How diverse is the ACII community? Analysing gender, geographical and business diversity of Affective Computing research

Abstract

ACII is the premier international forum for presenting the latest research on affective computing. In this work, we monitor, quantify and reflect on the diversity in ACII conference across time by computing a set of indexes. We measure diversity in terms of gender, geographic location and academia vs research centres vs industry, and consider three different actors: authors, keynote speakers and organizers. Results raise awareness on the limited diversity in the field, in all studied facets, and compared to other AI conferences. While gender diversity is relatively high, equality is far from being reached. The community is dominated by European, Asian and North American researchers, leading the rest of continents under-represented. There is also a strong absence of companies and research centres focusing on applied research and products. This study fosters discussion in the community on the need for diversity and related challenges in terms of minimizing potential biases of the developed systems to the represented groups. We intend our paper to contribute with a first analysis to consider as a monitoring tool when implementing diversity initiatives. The data collected for this study are publicly released through the European divinAI initiative.

Measuring and fostering diversity in Affective Computing research

“…The type of community members analysed varies among studies, although conference (keynote) speakers are the most common -and sometimes unique-target [13], [14], [16], [20]. Speakers have undoubtedly a key role in shaping the external prestige of a conference, but other actors such as PC members, authors and attendees are equally important when it comes to effectively evaluate diversity, as covered in few works [15], [18], [23] as well as in our previous study on ACII [11]. Interestingly, diversity among journal actors (authors, editorial boards) and societies/associations members is under-studied, especially in the AI field.…”

“…women, black people, other minority groups), institutions and countries. Our previous work presented in ACII 2021 [11] is, to the best of our knowledge, the first attempt to quantify diversity in the Affective Computing community. It computes four diversity indexes for each ACII conference edition from 2005 to 2019, following the same methodology as the AI Watch Index 2021 report [23], [24], and comparing them to those of top-tier AI conferences.…”

“…Traditional Biodiversity indexes (e.g. Shannon and Pielou) used in our previous work [11] are good examples, as they additionally allow for crossdimension metrics. Other more sophisticated indicators applied to disciplines such as ecology [3] or telecommunications [29] could be also adapted to the analysis of diversity in a research community, but remain unexplored to date.…”

“…The lack of tools to measure and monitor diversity is one of the limitations to assess the impact of efforts and policies. Hupont et al [11] proposed a methodology to quantify diversity at the International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligence Interaction (ACII), which considers gender, geographic location and institution type as diversity dimensions, and analyzes paper authors, keynote speakers and organizers. These results showed the limited diversity of the field, where the composition of researchers is persistently mostly men coming from Europe, Asia and North America.…”

Monitoring Diversity of AI Conferences: Lessons Learnt and Future Challenges in the DivinAI Project

“…Pielou and Shannon in- dexes are computed for each of the three community member roles, and then averaged as indicated in Figure 2 to obtain four diversity indicators: Gender Diversity Index (GDI), Business Diversity Index (BDI), Geographic Diversity Index (GeoDI) and the overall Conference Diversity Index (CDI). For further information about how DivinAI indexes are computed, we refer the reader to (Freire, Porcaro, and Gómez 2021;Hupont et al 2021).…”