AI AND HU ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
INTERSECTIONS Dr. David F. Green Jr. is tackling the intersection of writing and AI. Photo by Justin D. Knight.
To help solve this problem, Howard and Google created Project Elevate Black Voices, a partnership that developed a dataset of Black regional dialects. Hosting events in cities across the country, research teams recorded 600 hours of AAE. The dataset, owned by Howard and currently open to researchers at HBCUs, can now be used to improve ASR technologies for Black speakers. The project was led by Gloria Washington, Ph.D., Lucretia Williams, Ph.D., and other researchers from Howard and Google. “You shouldn’t have to code switch to use technology,” said Williams, senior researcher at Howard’s Human- Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute (HCAI), while giving a presentation on her lab’s work. This project is only one of the many AI-research initiatives underway at Howard. Through the work of researchers at every level — senior faculty to undergraduates — the university is becoming a hub for developing new knowledge about AI’s growing use, from improvements in medical imaging to the preservation of West African culture. Among these projects is the BRAVE IDEAS lab, run by Dr. Jaye Nias (also of the HCAI), which explores how AI can enhance how we learn about and preserve customs and languages. Nias’ recent work focuses on preserving and teaching others about the adinkra, symbols of the Asante people of Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire that serve as visual representations of proverbs and aphorisms. “I started to wonder about proverbs as a wisdom source that could be used to train an AI model,” Nias explained. “I moved into this idea of the symbol, the
IF YOU’RE ONLY DRAWING ON A LIMITED SET OF AUTHORS, WRITERS, AND THINKERS, IT LIMITS THE POSSIBILITIES AND THE CAPABILITIES OF HOW EXPRESSION OCCURS. proverb, and the wisdom that comes from it. We have the user put in a prompt, it finds a proverb, and then it parses a Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) to provide some structured wisdom for that prompt that relates to that proverb.” With its ability to preserve local wisdom and introduce it to people outside of the Asante, this project reflects a path for AI that safekeeps and expands cultural knowledge. For Nias, this means centering humans at every step. “This idea of rooting my research and my implementation of AI with cultural knowledge sources is really important to me,” she said. “When I first started in graduate school, I was interested in culturally relevant technologies and research within human-centered computing. I don’t like this idea of how technology is simply flattening the world. What we found is in the global South, many would lean into
I n June, Howard researchers marked a significant milestone in the journey to make Black voices heard. The researchers debuted resources they pioneered to make it easier for Blacks to use their voices to harness the power of artificial intelligence. AI-powered automatic speech recognition (ASR) tools — used in everything from transcribing to asking Apple’s Siri a question — have transformed how we communicate with each other and our devices. These tools, which rely on datasets that fail to include African American English (AAE), are prone to higher error rates for Black users speaking in their natural voices. For many Black users, these tools have been another example of how their lives and communities are excluded when discussing technological progress. make it easier for Black people to use their voices to harness the power of artificial intelligence. AI-powered
From Researchers to Musicians, Faculty and Students are Adapting to a Rapidly Developing Tech
by danny flannery
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Howard Magazine
Fall 2025
Fall 2025
Howard Magazine
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