Tech4ALL Digest, Apr 22
Your Bi-Weekly Ally Showcasing Tech × Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Accessibility
Feeling the pulse of innovation yet sensing systemic inequity? Committed to advancing accessibility, ethics and representation but fell lost about balancing priorities?
In this bi-weekly newsletter, we curate insightful content across various sectors, and share our latest technical advancements and community initiatives, brought to you by a diverse team of AImpower.org – including marginalized community members, technology developers, HCI researchers, and disability advocates.
Our CHI 2025 workshop “Speech AI for All” is happening in less than a week and at full capacity! We are excited to meet and join forth with more than 40 researchers, practitioners, policy scholars, and community advocates interested in creating fair and accessible speech AI at Yokohama, Japan! Read the article by UCSC that introduces the motivations and goals for our workshop.
AImpower.org just turned 3 years old! We are proud and grateful for a productive 2nd year. Read more about what we have achieved and where we are going in our 2024 Year in Review.
Our paper “Our Collective Voices: The Social and Technical Values of a Grassroots Chinese Stuttered Speech Dataset” has been accepted into this year’s ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ‘25)! Co-authored by members from StammerTalk and AImpower.org, this paper is a testimony to the value and feasibility of community-driven, grassroots AI. We thank National Science Foundation and Patrick J. McGovern Foundation for funding this work, and look forward to sharing it with you all at Athens in June!
SuperPenguin is developing the world's first AI voice that authentically incorporates stammering patterns. Moving beyond the typical fluent speech of AI assistants, this pioneering technology aims to increase representation and normalize diverse speech patterns in digital spaces. The project builds on SuperPenguin's existing work in speech therapy support, advancing their mission to create technology where everyone's voice is valued. Full info >> stammering-ai
Date: 2025-05-08
Join this powerful National Stuttering Awareness Week event on May 8 at 7:00 PM featuring thought-provoking documentaries that explore stuttering as an identity, not just a speech condition. Meet filmmakers Michael Turner and Maya Chupkov for a post-screening discussion moderated by comedian Nina G. Tickets: $9-$14.50. Full Info » Docs: Speech Diversity
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Thank you Libin Pan, Ang Li, Ben Lickly, Keith Boggs, Bin Fu, Qingyun Liu, Yilei An, Xieyang Liu, Yintao Liu, Chen Chen, Han Gao, Liu Qin, Yu Su, Haihong Li, Shaobo Wang, Fan Yang, Christian Rebischke, Rong Gong, Bangyong Liang, Shuyang Lin, Yilei Yang, Laura Harker, Yintao Liu, Lili Cao, Xin Mao, Liang Zhu, Ruogu Kang and anonymous donors.