How diverse is the ACII community? Analysing gender, geographical and business diversity of Affective Computing research

TL;DR

This study analyzes the diversity of the ACII affective computing community across gender, geography, and sector, revealing limited diversity and under-representation of certain groups, and provides a monitoring tool for future diversity initiatives.

Contribution

It offers the first comprehensive diversity analysis of ACII, highlighting gaps and proposing a monitoring approach for diversity in AI research communities.

Findings

Gender diversity is relatively high but not equal.

European, Asian, and North American researchers dominate.

Under-representation of companies and applied research centers.

Abstract

ACII is the premier international forum for presenting the latest research on affective computing. In this work, we monitor, quantify and reflect on the diversity in ACII conference across time by computing a set of indexes. We measure diversity in terms of gender, geographic location and academia vs research centres vs industry, and consider three different actors: authors, keynote speakers and organizers. Results raise awareness on the limited diversity in the field, in all studied facets, and compared to other AI conferences. While gender diversity is relatively high, equality is far from being reached. The community is dominated by European, Asian and North American researchers, leading the rest of continents under-represented. There is also a strong absence of companies and research centres focusing on applied research and products. This study fosters discussion in the community on the need for diversity and related challenges in terms of minimizing potential biases of the developed systems to the represented groups. We intend our paper to contribute with a first analysis to consider as a monitoring tool when implementing diversity initiatives. The data collected for this study are publicly released through the European divinAI initiative.