AI + Dance: Co-Designing Culturally Sustaining Curricular Resources for AI and Ethics Education Through Artistic Computing

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) systems are ubiquitous across many fields ranging from medicine (e.g., tumor detection), to natural language processing (e.g., digital home assistants, auto-translate tools), and personalization (e.g., social media recommendations). The rise of these systems has also seen a rise in the ethical challenges resulting from how some of these systems are designed and implemented. Most problematic is their propagation and amplification of problems such as racism and sexism [4, 6], among others. Further, these challenges exist within a computing discipline that is already burdened by exclusive, marginalizing cultures and practices that lead to low participation by women and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) [3]. Our project, AI + Dance, attends to these dimensions of inequity within AI/ML education through developing our understanding of how we can equip learners to recognize and rectify issues of AI and ML systems within an inclusive and culturally sustaining experience. We explore this in collaboration with STEM From Dance1 (SFD), a non-profit organization that supports girls of color in creative production with dance, CS, and STEM.