Our Story
AI & Equality – Human Rights Toolbox is a collaboration between Women at the Table and EPFL, in consultation with OHCHR.
In 2025, the gap between AI ethics rhetoric and ground-level accountability stopped being a technical problem and became a democratic one.
We responded by building infrastructure, not publishing more position papers.
2024
- Online course built, validated and launched on Sorbonne Center for AI (SCAI) learning portal.
- First fully accompanied 4-week Summer School with tutors, interactive exercises and student essays.
- Validation of AI & Equality Toolbox Methodology at the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) Conference, Sept 2024.
- Online Community grows to 300+ researchers from 59 different countries and 6 continents.
2023
- Launch of AI & Equality website.
- Launch of Online Community on Circle
- Workshops go global across Africa, Asia, LAC, Europe, US:
- Queen Mary University
- Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology KNUST, Ghana
- Make
rere University, Uganda - Universit
y of Lagos, Nigeria - African Centre for Technology Studies, Kenya
- American University Cairo, Egypt
- National Center for AI CENIA, Chile
- Chulalongkorn University, Thailand
- ETHZurich, Graduate Institute Geneva
- Royal Military College, Canada
- Cambridge University Computer Science
- Technical University Munich
- AI Doctoral Academy, EU
2022
Workshops delivered at:
- Cambridge University Learning for Purpose Gates Council Scholars Masters & Phd cohort: Applied Research Component on Corporate Approaches to Human Rights Management in the Technology Sector
- Three part series Eindhoven University of Technology (Tu/e): Applied Research Components on 1. Ethical and legal assessment of data sets 2. Interpretable Models & Explainable AI 3. Values, Inductive Risk, and ML Opacity.
- Sorbonne Center for Artificial Intelligence (SCAI) chaired by Center Director with 16 Phds across medicine, law, philosophy and computer science disciplines;
- Women in Data Science Zürich Conference where Poster wins 1st Prize.
Panels
- MOZFEST: Applied Research Component on The role of the private sector in Human Rights with Dr Isabelle Ebert/ St. Gallen
- UN High Level Political Forum (HLPF): Learning Session 6 Organized by UNITAR on SDG5 with UN Women, Women’s Major Group, Women At The Table delivered Human Rights based bias in AI
- AMRO 2022 Where Art meets Radical Openness Linz, Austria.
Mentorship and supervision
- Capstone Projects for Smith College/ Data Science Clinic with 5 final year undergraduate Data Science majors using AI & Equality Toolbox methodology:
- Examining “Does the COMPAS Needle Always Point Towards Equity? Finding Fairness in the COMPAS Risk Assessment Algorithm: A Case Study”
- Creating a new Jupyter notebook using Findex/World bank Datasets Analysis of Access to Emergency Funds in Sub-Saharan Countries.
2021
The Toolbox is the subject of an EPFL Masters Thesis expanding the technical portions of the workshop as part of Women at the Table’s Tech Fellows programme. The thesis is validated at EPFL and University College Dublin/School of Information & Communication through workshops, evaluation and iterations as Proof of Methodology/Concept for the <AI & Equality> Human Rights Toolbox.
Additional workshop delivery at
- unil/dhlab University of Lausanne Critical Data Studies / Masters: -Applied Research Component: Social impact of development practices on dating: Re-engineering the Tinder algorithm.
- Women in Data Science retreat-EPFL
- Women in Data Science retreat-St. Gallen
- Greek ACM (Assoc for Computing Machinery) – Winter School on Fairness in AI.
2020
First workshop delivered at EPFL in concert with the EPFL Digital Humanities Lab, and EPFL Equalities Office.
2019
EPFL workshop (initially titled AI & Gender: University Edition) conceived in collaboration with OHCHR to catalyze discussions on a human rights-based approach to AI with students and researchers.
2017
Women at the Table Roundtable for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) with whom Women at the Table continues to collaborate. University of Geneva and EPFL join us in conversation on AI & Gender (supported by w@tt’s flexible core funding from the Oak Foundation).
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