Artificial Intelligence for Social Good: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey comprehensively analyzes over 1000 papers on AI for social good, identifying trends, categorizing research, and highlighting challenges and future directions in the field.

Contribution

It provides the most detailed analysis to date of AI4SG literature, including quantitative trends, a unified framework for categorization, and insights into common challenges and future issues.

Findings

Quantitative analysis of AI4SG literature distribution and trends.

A unified framework for categorizing AI4SG applications.

Identification of key challenges and future research issues.

Abstract

Artificial intelligence for social good (AI4SG) is a research theme that aims to use and advance artificial intelligence to address societal issues and improve the well-being of the world. AI4SG has received lots of attention from the research community in the past decade with several successful applications. Building on the most comprehensive collection of the AI4SG literature to date with over 1000 contributed papers, we provide a detailed account and analysis of the work under the theme in the following ways. (1) We quantitatively analyze the distribution and trend of the AI4SG literature in terms of application domains and AI techniques used. (2) We propose three conceptual methods to systematically group the existing literature and analyze the eight AI4SG application domains in a unified framework. (3) We distill five research topics that represent the common challenges in AI4SG across various application domains. (4) We discuss five issues that, we hope, can shed light on the future development of the AI4SG research.