IIT Madras launches initiative to reduce gender data gap in Wikipedia

NEW DELHI: The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras’ Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBCDSAI) in collaboration with SuperBloom Studios and IITM alumni association is launching an initiative called ‘Hidden Voices’ to reduce the gender data gap in digital sources. IIT Madras is starting the initiative with Wikipedia.

‘Hidden Voices’ initiative aims to auto-generate biographies of several notable women within the next year, specifically within the next International Women’s Day (March 8, 2023), and thereby make a positive impact on gender representation among digital sources.

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The Hidden Voices team takes pride in mentioning that SuperBloom Studios was co-founded by three IIT Madras alumnae building this practice across three continents.

“While there are multiple layers of complexity to resolve the nature of equitable representation across all digital platforms, it is noted that there is significant value in increasing women representation in Wikipedia,” said an official statement from IIT Madras.

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Explaining how this initiative would be implemented, Professor 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. This is especially so when processing documents about underrepresented populations, the very fact that this project is trying to address. Hence, we will take advantage of AI solutions where possible, and judiciously use human oversight and verification to produce high quality outputs.”

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Elaborating further on this project, 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.”

Speaking about the role of IITM Alumni in this pioneering initiative, Mr. Krishnan Narayanan, President, IIT Madras Alumni Association (IITMAA), said, “This project comes under our Mission Million Smiles and Women-in-STEM program. A large number of our alumni, especially the younger ones, are digitally proficient and are willing to volunteer their time for such a wonderful cause.”

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Hidden Voices is planned to start with generating biographies of women from North America and India who have notable contributions in STEM fields and tech-adjacent business domains. The team aims to expand expertise areas, geography and include other underrepresented communities over time.