INNOVATION 
VOICE AI
TO DRIVE CHANGE​
​FOR GLOBAL WOMEN

WHY VOICE AI?

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Historic gender and cultural biases perpetuate in the ecology of AI.
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The stories of our mothers and grandmothers are missing from large datasets. That's why we need to use data and voice AI to speak up and drive attention where it's needed!

We need to not only challenge entrenched biases in data, we need to have a solution. Creating new datasets and voice AI storytelling can cut through the noise.

​Meet Hypatia​
AI AGENT, IN THE MAKING, WHO SHARES STORIES ABOUT WOMEN

Stories of women all over the world have often been left untold, but Hypatia is here to change that. She is an AI voice storyteller who can tell you crowdsourced narrative stories about amazing women from the earliest pioneers in your communities to the young women of today who will become tomorrow's leaders.

Her namesake is Hypatia, the famous philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt circa 350 AD.
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A 2020 World Economic Forum report found that women make up only 26 percent of data and AI positions in the workforce, while the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI’s 2021 AI Index Report found that women make up just 16 percent of tenure-track faculty focused on AI globally.
HypatiaStories was born out of the urgent need to incorporate women's stories into AI discovered during the Women in History Data Ideation Challenge, led by a partnership between IVOW and Topcoder. As a result of this project, Topcoder nominated IVOW as a finalist in their customer innovation awards, which recognize the most influential projects of the year that are “downright cool, edgy, important, and disruptive."

HYPATIA'S ORIGIN STORY


​Once upon a time, an AI was bit by a radioactive spider... Just kidding! In early July 2020, IVOW launched the Women in History Data Ideation Challenge, together with Topcoder. Our goal was to find public data sources about women throughout history and suggest how that data could be used to gain new insights for AI products and solutions.
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​Thanks to the amazing work of the many participants in this challenge, we discovered an urgent need to incorporate women’s stories into AI. Throughout history, the contributions of women pioneers in science and computing have often been watered down, overshadowed, or simply undocumented. In the next chapter of our own story, we are creating Hypatia as an AI storyteller specifically for documenting and sharing the stories of women working in data and AI.

​Read the full report on this project on Issuu or download the PDF:

OUR COLLABORATORS