Professional Documents
Culture Documents
net/publication/348929985
CITATIONS READS
26 101
3 authors, including:
All content following this page was uploaded by Lorenzo Porcaro on 02 February 2021.
outcome at the moment for AI research dis- ing the difference between categories (Stir-
semination. We consider diversity in terms of ling (2007)).
gender, geographical location and academia Nonetheless, even if Stirling’s definition
vs industry (possibly to extend further) and can be easily generalizable to different con-
incorporate three different aspects of a sci- texts, it is fundamental to notice that ap-
entific conference: authors, keynote speakers proaching diversity several interpretations
and organizers. After a literature review on can be adopted, according to the context of
diversity, we present the proposed indicators use. Indeed, to completely abstract from
and illustrate them in a set of impact AI con- the social context in which a technology is
ferences. implanted when modelling diversity can be
misleading, as Selbst et al. (2018) discuss.
Even if the authors focus on the concept
2. Background of fairness, likewise the issues identified can
be found while treating diversity, considering
2.1. The concept and measurement of
the several common aspects between these
diversity
two values, as pointed out by Celis et al.
Addressing the problem of conceptualizing (2016). Similarly, Mitchell et al. (2020) dis-
diversity is a long-lasting debate in the aca- cuss the link between fairness and diversity,
demic community, object of study of several and emphasize the differences between the
disciplines such as ecology, geography, psy- idea of heterogeneity related to the variety
chology, linguistics, sociology, economics and of any attribute within a set of instances, in
communication, among the others. The in- comparison to diversity intended as variety
terest in estimating the degree of diversity is with respect to sociopolitical power differen-
often justified by the relevance of its possible tials, such as gender and race. As Drosou
impact: from the promotion of pluralism and et al. (2017) affirm analyzing diversity in Big
gender, racial and cultural equality, to the Data applications, diversity can hardly be
enhancement of productivity, innovation and universally defined in a unique way.
creativity in sociotechnical systems (Stirling The issues which arise in the conceptu-
(2007)). Introducing its ubiquity, in a very alization of diversity are reflected when at-
broad sense Stirling defines diversity as ”an tempts are made for establishing a universal
attribute of any system whose elements may formula to audit the diversity of a system.
be apportioned into categories”. However, in several fields different needs have
We can find in the previous definition two led to the formulation of different measure-
words which reflect different dimensions of ments, nowadays still in use and effective.
diversity: elements and categories. The lat- Following, we refer to a diversity index as
ter is strictly related to the concept of rich- a measure able to quantify the relationship
ness, which can be interpreted as the num- between elements distributed in categories of
ber of categories present in a system. The a system.
former instead is connected to the evenness Two diversity indexes still being widely
of a system, i.e. the distribution of elements used have been proposed at the end of the
across the categories. Richness and evenness 1940s: the commonly called Shannon index
are the two facets of what in the literature is (H’) (Shannon (1948)), and the Simpson in-
called dual-concept diversity (McDonald and dex (D) (Simpson (1949)). Even if originally
Dimmick (2003)). Along with them, dispar- from two different fields, namely Information
ity is a third dimension of diversity, describ- Theory and Ecology, both are based on the
2
Measuring Diversity of Artificial Intelligence Conferences
idea of choice and uncertainty. Indeed, Shan- n divided by the total number of individuals
non defines his formula wondering what mea- found N , and S is the number of species.
sure would be suitable to describe the degree The Shannon index takes values between
of uncertainty involved in choosing at ran- 1.5 and 3.5 in most ecological studies, and
dom one event within a set of events. Simi- the index is rarely greater than 4. This mea-
larly, Simpson formulated his index measur- sure increases as both the richness and the
ing the probability of choosing randomly two evenness of the community increase. The
individuals from the same group within a fact that the index incorporates both com-
population. ponents of biodiversity can be seen as both
The main limitation of these indexes is a strength and a weakness. It is a strength
their focus on the analysis of the frequency because it provides a simple, synthetic sum-
of the elements, leaving aside any semantic mary, but it is a weakness because it makes it
information. Bar-Hillel and Carnap (1953) difficult to compare communities that differ
discuss this limit, considering also the mean- greatly in richness.
ing of symbols in contrast to the frequen-
tist approach. This semantic gap of diversity 2.2.1. Pielou Index
measurements can be partly solved by the in-
The Shannon evenness, discarding the rich-
troduction of a third dimension of diversity,
ness, can be computed by means of the
disparity, which joins variety and balance by
Pielou diversity index (Pielou (1966)):
creating a more solid framework for diver-
sity analysis. This dimension is present in H0
the Rao-Stirling diversity index: J0 = 0
(3)
Hmax
H 0 is the Shannon diversity index and
X
∆= (dij )α (pi · pj )β (1) 0
i,j i6=j
Hmax is the maximum possible value of H 0
(if every species was equally likely):
where dij indicates the disparity between
S
elements i and j, while pi and pj the pro- 0
X 1 1
Hmax =− ln = ln S (4)
portional representations of those elements. S S
i=1
This index initially proposed by Rao (1982),
and revisited by Stirling (2007), is often con- J 0 is constrained between 0 and 1, meaning
sidered while analyzing research interdisci- 1 the highest evenness.
plinarity in Scientometrics studies, even if its
validity is still being discussed, as recently 2.3. Simpson Index
done by Leydesdorff et al. (2019).
In the next sections, we focus separately The Simpson diversity index is a dominance
on the indexes we will use for our diversity index because it gives more weight to com-
analysis. mon or dominant species. In this case, a few
rare species with only a few representatives
will not affect the diversity. Since D takes
2.2. Shannon Index
values between 0 and 1 and approaches 1 in
S
X the limit of a mono-culture, 1 − D provides
H0 = − pi ln pi (2) an intuitive proportional measure of diversity
i=1
that is much less sensitive to species richness.
Consider that p = n/N is the proportion Thus, Simpson’s index is usually reported as
of individuals of one particular species found its complement 1 − D.
3
Measuring Diversity of Artificial Intelligence Conferences
4
Measuring Diversity of Artificial Intelligence Conferences
3.4. Conference Diversity Index can be beneficial to extract this kind of sta-
(CDI) tistical analysis, which should ensure strict
privacy and governance rules.
The general Diversity Index of a Conference
(CDI) is computed by averaging GDI, GeoDI In order to compute the diversity indexes,
and BDI. The typical values for the Shannon we need to measure p = n/N (i.e.: the
index are generally between 1.5 and 3.5 in proportion of individuals of one particular
most ecological studies, being rarely greater species found n divided by the total num-
than 4. Therefore, GeoDI needs to be nor- ber of individuals found N ), and S (i.e.: the
malized between [0, 1] before being combined number of species). For this purpose, we col-
with the other indexes, so we divide it by 3.5. lected the names and affiliations of keynotes,
See Table 1 that summarises all the proposed organisers and authors (of a random sam-
indexes. ple comprising 10% of the papers) of four
consecutive years of NeurIPS4 , RecSys5 and
ICML6 . The size of each sample is listed in
GeoDI Table 2. This data was gathered on several
GDI + 3.5 + BDI
CDI = (10) hackfests using a collaborative web applica-
3
tion7 designed for this purpose, that we also
used to engage with AI students and the re-
4. Indexes evaluation search community (e.g. AAAI conference)
and outreach on the relevance of the topic
In this section we describe the procedures of and the need for community efforts. All the
handling the data in order to evaluate the project data and material is available openly
suitability of the proposed indexes to repre- so it can be reproduced and extended to
sent the diversity of major AI events. other conferences. Note that our indicators
are exclusively based on public-domain infor-
4.1. Dataset mation available at conference proceedings.
The data publicly available from AI confer-
ences is restricted to the name, surname and 4.1.1. Computing GDI
affiliation of authors, keynotes and organ-
When computing the Gender Diversity In-
isers. This leads to some limitations when
dex, our dataset does not provide gender
computing the proposed indicators. For in-
identity information, so we infer the gender
stance, no data is provided about gender, so
based on the given first name and surname
it needs to be inferred based on the name
(in some cases, we made use of the NamSor
and surname, which introduces some errors
gender classifier library8 ).
and oversimplification to binary labels. An-
other limitation affects the way in which Due to this limitation of the publicly avail-
we compute the geographical diversity index. able datasets for identifying more gender op-
Having information just about the affiliation tions, we got S = 2 different species: ”male”
and not about the nationality, makes ethnic- 4. NeurIPS: Conference on Neural Information Pro-
based analysis extremely difficult to be per- cessing Systems
formed. However, these limitations can be 5. RecSys: The ACM Recommender Systems con-
solved if the conferences’ organisers collect ference
6. ICML: International Conference on Machine
more data at registration time, for instance. Learning
We are aware that some of this data might 7. https://divinai.org
be personal and sensitive information but it 8. https://v2.namsor.com/
5
Measuring Diversity of Artificial Intelligence Conferences
Table 2: Analysed conferences and size of the collected samples per year. Note that the
sample size includes authors, keynotes and organisers.
6
Measuring Diversity of Artificial Intelligence Conferences
Table 3: Gender Diversity Index (GDI), with the percentage of male and female among
authors (from a random sample of 10% of the papers), keynotes and organisers.
Table 4: Geographical Diversity Index (GeoDI), with the number of developing countries
and continents represented (we only collected the authors of the 10% of the papers).
7
Measuring Diversity of Artificial Intelligence Conferences
Table 5: Business Diversity Index (BDI), presenting as well the percentage of authors (from
a random sample of 10% of the papers), keynotes and organisers belonging to
Academia, Industry or Research Centres.
The analysis regarding the Geographical ilar to those related to the countries, and
Diversity Index is summarised in Table 4. they have a value below 0.5. We consider 7
As we mentioned before, we normalised it continents (Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Europe,
to the range [0,1] to make it comparable North America, South America and Ocea-
with the other indexes. As an index based nia), in order to avoid hiding lower represen-
just on the number of countries might hide a tation of Latin American countries. In most
lack of diversity regarding, for instance, the of the conferences explored, there are few
presence of researchers from least developed species (usually 3 -North America, Europe
countries, we also computed the number of and Asia- and rarely 4 -including Oceania-
developing countries present (following the ). Moreover, these countries are not equally
United Nations classification9 ). We couldn’t represented: most of the keynotes come from
find any representation of any of the coun- North America or Europe and just 5 re-
tries included in this list containing 46 coun- searchers from Africa were found among au-
tries. Thus, we also grouped the affiliations thors and organisers. We would also like to
data in order to report the presence of con- note the importance of the conference loca-
tinents and explore the variability of the in- tion for promoting the presence of minorities.
dex in considering these major geographical We highlight the case of RecSys 2020, located
divisions. The GeoDIcontinents index is com- in Brazil, with a high representation of or-
puted following the Pielou Index formula (see ganisers (13 out of 38) and even one keynote
Equation 3) and is also listed in Table 4. It (out of 3) from South America, a continent
belongs to the range [0,1], so normalization with almost no representation in the rest of
is not needed. the events.
We can see that, in general, the indexes Table 5 reports the Business Diversity In-
computed for the continents are very sim- dex for the studied conferences. Again,
9. https://unctad.org/topic/ NeurIPS 2020 presents the higher diversity
least-developed-countries/list index (0.89), as it has representation from
8
Measuring Diversity of Artificial Intelligence Conferences
9
Measuring Diversity of Artificial Intelligence Conferences
10