Indian Institute of Technology Madras’ Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBCDSAI) and SuperBloom Studios, a business consultancy firm, have launched an initiative called ‘Hidden Voices’ to reduce the gender data gap in digital sources, starting with Wikipedia.

The initiative founders have set a goal of auto-generating biographies of several notable women within the next year, specifically within the next International Women’s Day (8th March 2023). SuperBloom Studios was co-founded by three IIT Madras alumni.

Some of the major barriers in addressing the data gap include editors’ gender and interest but also contributions from external sources. Hence, the project aims to develop information theoretical approaches, ML-assisted auto-identification and validation of external sources and textual analysis methods to auto-generate the first draft of Wikipedia-style biography. The models developed will employ this approach to generate Wikipedia articles for notable women in STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine and Management).

The project is hoped to lead to multiple data and analytics-based products and services that could go beyond Wikipedia-gap closure and address the lack of gender diversity in data at a global level.

Those interested in volunteering for this initiative can register here.