Professor Named Change Agent for Cultivating Inclusive AI.

Professor Named Change Agent for Cultivating Inclusive AI
Elaine Nsoesie is one of 25 honorees worldwide who will be recognized by Mozilla during The 2nd Annual Rise25 Awards, which celebrate individuals for their leadership in ensuring a trustworthy future for AI.

Elaine Nsoesie, associate professor of global health, has been named one of 25 honorees and artificial intelligence (AI) innovators worldwide to be celebrated at Mozilla’s 2024 Rise25 Awards.
The second annual Rise25 Awards celebrate individuals for their valuable leadership in ushering in a future for AI that is “responsible, trustworthy, inclusive, and centered around human dignity.” Finalists were selected from hundreds of nominees and have used “philanthropy, collective power, and the principles of open source” to ensure the next wave of AI both serves and represents everyone. Mozilla will celebrate the cohort of honorees—25 individuals split across five categories: advocates, artists, builders, change agents, and entrepreneurs—at a special ceremony in Dublin, Ireland on August 13.
By naming Nsoesie a Change Agent, Mozilla aims to recognize her for leading the way in diversifying AI and to celebrate her ongoing work focused on ensuring that the technology is inclusive of those historically excluded from the tech narrative.
In a recent blog post announcing this year’s awards, Mark Surman, president of Mozilla, said, “At Mozilla, we believe the most groundbreaking innovations arise when people of all kinds of backgrounds come together to collaborate and openly trade ideas. This approach to innovation — grounded in strong pillars of experimentation and community — has defined our work over the past 25 years, fueling global movements around open-source innovation, online privacy and trustworthy AI.”
Nsoesie, who was born and raised in Cameroon, has dedicated her career to the advancement of global health equity through data science and technology. She holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Maryland College Park and a master’s in statistics and a doctorate in computational epidemiology from Virginia Tech. In 2018, she joined SPH’s Department of Global Health where her work recently earned her the 2024 Award for Excellence in Public Health Practice.
She has served as a program lead and a senior advisor to the Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity (AIM-AHEAD) program at the National Institutes of Health, and she led the Racial Data Tracker project at Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, which aimed to collect, analyze, and disseminate publicly available data that points to the structural nature of racism.
“I am honored to receive this award from Mozilla. I have been reading the bios of the other honorees and I am in awe of the inspiring work they are doing around the world to make AI work for the benefit of all. I am encouraged and inspired to continue the work that I am already doing,” says Nsoesie. She highlights Data Science Africa 2024, a conference she recently co-chaired in Nyeri, Kenya that attracted participants from more than 20 African counties, as an example of the work she is referring to. She points out that of the four keynote speakers, three were African women working on applications of AI.
“We have not always had such rich and diverse representation of research from countries across Africa,” says Nsoesie. “When I started in academia, I used to attend meetings and conferences where I would look across the room and realize I was the only woman or the only person of African descent. In those rooms, I often felt like I was not just expected to voice my opinions but the opinions of an entire group. This is one reason I am committed to increasing representation in data science and scientific research broadly. I do not want to be the only one in any room.”
To this end, Nsoesie found Rethe, an initiative launched in Tanzania in 2019 intended to increase representation of Africans in scientific research publications. The program, which organizes and facilitates scientific writing workshops for students in Africa, proved immensely popular and Nsoesie is now eager to leverage a Practice Innovation Award from SPH’s idea hub to develop Rethe 2.0 this summer.
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