Global nonprofit Technovation helps girls solve local problems with AI

Earlier this year, nonprofit Technovation announced The AI ​​Forward Alliance, a collaboration aimed at increasing the number of young women in AI. It’s one of several initiatives the organization has used to keep its curriculum at the top of its game since its inception in 2006.

We spoke with founder Tara Chklovski, Ph.D., about Technovation’s mission, its AI initiatives, and how companies can support young women in their careers. Bringing more women and girls into AI brings the courage needed to address issues like bias, she said.

What is Technovation?

Technovation is a non-profit educational organization that works worldwide. Girls and young women between the ages of 8 and 18 can join the program to create a project that will benefit their local communities using technology. The project lasts about 12 weeks.

Each girl or team of girls has a mentor—a parent in the case of younger girls—who helps them identify problems and find technological solutions. One group in rural Kenya taught AI to recognize the sound of gunfire to speed law enforcement responses to crimes. Other groups have created apps to help women report domestic violence or an app connected to a vibrating bracelet that alerts deaf or hard-of-hearing people to fires, weather, or other emergencies.

“We are the only global program that is fully focused on girls, and we have long-term data that shows that because of their strong background in technology, girls are much more likely than average to pursue higher education in computer science and careers in technology,” Chklovski said.

She said 76% of Technovation graduates go on to major in computer science, and 60% go on to pursue careers in the technology industry, largely because of the program. Chklovski attributes that success in part to putting problem-solving first.

“Instead of taking you through the basics of programming and then giving you a project at the end, we turned it around and asked, how do you identify meaningful problems that will change the world?” she said.

Participants complete their project with a solid business plan and presentation, as well as demo videos showcasing their product.

Encouraging girls to pursue future technologies, says Chklovski, enriches the industry with people who are confident enough to pursue new ideas.

“You just need a courageous workforce that can come up with new ideas,” she said. “The heart of innovation is new ideas, different ideas, different ways of thinking.”

AI is Technovation’s latest tool for solving local problems

The AI ​​Forward Alliance is a collaboration between Technovation, UNICEF, Google, and others to impact 25 million young women. The alliance aims to foster problem-solving skills, complex systems thinking, data science, and machine learning.

Chklovski noted that artificial intelligence is not Technovation’s only focus, but it has been a component of its efforts for several years.

“We started building the AI ​​in Action curriculum eight years ago,” Chklovski said. “We’re coming to this conversation about AI with … tons of data about what works and what doesn’t. The whole (generative) AI boom is just accelerating. What we’ve seen is exciting and interesting for young girls.

“The AI ​​Forward Alliance is really about bringing in cutting-edge technology. Right now it’s AI, but maybe in five to 10 years, maybe it’s a quantum computer. So in a sense, we’re technology agnostic. It’s more about what’s relevant to training the workforce, what’s the most powerful tool for tackling the big, complex problems that we’re facing.”

Bad data in, bad data out

Chklovski acknowledges that generative AI can, as the AI ​​Forward Alliance has noted, raise “controversy and concerns” — particularly when it comes to AI-related hallucinations, which occur when an AI model generates inaccurate or misleading information but presents it as if it were true.

“There’s so much room for improvement,” Chklovski said in response to concerns about AI hallucinations. “And I think the way to do that is to improve the data set.”

For example, Technovation projects need data on local problems to solve them.

“We work with orphanages all over Vietnam, and the girls were very concerned that the standard image recognition models that were out there weren’t recognizing Vietnamese facial expressions,” Chklovski said. “So they developed their own dataset and trained it to work on their population.”

SEE: Stay up to date on AI with TechRepublic’s cheat sheets.

Women in AI: How Companies Can Attract Young Women to Tech Jobs

Despite years of progress across sectors, the tech industry still struggles with a long-standing problem: persistent underrepresentation of women.

Recent studies show that women hold about 26% of technology jobs in the U.S., despite making up almost half of the workforce. Women make up 35% of all workers in computer systems design and related services in the U.S.

Improving gender equality in the workplace reduces the likelihood that products, including generative AI, will exhibit bias. A 2018 Deloitte study found that when organizational leaders support inclusion, 70% of employees report an increase in “respect, value, and longing,” as well as “psychological safety; and inspiration.”

On the other hand, fewer women in tech limit the pool of people who can help companies find solutions to real-world problems. For example, the projects that Technovation groups work on are often aligned with the UN General Assembly’s global goals.

To encourage young women to pursue careers in tech, companies should look beyond traditional higher education paths to find the skills they want to hire, Chklovski said. Much of the talk about AI in education is “shortsighted,” she suggested, because the technology is moving too quickly.

“Rapid engineering is something else. People talk about it, and I think that’s too low a goal,” she said. “Because by the time you’re designing curriculum, training teachers, implementing it at scale, the technology has already changed. It’s more about educating young people, especially building future-proof skills, where lifelong learning is key.”

Recruiters should look for products that young women like Technovation’s graduates have already created and problems they’ve solved. For example, Chklovski said, a Technovation team created an Uber-like app in 2010, before ride-sharing companies became popular. Another group created an app that encouraged digital “focus time,” long before it became a common mantra that people might have trouble concentrating in the face of a flood of digital information.

She suggested that companies approach workplace training in a project- and practice-oriented way, encouraging people to pick a problem and learn how to solve it, rather than watching “extremely boring” training sessions.

Companies should also consider offering internships to young women who have computer science degrees or practical experience outside the top 20 universities, Chklovski noted.

“We have 11,000 female graduates who are over 18 years old — looking for internships, early career opportunities — and have a solid portfolio of what they’ve built, what problems they’ve solved,” she said. “That takes some of the uncertainty out of hiring.”