Our advocacy has helped remove the GRE as an admissions requirement by some graduate schools in the US and highlight obstacles to research, industry and networking opportunities for Africans and those in the diaspora. We've shed light on visa issues faced while trying to attend major international AI conferences, the lack of presence of international companies on the African continent, and the choice of conference locations that exclude many members of our community.

Our advocacy on barriers faced by our members has resulted in new processes by conferences such as NeurIPS to mitigate these challenges, resulting in an increase in the number of Black keynote speakers at major AI-related events and the first Google AI center in Africa (Accra, Ghana).

Some additional highlights include:

• Graduate schools such as Cornell and UC Berkeley’s computer science departments have accepted a record number of Black students into their programs.
• As a result of publicity regarding Black in AI’s visa issues (which Justin Trudeau was asked about by reporters), Canada’s minister of innovation has agreed to work with NeurIPS to ease visa related issues in the future.
• Our efforts would have brought ICLR to Ethiopia, which would have made it the first major international AI conference to be held in Africa. It was unfortunately held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic but still featured 2 Black women as keynote speakers for the first time, and workshops like Africa NLP and Practical ML for the developing world.
• Since Black in AI’s first workshop in December 2017, many new AI focused-affinity groups such as LatinX in AI, Queer in AI, {Dis} Ability in AI, and Indigenous AI have been formed. Just as there was and is a need for Black in AI, there is a need for representation across all disciplines. Many Black in X groups have been formed including Black in Neuro, Black in Robotics, Black in Quantum, Black Women in AI, Black in Data, Black Women in Data, to name a few.
• The annual Black in AI workshop has pioneered remote meetups and telepresence to increase diversity and inclusion.

‍

Key Accomplishments

‍

800+

Students supported worldwide via the Emerging Leaders in AI - Grad Prep program

‍

700+

Application fee waivers provided to Black in AI members for graduate CS programs. Advocacy outreach successfully pushed for the provision of these waivers for our members applying to graduate programs at universities including:

‍

Stanford University, Princeton University, Cornell University, Vanderbilt University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Brown University, University of Pennsylvania, Yale University (Ph.D), MIT, Northwestern University, Carnegie Mellon University, University of California (Berkely), Duke

‍

‍75%

On average, 75% of mentees in our Grad Prep program are accepted to more than one fully-funded graduate program. Our graduate applicants have been admitted to top-tier universities including:

‍

Howard University, Australian National University, University of California - Berkeley, Princeton University, University of British Columbia, University of Cape Town, Carnegie Mellon University, University College Dublin, Cornell University, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Oxford, Stanford University, University of the Witwatersrand, and many other places across the world.

‍

20+

CS programs at top-tier schools removed standardized testing requirement (GRE & TOEFL) based on our advocacy

‍

Graduate Research Pipeline

• Identified the barriers that limit the underrepresented community in applying to graduate programs through our ongoing research “Equity in Graduate Program Application.” 
• In collaboration with the Computing Research Association (CRA), we are questioning and improving graduate enrollment, retention, and graduation rates for underrepresented communities.

‍

Affinity Group Collaborations

• We identified the barriers that limit the underrepresented community in applying to graduate programs through our ongoing research, "Equity in Graduate Program Application
• We are collaborating with AI affinity groups on a research-based study focused on providing transparecy around different aspects of the workplace for researchers/practitioners in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

‍

White Paper - Equity in Graduate Applications

• Topical focus - A current limitation of the existing programmatic and intervention efforts aimed at broadening participation within computing is the inability to fully capture the diverse barriers that hinder underrepresented groups from successfully applying and enrolling in AI graduate programs.
• Outcomes of the research - This research presents the first study that outlines the barriers faced by Black applicants to AI graduate programs. 
• Learnings from the research - Identifying these barriers may prove beneficial in encouraging and facilitating discussions towards devising ways to support underrepresented students better and for academic institutions to move beyond rhetoric and create a lasting change around graduate admissions.

‍