating D&I principles in AI can enable stories from the D&I in AI themes. After each focus group technology to better respond to the needs of diverse users while exercise, we used GPT-4 to generate D&I user stories. We aimed to examine how closely the user stories from both human 2 Bano et.

This paper investigates the potential of Virtual Reality (VR) as a research tool for studying diversity and inclusion characteristics in the context of human-robot interactions (HRI). Some exclusive advantages of using VR in HRI are discussed, such as a controllable environment, the possibility to manipulate the variables related to the robot and the human-robot interaction, flexibility in the design of the robot and the environment, and advanced measurement methods related e.g. to eye tracking and physiological data. At the same time, the challenges of researching diversity and inclusion in HRI are described, especially in accessibility, cyber sickness and bias when developing VR-environments. Furthermore, solutions to these challenges are being discussed to fully harness the benefits of VR for the studying of diversity and inclusion.