Not just a wheelchair: Disability representation in AI

November 19, 2024 CREATE Ph.D. graduate Kelly Avery Mack led research that investigated how AI represented people with disabilities. Specifically, Mack’s team wanted to know if AI-produced images and image descriptions perpetuated bias or showed positive portrayals of disability. The team included four research scientists from Google Research: Rida Qadri, Remi Denton, new CREATE Advisory Board member Shaun K. Kane, and Cynthia L. Bennett, Ph.D., UW Human Centered Design and Engineering. Examples of positive disability representation in AI-generated images where…

CREATE awarded $4.6M for research on AI risks, opportunities for people with disabilities

September 10, 2024 CREATE will be leading a Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on participatory, assistive, inclusive, and responsible use of AI technology, funded by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR), a program of the Administration for Community Living, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The interdisciplinary team of researchers involved with this RERC come from the College of Engineering, the Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, the Information School, Disability Studies, and…

CREATE researchers find ChatGPT biased against resumes that imply disability, models improvement

June 24, 2024 This is the takeaway from CREATE Ph.D. student Kate Glazko, who got curious when she noticed recruiters posting online that they’d used OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools to summarize resumes and rank candidates. Advised by co-author and CREATE Director Jennifer Mankoff in the Allen School, Glazko studies how GAI can replicate and amplify real-world biases — such as those against disabled people. So how might such a system, she wondered, rank resumes that implied someone had a disability?…

Anat Caspi speaks at White House panel on AI in Transportation

June 17, 2024 CREATE associate director Anat Caspi spoke on ‘Mapping, Visualizing, and Building the Future’ as part of a White House panel on AI in Transportation. Focused on developing a national transportation infrastructure observatory and an accompanying application ecosystem, the panel gathered innovators in transportation, aiming to align end users, researchers, entrepreneurs, and federal agencies while addressing privacy, cybersecurity, and policy challenges. Dr. Caspi highlighted the Taskar Center’s pioneering work on AI and transportation, particularly through the Transportation Data…

CREATE AI+Accessibility Hackfest – Winter ’24

March 6, 2024 – post-event update In March 2024, CREATE gathered with industry and community partners for a hackfest to explore and invent the future of AI and Accessibility. The event featured invited speakers Heather Nolis, Ian Stenseng, and Shaun Kane and exciting workshops on building custom GPT and creating accessible Jupyter notebooks. See the full lineup of brainstorming, hacking, and presentation sessions. The 3-day hackfest attendees included those with no experience in coding or hacking, others with advanced experience in…

Winter 2023 CREATE Research Showcase

December 12, 2023 Students from CSE 493 and additional CREATE researchers shared their work at the December 2023 CREATE Research Showcase. The event was well attended by CREATE students, faculty, and community partners. Projects included, for example: an analysis of the accessibility of transit stations and a tool to aid navigation within transit stations; an app to help colorblind people of color pick makeup; and consider the accessibility of generative AI while also considering ableist implications of limited training data….

UW News: Can AI help boost accessibility? CREATE researchers tested it for themselves

November 2, 2023 | UW News Generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, an AI-powered language tool, and Midjourney, an AI-powered image generator, can potentially assist people with various disabilities. They could summarize content, compose messages, or describe images. Yet they also regularly spout inaccuracies and fail at basic reasoning, perpetuating ableist biases. This year, seven CREATE researchers conducted a three-month autoethnographic study — drawing on their own experiences as people with and without disabilities — to test AI tools’ utility for accessibility. Though researchers…