The NSF Convergence Accelerator supports use-inspired, team-based, multidisciplinary efforts that address challenges of national importance and will produce deliverables of value to society in the near future. The broader impact and potential societal benefit of this Convergence Accelerator conference proposal is to address institutional racism by utilizing advanced technologies that have the potential to disrupt institutional racism in ways that have not been experienced previously. The disparate burden of the COVID-19 pandemic on Black communities, the recent high profile police involved murders of Black people in Minneapolis and Louisville, and the longstanding racial achievement gaps in education underscore the need for the proposed project. Institutional racism currently manifests heavily within criminal justice, education, and healthcare. The project seeks to explore the use of technology in building more socially conscious systems to mitigate institutional racism. Leading experts in this project will leverage their talents, perspectives, and resources to help the project document technology-infused ideas that have potential to disrupt institutional racism in ways that have not been experienced in the past. Ending institutional racism will only be advanced by visionaries across academic disciplines and sectors who can see a universe of opportunity that is not distant or unattainable. The field experts who will commit to this project have the capacity to converge efforts to advance human technology in addressing racial inequities in criminal justice, education, and health systems. The PIs have plan to broadly disseminate findings included in the technical report across sectors including academia, non-profits, government, and especially the technology industry. Finally, this project also has the potential to broaden the scope and influence of research by including HBCU scholars.
This project will advance knowledge of technologically-informed systems at the Human Technology Frontier that have the potential to mitigate institutional racism in the criminal justice, education, and health workforce. The virtual workshops will bring together transdisciplinary and cross-sector thought leaders from social, behavioral and computational sciences and industry with demonstrated capacity to propose technological innovations that have the most potential to create the humanistic agency necessary to advance racial equity within the criminal justice, education, and health systems. The plan for the workshops optimizes and builds upon prior identified cutting-edge research that will be foundational to achieving the project’s ultimate goal of developing a technical report that provides solutions to existing gaps affecting the Black community in criminal justice, education, and healthcare. Our plan to distribute relevant major studies prior to the workshops for the leaders to review and evaluate will ensure that ensuing discussions at the workshop are informed by the current landscape. Further, final reports from each workshop session will have the potential to form the basis for a NSF Convergence Accelerator Track topic. The PIs organization, Quality Education for Minorities Network (QEM) has 30 years of experience with research and programs that have assembled technical advisors necessary to conduct the proposed activities. The project will also strategically use HBCU researchers for their time-honored expertise with advancing African American progress.