Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA)

The mission of the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub (NEBDHub) is to build and strengthen partnerships. Great partnerships cannot rest on a foundation of inequality; they must advance equity and accessibility for all partners, of all backgrounds. That’s why building a diverse, equitable, inclusive, and accessible community is central to the work of the NEBDHub. The NEBDHub is committed to advancing opportunities for those who have been underserved in the data science field, including from the perspective of racial and social equity and fairness, and for individuals with differing abilities.

As a mode of representation, data holds great power in individual and institutional decision-making. Data both reveals disparities and needs within our communities and provides a path forward toward innovation and change. As a community of data science practitioners, we are committed to building diversity, equity, and inclusion in all aspects of our work, always mindful to leverage the power of data responsibly, and work to improve accessibility to data and insights. Our focus on Responsible Data Science serves as a foundation for enabling data science that is secure, private, and ethical.

We realize our commitment to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility through mutual collaboration, proactive outreach, and inclusivity by design. Our goal every day is to do better than we have done before.

Find NEBDHub DEIA resources:

DEIA and Data Science Resources

NYU Center for Responsible AI: All Aboard! Making AI Education Accessible

The NYU Tandon Center for Responsible AI (NYU R/AI) catalyzes policy and industry impact, fosters interdisciplinary research and education, and builds an equitable and socially sustainable ecosystem of AI innovation. In Spring 2023, R/AI published the All Aboard! Making AI Education Accessible primer to improve the accessibility of the R/AI “We are AI” course and provide guidelines for accessibility in AI education broadly. This project was supported in part by the NEBDHub’s Seed Fund program. Additional information about this initiative from the April 2023 R/AI Launch event can be found in this presentation deck (external link no longer available).

Race + Data Science Lecture Series

The Data Science Institute (DSI) at Columbia University hosts the Race + Data Science Lecture Series at regular intervals. This lecture series aims to celebrate and advance research in the areas of race and data, engineering, and computational science.

With this series of events, the DSI’s goal is to improve how we as data scientists and data-adjacent researchers speak about race. Through wide distribution of our speaker’s research, we envision that these talks can lead to the discovery of important resources about race, inequity, and emerging applications. This series is funded by support from the MacArthur Foundation and New America.

Spanish Language Data Science Materials

A substantial portion of the NEBDHub’s community studies in Spanish-speaking countries, including Argentina, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Spain, or is engaged in the activities of Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) that are Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). In fact, 84 of the 644 higher education organizations engaged in the NEBDHub’s programs, resources, or events are HSIs.

Learn more about some of the Spanish-language data science education tools we share through the NEBDHub.

The People’s Speech Dataset

The People’s Speech Dataset is among the world’s largest English speech recognition corpus today that is licensed for academic and commercial usage under CC-BY-SA and CC-BY 4.0. It includes 30,000+ hours of transcribed speech in English languages with a diverse set of speakers. This open dataset is large enough to train speech-to-text systems and crucially is available with a permissive license. Just as ImageNet catalyzed machine learning for vision, the People’s Speech will unleash innovation in speech research and products that are available to users across the globe.

10 Women Who Pioneered the Tech Industry

Women programmed the very first computer, wrote the code that landed men on the moon, and came up with the idea for computer programs a century before the invention of computers. Thanks to the barrier-breaking work of women like Annie Easley, Carol Shaw, and Margaret Hamilton, today women work in every sector of the tech industry.

March 2022 Women in STEM Campaign

In honor of Women’s History Month, the NEBD Hub and the National Student Data Corps (NSDC) launched a month-long program in March 2022 called the Women in STEM campaign. This campaign leveraged social media and the NEBD Hub’s newsletters to share resources, opportunities, and information about how women can establish a successful career in data science. This campaign culminated with the March NSDC Career Panel, held on Friday, March 25th.

Let’s Teach Computer Science Majors to Be Good Citizens. The Whole World Depends on It.

Minority Serving Institutions: America’s Underutilized Resource for Strengthening the STEM Workforce

Equity-Centered Leadership and Communication Brief, National Science Foundation (NSF)

American Chemical Society Inclusivity Style Guide

Research has shown that stereotyped language can do harm. In contrast, more inclusive language can create positive change (for example, more gender-neutral language can reduce bias). Inclusive language and images make content more accurate and ensure that it finds the widest possible audience. This writing style guide from the American Chemical Society (ACS) can be used by STEM researchers and administrators for improving the inclusivity features of online communications.

NSF Report: Diversity and STEM: Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities

A diverse workforce provides the potential for innovation by leveraging different backgrounds, experiences, and points of view. Innovation and creativity, along with technical skills relying on expertise in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), contribute to a robust STEM enterprise. Furthermore, STEM workers have higher median earnings and lower rates of unemployment compared with non-STEM workers. This report provides high-level insights from multiple data sources into the diversity of the STEM workforce in the United States.