King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) is launching “Dear AI,” an International Women’s Day campaign and hackathon to tackle gender bias and the under-representation of women in AI software.

A recent KAUST search of a popular AI imaging software tool returned an average of 1% women when using the prompt “imagine entrepreneur,” “imagine inventor” and “imagine software engineer.”  Yet globally, women represent one in three early-stage entrepreneurs and 20% of computer scientists, and in Saudi Arabia, 45% of startups are owned by women. The results highlight the biases in today’s neural networks and raise questions about how they are trained. The name “Dear AI” reflects KAUST’s call for accurate representation of datasets and demographics from KAUST, Saudi Arabia and beyond.

“Gender bias is a well-known drawback of many learning AI systems based on artificial neural networks, especially regarding women of color,” said said KAUST Professor of Computer Science Jürgen Schmidhuber, director of the KAUST AI Initiative. “One solution is to retrain the algorithms on appropriately selected unbiased data sets. Creating such sets, however, is a non-trivial task.  Nevertheless, I am encouraged by the fact that Saudi women are turning to tech as viable career paths and 47% of the graduates in our AI academy program are women. That by itself may move the needle in this space: more women working in AI may help to generate new and less biased data sets as a natural by-product of their work.”

Saudi Arabia is witnessing significant acceleration of women in scientific fields  and KAUST is at the forefront, notably for being the first mixed gender university in the country, which heralded a new era of inclusion for women in academia. The University has continued to create professional opportunities for women on campus and in the Kingdom. For example, KAUST maintains a female student body population of 39% — a figure higher than the global average of women in STEM programs — and its AI extension courses by the KAUST Academy graduate 47% women.

KAUST also has a mandate to train young entrepreneurs and scientists from around Saudi Arabia. Its entrepreneurship programs have trained more than 24,000 people with an average female participation rate of 51%. It’s MENA-based startup accelerator program, TAQADAM, now in its sixth year, has a female founder rate of 49%, well above the global average.