Get the latest news, advances in research, policy work, and education program updates from HAI in your inbox weekly.
Sign Up For Latest News
The AI Inflection Point: What, How, and Why We Learn
How did we get to today’s technology which now supports a trillion dollar AI industry? What were the key scientific breakthroughs? What were the surprises and dead-ends along the way...

How did we get to today’s technology which now supports a trillion dollar AI industry? What were the key scientific breakthroughs? What were the surprises and dead-ends along the way...
The African Olympiad Academy is a world-class high school dedicated to training Africa’s most promising students in mathematics, science, and artificial intelligence through olympiad-based pedagogy.

The African Olympiad Academy is a world-class high school dedicated to training Africa’s most promising students in mathematics, science, and artificial intelligence through olympiad-based pedagogy.
Prior work finds a diversity paradox: Diversity breeds innovation, yet underrepresented groups that diversify organizations have less successful careers within them. Does the diversity paradox hold for scientists as well? We study this by utilizing a near-complete population of ∼1.2 million US doctoral recipients from 1977 to 2015 and following their careers into publishing and faculty positions. We use text analysis and machine learning to answer a series of questions: How do we detect scientific innovations? Are underrepresented groups more likely to generate scientific innovations? And are the innovations of underrepresented groups adopted and rewarded? Our analyses show that underrepresented groups produce higher rates of scientific novelty. However, their novel contributions are devalued and discounted: For example, novel contributions by gender and racial minorities are taken up by other scholars at lower rates than novel contributions by gender and racial majorities, and equally impactful contributions of gender and racial minorities are less likely to result in successful scientific careers than for majority groups. These results suggest there may be unwarranted reproduction of stratification in academic careers that discounts diversity’s role in innovation and partly explains the underrepresentation of some groups in academia.
