Introduction
There is a pressing need to examine and confront racial disparities and bias in the way Artificial Intelligence is developed and used. Historically Black Colleges and Universities are taking the lead in making AI awesome for all. This list tries to document those efforts.
Table of Contents
- Courses
- Student Organizations Robotics clubs, student groups doing Kaggle competitions, etc.
- Outreach Hackathons for high schoolers, learn-ups for community activitists, etc.
- Centers Multidisciplinary or multi-institutional collaborations involving HBCUs
- Conferences
- Publications
- Grants
Courses
Morehouse College
- Artificial Intelligence CS 425-01 Artificial Intelligence
- The course has been taught since 2005 by Dr Amos Johnson, usually in alternating years. I have linked to the 2006 course site.
Spelman College
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CIS 432 Artificial Intelligence - Covers fundamental concepts, techniques and issues of artificial intelligence; state space search strategies; heuristic methods and programming techniques; and survey of applications in areas of problem solving, expert systems, natural language understanding, vision and learning.
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CIS 435 Robotics - Introduces students to programming robots. Lectures are combined with hands-on classroom learning activities
Howard University
- Introduction to Machine Learning
- Introduces students to fundamental concepts and algoritms for machine learning including linear regression, naive Bayes classifiers, and neural networks. The class is taught by Dr Mugizi Robert Rwebangira
Bowie State University
I noted two AI related classes at Bowie State’s CS course listing page:
- COSC 473 Artificial Intelligence(Fall)
- Project oriented class that introduces artificial intelligence topics including machine learning, problem solving, knowledge representation, expert systems.
- COSC 474 Machine Learning and Discover (Spring only)
- Introduction to machine learning touching learning from examples, analogies, through solving problems.
North Carolina A&T State University
- COMP-590.03Artificial & Computational Intelligence
- Especially interesting because the department has on-going work in the application of AI to problems in computer security and privacy. One of the lectures focuses on artificial immune systems – an approach that has been taken in computer security. Dr. Dozier (department head) has expertise in genetic and evolutionary computing. From the catalog: “This course is an introduction to the theory of artificial intelligence and a survey of artificial intelligence application areas. It covers the foundational concepts related to knowledge representation and search strategies.”
Coppin State University
- COSC 307 **Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (Fall)
- This course is an introduction to artificial intelligence. Techniques for logic programming, object-oriented systems, rule based systems representing uncertainty and searching are presented.
Student Organizations
Spelman College
- Spelman Robotics Team - The Spelbots made history as the first all-female robotics team, all African American robotics team. Some of the early accomplishments of the team are highlighted in this AAAI Spring Symposium paper
Outreach
Centers
Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU)
- Center for Intelligent Systems, Control, and Robotics (CISCOR) - The goal of CISCOR is “to use state-of-the-art technology to develop practical solutions to problems in systems, control and robotics for applications in industry and government”. CISCOR is a collaboration between engineering and computing departements at FAMU and Florida State University (FSU) in Tallahassee.
Bowie State University
- Virtual Reality Laboratory
- The VR laboratory at Bowie State University in Maryland is looking to develop student research and development skills in VR as well as in understanding the potential for VR for instruction and visualization. The lab’s research is at the intersection of VR and AI – looking at how virtual agents can help people in emergency situations. The lab is headed by Dr Sharad Sharma.
North Carolina A&T State University
- Cyber Identity and Biometrics (CIB) Lab
- The Cyber Identity Lab conducts work on identity and authentication leveraing research in biometrics, machine learning, and general data science. It is managed by Dr. Kaushik Roy
- Testing Evaluation and Control of Heterogeneous Large-scale Systems of Autonomous Vehicles
- The center was founded as a DOD Center of Excellence in Autonomy. It seems to focus on solving the challenges implied by coordinating fleets of drones, self-driving cars, and other autonomous vehicles.
Coppin State University
- Lab for Artificial Intelligence and its Applications (LAIA) LAIA engages undergraduate students majoring (and minoring) in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Psychology and high school students at Coppin Academy High School in the research and development of robotics, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, the internet of things (IoT), and culturally relevant learning technologies. These projects engage our team in designing, developing, and researching various aspects of computing hardware and software – designing them, building them, and learning with them. All projects have a mixed method research approach where, as we progress with design, interview members of the target population to determine how best to design a feature, build a prototype, and then request that members of the target audience evaluate those prototypes for improvement. An example project is the design of our Rooftop Garden Robotics project (e.g. a robot designed to maintain and harvest fruits and vegetables on rooftops in Baltimore City). This project won First Place in the 2016 White House HBCU Maker & Innovation Challenge. Information about this project and others can be found on our website, listed above. ——-
Conferences
Spelman College
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Computer Science for All Workshop - The goal of National Science Foundation’s Computer Science for All program is to “provide all U.S. students the opportunity to participate in computer science (CS) and computational thinking (CT) education in their schools at the K-12 levels”. Spelman College hosted a workshop for applicants. Dr Brandeis Marshall Chair of Computer & Information Sciences at Spelman College was one of the presenters.
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Data Science Faculty Retreat (DSX) June 19-30 2017 - The Data Science Faculty Retreat is an outgrowth of an NSF funded collaboration between Spelman and Morehouse Colleges. The focus of this retreat is to provide support for faculty to incorporate data science in their existing curriculum.
Prairie View A&M University
- The Second Workshop of Mission-Critical Big Data Analytics (MCBDA 2017)
- The conference is a forum for research in big data analytics for extreme scale. The projects seem not limited to DoD related work. A number of the presentations focused upon scientific computing. The affiliated Center of excellence in Research and Education for big military Data InTelligence (CREDIT) center also provided training on Tensorflow.
Publications
Bowie State University
- Oladunni, Timothy, and Sharad Sharma. Predictive Real Estate Multiple Listing System Using MVC Architecture and Linear Regression. ISCA 24th International Conference on Software Engineering and Data Engineering. 2015.
- Synopsis Looks like an interesting use of linear machine learning algorithms for housing price prediction based upon standard features. Seems very accurate for closing price over a small sample from 2015. Housing discrimination continues to be a persistent barrier to equality, I hope Dr Oladunni continues the work, and I hope he’s taking a crack at a recent Kaggle competition.
North Carolina A&T State University
- Roy, Kaushik, Prabir Bhattacharya, and Ching Y. Suen. “Iris segmentation using variational level set method.” Optics and Lasers in Engineering 49.4 (2011): 578-588.
- Synopsis This seems to be representative of the biometrics work going on in the Cyber Identity and Biometrics (CIB) Lab.
Grants
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