Focus: The TRAILS Institute is especially focused on expanding access to foundational education for historically marginalized and minoritized groups of learners and users. The institute will work with these communities to learn from, educate, and recruit participants. The focus is to retain, support, and empower those marginalized in mainstream AI. The integration of these communities into this AI research program broadens participation in AI development and governance.
Mission 1: A first goal of the TRAILS Institute is to discover ways to change the design and development of AI systems. This will help communities make informed choices about AI technology adoption.
Mission 2: A second goal is the development of best practices for industry and government. This will foster AI innovation while keeping communities safe, engaged, and informed.
The TRAILS Institute’s research program identifies four key thrusts.
- Social Values: It involves increasing participation throughout all aspects of AI development. This ensures the values produced by AI systems reflect community and interested parties’ values. This includes participatory design with diverse communities.
- Technical Design: It includes the development of algorithms to promote transparency and trust in AI. This includes the development of tools that increase robustness in AI systems. It also promotes user and developer understanding of how AI systems operate.
- Socio-Technical Perceptions: It involves the development of novel measures including psychometric techniques and experimental paradigms. These measures will assess the interpretability and explainability of AI systems. This will enable a deeper understanding and perception of existing metrics and algorithms. This provides understanding of the values perceived and held by included community members.
- Governance: It includes documentation and analysis of governance regimes for both data and technologies. These provide the underpinning AI for the development of platform and technology regulation. Ethnographers will analyze the institute itself and partner organizations. They will document ways in which technical choices translate to governance impacts.
The research focus is in two use-inspired areas. The first being information dissemination systems (e.g., social media platforms). The second is energy-intensive systems (e.g., autonomous systems).
The institute’s education and workforce development efforts in AI include new educational offerings. These cater to many markets, ranging from secondary through executive education.
EdtechMasters with TRAILS
- AI Summer Program for High School Students
Through the University of Maryland’s Iribe Initiative for Inclusion & Diversity, TRAILS offers an AI Summer Program for regional high school students. The two-week program intends to create a more inclusive and diverse field of AI practitioners and users by targeting and serving underrepresented communities. Students work with faculty to apply AI to solve real-world problems with a social justice lens. They also explore the field of AI through team projects, industry field trips, and presentations from guest speakers. TRAILS intends to expand the AI Summer Program to other areas and universities.
- Social Media & AI-Based Education
We also focus on social media and AI-based educational technologies that have perpetuated harm, trauma and injustice among teachers and youth, particularly among students of color. Led by education and computing specialists at Morgan State University, TRAILS will work with educators, high school students and pre-service teachers to develop algorithms and metrics that can be used.
Email: theresearchuniversity@gmail.com
JOIN COMMUNITY SUBSCRIBE HERE TO LEARN MORE
