How one company is helping to diversify the A.I. field

Dr. Taniya Mishra has been an A.I. and machine learning researcher for over a decade, and in that time, the scientist saw something crucial missing in the landscape.

“I don’t see myself represented in this field that I think of as my own,” she says.

To underscore the point, an industry report published in 2019 found the A.I. field has a “diversity crisis,” with women representing less than 20% of A.I. professors. They make up only 10% of A.I. research staff at Google, for instance, and the picture is more grim for people of color: only 2.5% of the company’s entire workforce is Black.

In 2020, Dr. Mishra founded SureStart with a goal to tackle the issue, building an A.I. optimized platform for A.I. jobs training and jobs connection. Its mission is to build a more strong and sustainable pipeline to bring students from communities currently underrepresented in A.I.

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