University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Sponsored Programs Administration

Black in AI is a place for sharing ideas, fostering collaborations and discussing initiatives to increase the presence of Black people in the artificial intelligence field. The organization hosts a vibrant online community, works to increase the visibility of Black contributions to the AI field, maintains a graduate school mentorship program, hosts professional workshops and provides need-based travel grants to attend them, and undertakes advocacy to surface and address barriers that prevents members of its community from having equal opportunity within the AI field. The award supports Black in AI’s annual workshop that is co-located at the 2019 Neural Information Processing Systems conference and long-term organizational planning.