Reflecting on Pride: How five Facebook researchers honor their LGBTQ+ history

by Facebook AI

The LGBTQ+ community has a long history of resilience and activism in the fight toward acceptance and equal rights in the United States. Pride Month is celebrated every June to honor the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in Manhattan and activists such as Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. This year, the 50th anniversary of Pride coincides with an increased swell of support for the fight against racial injustice and the Black Lives Matter movement, with protests and demonstrations occurring in every state across the U.S. and in countries around the world.

To reflect on the history of Pride Month and its roots in activism, we reached out to the LGBTQ+ community at Facebook. Researchers Gregory Davis, Meghan Rolfe, Darwin Mastin, TJ Olojede, and Hannah Furnas each volunteered their time to share what Pride means to them, how their research influences our products, and how they’re recognizing Pride this year.

Designing a product to bring our authentic selves

Gregory Davis (he/him) is a UX Researcher working on Portal.

Portal allows us to connect with significant others from all aspects of our lives. Making sure people are comfortable is vitally important to that goal. As a UX Researcher, I work on what Portal users need to be able to bring their multiple selves to the device. For LGBTQ+ users, these questions take on enhanced importance.

Pride, to me, is about celebrating the things about you that people can’t see and that many don’t want to see. The freedom to be out — to be all of our identities all of the time — is a gift that LGBTQ+ people cherish, given to us by our queer fore-parents and paid for with the blood, sweat, and tears of their activism and resistance. That activism tipped the scales toward equality with the Stonewall Uprising in June of 1969 when members of the LGBTQ+ community protested against the frequent police raids on the Stonewall Inn — a fight that is extremely relevant to today’s protests against police brutality.

Because queer people fought back at Stonewall and galvanized on the streets, in their homes, and at the ballot, we celebrate Pride Month every June. We celebrate winning marriage equality, protection against discrimination, and the ability to live our lives openly and honestly. That work isn’t done, however. In 2018 and 2019, at least two transgender or gender-nonconforming people were murdered each month. Most of these victims were Black trans women. Black LGBTQ+ people are still in the fight for respect from their families, recognition and equity at work, and safety from state violence.

When I look at my work as a bisexual Black man here at Facebook and beyond, I bring that history and knowledge with me. I design and implement projects at Portal thinking about the consumer in all their facets, including their race and sexuality. This helps us create a better product for everybody by making sure no one is excluded or neglected.

Working toward a safer platform for people to live their truth

Meghan Rolfe (she/her) is a UX Researcher working on Community Integrity.

Pride, to me, represents that journey we take that ends with the open-armed embrace of the LGBTQ+ community and the feeling that we are all in this together — that we see one another. I believe many of us grew up with a deep pain caused by the feeling that we are the “Other” in society, internalizing a deep-rooted fear of rejection and staying tightly in the closet. For me, Pride is about the release of that rejection and the overwhelming joy you feel once you can live your truth.

My work in Community Integrity relates to this. Part of my role is understanding the potential benefits and harms of identity verification on our platforms, as well as the steps we can take to support individuals regardless of identity, documentation status, or membership in marginalized groups. Many people use our platforms to find a community where they can safely express their authentic selves. Transgender people in particular are often able to be their true selves online before they’ve come out to their family and friends. This is a wonderful use of our products, and we should find ways to support this even more.

However, there is a flip side to this. Like many other companies, our security systems are built around identity verification: If someone is hacked, they are asked for government-issued documents that can confirm they are who they say they are. This means that for those who use a different identity online — even if that identity is their most authentic — an exact match with government-issued documents is expected, which makes it difficult to resolve disparities between on- and offline identities. Based on prior feedback, we’ve changed our policy to allow a wider range of documents beyond government-issued ID; even so, we are currently conducting additional research on this experience to understand how we can better support individuals with different on- and offline identities.

Identity verification also allows us to hold people accountable for any violations of our Community Standards, such as bullying and harassment. It’s important that we provide victims with the ability to report not just the accounts responsible for harassing behaviors, but also the individuals behind those accounts. By creating systems of accountability, we can better protect members of the LGBTQ+ community from both online and offline attacks.

This Pride, we must not only remember the LGBTQ+ leaders who fought for us to be able to live our truths, but also remind ourselves that this fight continues.

Listening, learning, and teaching with empathy

Darwin Mastin (he/him; they/them) is a UX Researcher working on pathfinding.

As a human behavior researcher, I love to learn about what drives people. I want to understand our unconscious actions, and make this knowledge available through stories and products. My research at Facebook is focused on understanding current and future gaps within the Facebook app and the company. We are not perfect, but I think research can influence the products and company by bringing other necessary and underrepresented voices to the table.

To me, Pride doesn’t stop at being proud. In addition to celebrating ourselves and our community, we must continue to stand up for our community and have the support of our allies in doing so. We all need to focus on listening, learning, and being involved — because our celebrations of Pride were born from similar calls for justice by queer trans people of color.

One of the ways we can help is educating others about the issues that marginalized communities face. The LGBTQ+ community spans every demographic group — race, age, education level, and so on. We can’t make assumptions about anyone else’s experience; we need to reach out and listen and learn, because all of our histories are so different and so broad, and coming together to celebrate and understand these differences makes for a stronger community.

However, while it is necessary to do the work of educating others, it should not be the sole responsibility of marginalized communities. I’ve found that when those who are less informed are able to attach to a story or an experience, it drives empathy and inspires them to want to learn more rather than just learn now. But once inspired, new allies must share the burden, internalize their learning, and educate others. It’s important that our allies take a moment and have those difficult conversations. It will be hard, but that’s where it starts.

A movement is not a moment. It is action and reaction, and building on that over and over again. Change will come from listening to our broader communities, giving voice to people who have not been heard. It’s not just something today and not tomorrow. We know the next step is voting, representation, policy — those steps will follow from the public’s demands. Those are the building blocks to pride.

Fostering inclusion through work and at work

TJ Olojede (he/him) is a Creative Researcher in Facebook’s Creative Shop.

As the Creative Research team within Facebook’s Creative Shop, our focus is on elevating creativity in advertising on the platform and making sure that advertisers utilize creativity maximally to achieve better business outcomes. Our research helps us understand what creative strategies perform better, and we share those best practices with all of the businesses who advertise on Facebook. I like to think that in this way, we make Facebook advertising more inclusive and accessible to the everyday “pop-and-pop” shop and to businesses big and small.

Pride Month feels bittersweet to me this year. It is an interesting time to exist at the intersection of being gay and Black in America, even as an immigrant. Often these two identities exist in conflict and influence how much I feel like I belong to either group, since I’m still an “other” within each community. When I first moved to the U.S., I was excited to leave Nigeria, and to be somewhere where LGBTQ+ rights were leaps and bounds above anything back home — even though not optimal. And then I started to understand what it meant to be Black in America, and I remember thinking I had just exchanged freedom from one oppression for another.

When the more recent Black Lives Matter protests started after the murder of George Floyd, it felt clear to me how to feel. With June being Pride Month, however, it didn’t feel right to celebrate Pride and be happy in the midst of all that was going on. Even worse, I felt betrayed seeing all of my non-POC friends who hadn’t said anything about BLM suddenly want to celebrate Pride.

But at work, I appreciated that the Pride team was sensitive and empathetic enough to hold off on all of the Pride fanfare in the middle of the protests, and that to me spoke volumes about how much we care about each other within the company. I appreciate that I work with a team of inclusive, caring people who make work a safe space and engender that sense of belonging and emotional closeness. For me, inclusion boils down to feeling like I matter, like I belong here, and that there are others here like me.

Acquiring a more complete picture of our community

Hannah Furnas (she/her) is a Research Science Manager on the Demography and Survey Science team.

At Facebook, I support a team of researchers working on projects at the intersection of survey research and machine learning. We design projects to collect survey ground truth that’s used to train and evaluate machine learning models.

To me, Pride means embracing my own queer identity and showing up for the LGBTQ+ community. I’m continuing to embrace my own queer identity in an ongoing process of showing up more fully for myself so that I can show up for others. I’m intentionally expanding my understanding of what it means to belong to the LGBTQ+ community — which includes noticing and unlearning a lot of what my upbringing has taught me.

I grew up in a very white, cis-normative, heteronormative environment. People, structures, and institutions praised heterosexual couples and shamed other types of relationships. When I came out two years ago, a lot of the pushback I received was from people who couldn’t fathom why I wanted to come out as bi/pan since I was in a relationship with a cis man. This idea that I should hide who I am is one of the reasons it took me so long to come out to myself. Through support from my colleagues in the Pride community at Facebook, I’ve begun to truly embrace who I am.

Not only did my early socialization impact my coming-out experience, but it also gave me an incomplete picture of LGBTQ+ history and the current issues we face. I was exposed to media that suggested the work was done and equal rights were won. This obviously isn’t the case. Systemic discrimination and violence disproportionately impacts BIPOC and trans communities despite the fact that our movement wouldn’t exist today without trans activists like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.

If I fail to acknowledge the full lived experiences of others in our community, then I’m also upholding the structures and systems that continue to oppress the LGBTQ+ community. I’m continuing this lifelong work of building awareness and taking action to embrace ourselves and our community more fully. To me, this is what Pride is all about — this year and every year.

—

Diversity is crucial to understanding where we’re succeeding and where we need to do better in our business. It enables us to build better products, make better decisions, and better serve our communities. We are proud of our attention to the LGBTQ+ experience across our apps and technologies, often thanks to the many LGBTQ+ people and allies who work at Facebook.

To learn more about Diversity at Facebook, visit our website.

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Holographic optics for thin and lightweight virtual reality

Holographic optics for thin and lightweight virtual reality

by Facebook AI

Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) is always exploring new optical architectures to improve form factor, comfort, and optical performance. Last fall, at Oculus Connect 6, FRL Chief Scientist Michael Abrash introduced new miniaturization progress in VR with Half Dome 2 and 3, two prototypes that examine how varifocal displays can improve visual and physical comfort. This year, at the virtual SIGGRAPH conference, we’re presenting another research milestone on this path: a new optical architecture that is significantly more compact and offers the potential for better visual performance.

In this work, “Holographic Optics for Thin and Lightweight Virtual Reality,” researchers Andrew Maimone and Junren Wang propose a new class of near-eye displays, which combine the power of holographic optics and polarization-based optical folding — an approach that could be used to develop future sunglasses-like VR hardware. These two methods help keep the optics as thin as possible while making the most efficient use of space. We anticipate that such lightweight and comfortable form factors may enable extended VR sessions and new use cases, including productivity.

The design is demonstrated in a proof-of-concept research device that uses only thin, flat films as optics to achieve a display thickness of less than 9 mm while supporting a field of view comparable to today’s consumer VR products. The work demonstrates the promise of better visual performance, as well: Laser illumination is used to deliver a much wider gamut of colors to VR displays, and progress is made toward scaling resolution to the limit of human vision.

This video demonstrates video game animation, as shown on our proof-of-concept research. 

The approach

This image shows our research device display modules mounted into a frame. This research device was used to capture the green image shown below (some components are mounted externally).

Today’s VR displays have three primary components: a source of light (e.g., LEDs), a display panel that brightens or dims the light to form an image (e.g., an LCD panel), and a viewing optic that focuses the image far enough away so that the viewer’s eyes can see it (e.g., a plastic lens). As the first two components can readily be formed into thin and flat modules, most of the weight and volume go into the viewing optics. To significantly reduce the overall size and weight of VR displays, we combine two techniques: holographic optics and polarization-based optical folding.

Most VR displays share a common viewing optic: a simple refractive lens composed of a thick, curved piece or glass or plastic. We propose replacing this bulky element with holographic optics. You may be familiar with holographic images seen at a science museum or on your credit card, which appear to be three-dimensional with realistic depth in or out of the page. Like these holographic images, our holographic optics are a recording of the interaction of laser light with objects, but in this case the object is a lens rather than a 3D scene. The result is a dramatic reduction in thickness and weight: The holographic optic bends light like a lens but looks like a thin, transparent sticker.

However, even if the lens itself is made thin, the viewing optics as a whole may still be large — a considerable amount of empty space must be placed between the display panel and the lens to properly focus the image. Ordinarily, light from the display panel propagates forward to the lens and then continues toward the eye. However, when we apply polarization-based optical folding, light can be controlled to move both forward and backward within the lens so that this empty space can be traversed multiple times, collapsing it to a fraction of the original volume.

Wider color gamut

Shown on the left, a photograph captured with the proof-of-concept research device shown above. On the right, a photograph taken through a larger full-color benchtop prototype. We are currently working on achieving full color on the smaller research prototype.

When we apply holographic optics to a VR display, we must reevaluate all other optical components. Notably, holographic optics compel the use of laser light sources, which are more difficult to integrate but provide a much richer set of colors than the LEDs common in nearly all of today’s VR headsets, phones, computers, and televisions.

To illustrate the difference, the figure below shows the gamut of human-visible colors. A common set of colors reproducible on many displays today is the sRGB color space (illustrated by the smaller triangle). Note that it can capture only a small fraction of the colors that we can actually see. In contrast, the outer triangle represents the much larger set of colors that can be reproduced using the lasers on one of our research prototype displays. This allows the reproduction of vivid and saturated colors. Think of a brightly lit neon sign or the iridescent sheen of a butterfly wing.

This figure illustrates the gamut of human-visible colors. The sRGB space represents a common set of colors reproducible on many displays today. The outer triangle represents the larger set of colors reproducible on our research prototype.

What’s next

While it points toward the future development of lightweight, comfortable, and high-performance AR/VR technology, at present our work is purely research. In our technical paper, we identify the current limitations of our proposed display architecture and discuss future areas of research that will make the approach more practical. To our knowledge, our work demonstrates the thinnest VR display demonstrated to date, and we’re excited to see what the future holds.

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Spotlight session with PhD students from the 2019 Facebook Fellowship cohort

Spotlight session with PhD students from the 2019 Facebook Fellowship cohort

by Facebook AI

Each year, we invite PhD students from around the world to apply for the Facebook Fellowship, a program designed to encourage and support promising doctoral students who are engaged in innovative and relevant research in areas related to computer science and engineering.

As a continuation of our regular Fellowship spotlight series, we’re highlighting Aishwarya Ganesan (University of Wisconsin–Madison), Kartik Hegde (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Maria Bauza Villalonga (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Neil Gaikwad (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). From teaching robots to identify objects to developing human-centered AI and public policy for sustainable development, these four Fellows showcase a wide array of research areas.

Improving the reliability of distributed systems without compromising performance

Aishwarya Ganesan is a PhD candidate in computer sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW–Madison), advised by Professor Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau and Professor Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau. Her research interests are in distributed systems, storage and file systems, and operating systems, with a focus on improving the reliability of distributed systems without compromising their performance.

“I’ve always been fascinated by distributed systems,” she says. “And the reliability and performance challenges are especially interesting at the scale of Facebook with multiple applications and millions of users.” In February, Aishwarya and her team at UW–Madison won a Facebook research award in distributed systems with their proposal entitled “BlockCheck: Examining and improving blockchain reliability.”

Aishwarya learned about the Facebook Fellowship program at OSDI. “One of the main reasons I applied [to the program] was the opportunity to be part of a cohort of peers who are likely to be my future colleagues in academia or industry,” she says. She also appreciates having connections to Fellows from previous years who could provide PhD guidance and practical advice such as what the interview process after graduation is like.

“Winning the Facebook Fellowship also gives me an opportunity to interact with Facebook researchers and engineers. Through these interactions, I hope to learn how the ideas developed as part of my thesis are applicable in the real world.”

Aishwarya’s research has been recognized with a Best Paper award at FAST 2020 and FAST 2018 and a Best Paper award nomination at FAST 2017. She was selected for the Rising Stars in EECS 2018 workshop. Read more on her webpage.

Accelerating deep learning on mobile and IoT devices

Kartik Hegde is a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, advised by Chris Fletcher. He received a bachelor of technology degree from National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK), Surathkal, in 2015. His research is focused on building efficient chips to power next-generation AI workloads.

Every day, we interact with smart devices that offer information and convenience through services hosted in the cloud — but this requires a constant internet connection, and response times can be slow. Kartik’s research aims to build more efficient processors that enable more machine learning on the device, faster and more cost effectively.

Before Kartik became a Fellow, he spent some time as an intern at Facebook and experienced what it’s like to conduct research in industry. “At Facebook, we get the best of what academia and industry offer,” he explains. “In academia, you have the independence to pursue your own ideas. In industry, you get the satisfaction of having an impact on people. If your idea is built into something at Facebook, it’s impacting billions of people. It’s the best of both worlds.”

The Fellowship Award includes a paid visit to Facebook HQ in Menlo Park for the annual Fellowship Summit, where Fellows may present their current research in a poster session to discuss their ideas with other Fellows as well as Facebook researchers. “It’s a great privilege where you meet all of the other Fellows and get a chance to network and hear great talks,” says Kartik, who attended the 2019 Fellowship Summit. “I was inspired by conversations I had with other Fellows about new ideas and possibilities for collaboration.”

Although the event won’t be held in person this year, the Fellows will still get a chance to connect with each other remotely. “In addition to the benefit of making new connections, the Fellowship also offers the recognition of winning a competitive fellowship and the independence to work on your own projects,” Kartik says.

To learn more about Kartik and his research, visit his webpage.

Teaching robots to identify objects by combining tactile sensors with computer vision

Maria Bauza Villalonga is a PhD student in robotics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working with Professor Alberto Rodriguez. She received bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and in physics from Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Spain. Her research focuses on combining tactile and visual information to enhance robot dexterity during object manipulation.

“In industry automation, many processes involve picking up objects and performing tasks,” Maria explains. “While it’s trivial for a human to identify an object through touch, it requires a lot of intelligence for a robot to pick up an object from a bin and accurately localize it in order to perform the next task. There are many cases where industry cannot yet use robots because of this challenge.”

Maria’s goal is to improve a robot’s ability to accurately manipulate objects and perform tasks by combining computer vision with tactile sensing information. With her MIT-Princeton team, Maria won the Amazon Robotics Challenge stowing task in 2017 and received the Amazon Robotics Best Systems Paper Award in Manipulation in 2018. She explains that through this competition, they learned about the importance of tactile localization for a robot to be able to estimate where an object is.

In her research, the robot uses tactile sensors to scan and reason about the object it is touching and combines that with computer vision to accurately identify and localize objects. She is using tools that Facebook has developed for image recognition and segmentation in her research.

When she finishes her PhD, Maria plans to apply for a faculty position. She enjoys academia because she can think long-term and work on projects that could take years to accomplish, and explore her original ideas with her students. Learn more about Maria’s research on her website.

Advancing sustainable development with just design of human-centered AI and public policy

Neil Gaikwad is a doctoral student in the MIT Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working with Professor Danielle Wood. He specializes in human-centered machine learning and public policy for sustainable development. Neil develops data-driven human-AI collaboration algorithms and social computing systems, with a focus on increasing fairness and transparency in high-stakes policy decisions.

“Over the centuries, socio-technical systems such as market institutions and humanitarian systems have been instrumental in socioeconomic and environmental sustainability. However, lack of scientific understanding of underlying social and physical processes often leads to prejudiced policy decisions that harm vulnerable communities and hinder sustainable development,” Neil explains. “My research seeks to decode the fundamental nature of these processes on sustainability through the lens of human-centered machine learning, participatory design, and evidence-based policymaking.”

Neil became interested in the Fellowship because of the high-impact research of Facebook Core Data Science (CDS), which aligned with his research agenda. Neil and Facebook CDS have created the first workshop on Humanitarian Mapping at the ACM KDD conference. “The ongoing crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic exemplifies the criticality of the workshop. This initiative will create a framework for researchers to showcase how industry, academics, government research labs, and policymakers can work together to address humanitarian and sustainability challenges,” he says.

Neil is also a recipient of the Karl Taylor Compton Prize (MIT’s highest student award) and is an MIT Arts Scholar. He harnesses contemporary photography to communicate and advocate for science. “It’s hard to contextualize sustainability challenges such as climate change to a general audience merely through scientific models,” he says. “The arts play a vital role in helping people understand scientific underpinnings at subconscious levels and facilitate inclusive dialogues and engagement between diverse communities.”

After graduation, Neil plans to pursue a career in a line of academic research as a professor. “My major goal is to establish an informed research agenda at the boundaries of computational, design, and socioeconomic thinking, with students and global collaborators, to address the pressing sustainable development problems,” he says. For more information about Neil’s work, visit his webpage and arts portfolio.

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Facebook announces award recipients of the Ethics in AI Research Initiative for the Asia Pacific

by Facebook AI

The development of state-of-the-art AI technologies often brings to light intricate and complex ethical questions that industry, academia, and governments must work together to solve.

To help support thoughtful and groundbreaking academic research in the field of AI ethics in the Asia Pacific, Facebook partnered with the Centre for Civil Society and Governance of The University of Hong Kong and the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data, Hong Kong (PCPD; esteemed co-chair of the Permanent Working Group on Ethics and Data Protection in AI of the Global Privacy Assembly) to launch the Ethics in AI for the Asia Pacific RFP in December 2019. Today, Facebook is announcing the winners of these research awards.

View RFPSharing the same goal as the Ethics in AI – India RFP announced by Facebook in June 2019, this RFP aimed to support independent AI ethics research that takes local traditional knowledge and regionally diverse perspectives into account. The RFP was open to academic institutions, think tanks, and research organizations registered and operational across Asia Pacific. We were particularly interested in proposals related to the topics of fairness, governance, and diversity.

“AI technologies are increasingly being applied to various industries to enhance business operations, and ethical issues arising from these applications, such as ethical and fair processing of personal data, must be fully addressed,” says Stephen Kai-yi Wong, Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data, Hong Kong. “Commercial and public sectors, academia, and regulatory bodies need to work together to promote a strong ethical culture when it comes to the development and application of AI systems. Besides advocating accountability and data ethics for AI, we as the co-chair of the Permanent Working Group on Ethics and Data Protection in AI of the Global Privacy Assembly also take the lead in working out practical guidance in addressing ethical and data protection issues in AI systems. We hope the winning projects will facilitate better understanding of ethics and data protection in AI, and foster regional efforts in this field.”

“AI has created substantial potential for the attainment of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. To fully materialize the potential, AI’s application needs to be ethical and effectively governed by appropriate rules and mechanisms in multiple arenas,” says Professor Lam, Director of Centre for Civil Society and Governance, The University of Hong Kong. “Our Centre is pleased to collaborate with academia, the AI industry, and the public and business sectors in this initiative to promote research and dialogue on AI ethics in the Asia Pacific region. I look forward to seeing some of the research findings of the winning projects, which will inform policy deliberation and action.”

“The latest advancements in AI bring transformational changes to society, and at the same time bring an array of complex ethical questions that must be closely examined. At Facebook, we believe our understanding of AI should be informed by research conducted in open collaboration with the community,” says Raina Yeung, Head of Privacy and Data Policy, Engagement, APAC at Facebook. “That’s why we’re keen to support independent academic research institutions in APAC in pursuing interdisciplinary research in AI ethics that will enable ongoing dialogue on these important issues in the application of AI technology that has a lot of potential to benefit society and mankind.”

Thank you to everyone who submitted a proposal, and congratulations to the winners.

Research award winners

Principal investigators are listed first unless otherwise noted.

AI decisions with dignity: Promoting interactional justice perceptions
Dr. Sarah Bankins, Prof. Deborah Richards, A/Prof. Paul Formosa, (Macquarie University), Dr. Yannick Griep (Radboud University)

The challenges of implementing AI ethics frameworks in the Asia Pacific
Manju Lasantha Fernando, Ramathi Bandaranayake, Viren Dias, Helani Galpaya, Rohan Samarajiva (LIRNEasia)

Culturally informed pro-social AI regulation and persuasion framework
Dr. Junaid Qadir (Information Technology University of Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan), Dr. Amana Raquib (Institute of Business Administration – Karachi, Pakistan)

Ethical challenges on application of AI for the aged care
Dr. Bo Yan, Dr. Priscilla Song, Dr. Chia-Chin Lin (University of Hong Kong)

Ethical technology assessment on AI and internet of things
Dr. Melvin Jabar, Dr. Ma. Elena Chiong Javier (De La Salle University), Mr. Jun Motomura (Meio University), Dr. Penchan Sherer (Mahidol University)

Operationalizing information fiduciaries for AI governance
Yap Jia Qing, Ong Yuan Zheng Lenon, Elizaveta Shesterneva, Riyanka Roy Choudhury, Rocco Hu (eTPL.Asia)

Respect for rights in the era of automation, using AI and robotics
Emilie Pradichit, Ananya Ramani, Evie van Uden (Manushya Foundation), Henning Glasser, Dr. Duc Quang Ly, Venus Phuangkom (German-Southeast Asian Center of Excellence for Public Policy and Good Governance)

The uses and abuses of black box AI in emergency medicine
Prof. Robert Sparrow, Joshua Hatherley, Mark Howard (Monash University)

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Announcing the winners of the Measuring Economic Impact in the Digital Economy research awards

by Facebook AI

In January 2020, Facebook launched a request for research proposals that address the economic impact of digital technologies. For this RFP, we pledged $1 million in research award funding as part of Facebook’s continued goal of supporting independent research that helps us better understand and measure the impact of the digital economy. Today, we are announcing the winners of these research awards.

VIEW RFP

“The survival of small and medium-sized businesses hinges on their being able to operate and reach as many customers as possible during the COVID-19 pandemic,” says Arturo Gonzalez, Director of Advocacy and Research at Facebook. “Part of the solution is being online to the fullest extent possible.

“Facebook believes that research and the academic community play an important role in analyzing the impact of digital tools for small and medium-sized businesses. Our goal for this RFP was to foster further innovation in academia in this space, to accelerate the production of high-quality, independent, and data-driven research that, when all is said and done, advances the goal of helping small businesses.”

We were especially interested in proposals that addressed the economic consequences and implications of developing digital technologies for small businesses. We were additionally interested in research projects in the following topics, although we encouraged creative approaches beyond these areas:

  • A taxonomy of the digital economy, including subsectors within the digital economy
    • The demarcations between the analog and digital economies
    • Shortcomings (if any) of national accounts and other official statistics of GDP
  • Theoretical models of economic impact of the digital economy
    • How to obtain causal impacts and/or identify biases found in noncausal estimates
    • Incorporate the feedback effects due to the multisided nature of platforms
    • What needs to be solved for in order to estimate the model
  • Empirical application of theoretical models of causal economic impact
    • The biases (if any) present in reduced-form empirical model
    • Limitations of the model and results, including in scope (geographic, size of business), due to data availability or other issues

We received 57 proposals from 16 countries. Thank you to all the researchers who took the time to submit a proposal, and congratulations to the award recipients. For more information about areas of interest, eligibility, requirements, and more, visit the application page.

Research award winners

Digital economy and regional inequalities in the UK
Raquel Ortega-Artiles, Emmanouil Tranos, Giulia Occhini, Levi Wolf, Tasos Kitsos (University of Birmingham)

The expansion of the internet and economic growth worldwide
Paul Raschky, Klaus Ackermann, Simon Angus (Monash University)

GDP-B: A new well-being metric in the era of the digital economy
Erik Brynjolfsson, Avinash Collis, Jae Joon Lee (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

The impact of online listings on small business performance
Abhishek Nagaraj, Gauri Subramani, Michael Luca (University of California, Berkeley)

Measuring the impact of the digital economy in Canada
Sarah Doyle, David Wolfe (Ryerson University)

Modeling and measuring the economic impacts of digital platform innovation
Johannes M. Bauer, Steven S. Wildman, Tiago Sousa Prado (Michigan State University)

Social sharing and the growth of small businesses: Measurement and strategy
Tianshu Sun (University of Southern California)

The post Announcing the winners of the Measuring Economic Impact in the Digital Economy research awards appeared first on Facebook Research.

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