The Indian Institute of Technology Madras’ Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBCDSAI) and SuperBloom Studios, a Business Consultancy Firm, are launching an initiative to reduce the Gender Data Gap in Digital Sources. ‘Hidden Voices’ is being done in partnership with IIT Madras Alumni and is starting with Wikipedia to begin with.

The initiative aims to auto-generate biographies of several notable women within the next year, specifically within the next International Women’s Day (8th March 2023) thereby making a positive impact on gender representation among digital sources. The models developed will employ this approach to generate Wikipedia articles for notable women in STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine and Management).

The IIT Madras believes that while there are several layers of complexity to resolve the nature of equitable representation across all digital platforms, there is significant value in increasing women representation in Wikipedia.

Prof Balaraman Ravindran, Head, RBCDSAI-IIT Madras, said, “The project will be an instance of a human-allied AI execution. While the state-of-the-art of Automated Language Processing has significantly advanced there are situations when the AI will make errors. We will take advantage of AI solutions where possible, and judiciously use human oversight and verification to produce high quality outputs.”

Addressing a measurable quantitative lack of representation of gender diverse voices in these core digital data sources, ‘The Hidden Voices’ initiative sets out to tackle this issue.

Dr Raji Baskaran, Founding Partner, SuperBloom Studios, said, “The lack of availability of proper information often creates and cements unintended biases. This is nowhere more prominent than in the ever-widening digital gender data gap. Hidden Voices addresses a critical data gap and builds tools to systematically reduce this gap at scale. Building products and services that are inclusive is at the core of our business strategy.” 

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