Dr. Gloria Washington: A Human-Centered Vision for Gender Equity in Science & Technology Across

By CGEST Contributor

On Thursday, January 26, 2023, the Center for Gender Equity in Science and Technology welcomed Directorship candidate Dr. Gloria Washington. She presented her vision for the center to the CGEST team and other ASU associates and affiliates.

Dr. Washington is an Associate Professor at Howard University in Computer Science. She runs the Institute for Socially and Culturally Relevant Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HCAI) at Howard. The Institute is sponsored by Amazon, the Office of Naval Research, National Science Foundation, and Google. It has over $12 million in extramural funding for projects ranging from study of human-in-the-loop techniques for creation of:

• Smarter diversity, equity, and inclusion training software

• Mixed reality experiences for improving doctors and nurse communications

• Assistive/empathetic technology for improving performance of Black and marginalized students in science and computing courses

• Speech recognition techniques for identifying African American Vernacular/Black English

Additionally, Dr. Washington is passionate about encouraging students to pursue entrepreneurial activities. She is on the board of Curl IQ, a tech startup that began as an undergraduate research project to help young women with textured hair identify hair-safe products using computer vision.

Dr. Washington holds a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from George Washington University, and a B.S. in Computer Information Systems from Lincoln University of Missouri, an HBCU.