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Successful PhD Dissertation Defense: Including Disability in Datasets and AI Development
Rie Kamikubo, a UMD PhD candidate successfully defended her dissertation on December 18th, 2024! Her PhD is in Information Studies with a focus on the intersection between AI and disability. Rie started with a background in interaction design, where she first learned about accessibility. Taking quickly to the field, she began her work in extending datasets in order to make them more inclusive. Data sets can be used to build AI applications, but there is a lack of disability representation in most of these sets which can lead to technologies working incorrectly or being discriminative. Rie and her team conducted participatory studies, inviting people with disabilities to discuss how data should be shared and who should have access to it. Rie also worked with Microsoft on its project about AI development and disability. “My favorite part of my PhD work was putting resources out there and inspiring others to study more,” she says. Rie is now applying for assistant faculty positions at different universities. She hopes to continue her work in accessibility and human-centered AI. Explore Rie’s work below:
- Sharing Practices for Datasets Related to Accessibility and Aging (2021): https://doi.org/10.1145/3441852.3471208
- Facilitating Sharing and Re-use of Accessibility Datasets: Benefits and Risks (2022): https://doi.org/10.1145/3523265.3523269
- Data Representativeness in Accessibility Datasets: A Meta-Analysis (2022): https://doi.org/10.1145/3517428.3544826
- Contributing to Accessibility Datasets: Reflections on Sharing Study Data by Blind People (2023): https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581337
- AccessShare: Co-designing Data Access and Sharing with Blind People (2024): https://doi.org/10.1145/3663548.3675612
