Societal Context Knowledge
for Responsible AI

Societal Context Understanding Tools and Solutions (SCOUTS) is a Google Research initiative with the mission to empower people with the scalable, trustworthy societal context knowledge required to realize responsible, robust AI and solve the world's most complex societal problems.

Our mission is based on a very simple premise that, in order to respect cultural, social and legal norms and mitigate harmful societal biases and unjust impacts, we must know what those biases, norms and impacts are. We strive to make societal context knowledge useful and accessible to people and ML systems.


SCOUTS mission image
Our work
Jigsaw Blog image
Scaling machine learning fairness with societal context by Rachel Rosen, Alyssa Chvasta, Lucy Vasserman, Sameer Sethi, Emmanuel Klu, Donald Martin
How Jigsaw partnered with SCOUTS to reduce unintended bias and improve fairness of the Perspective API models...
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AI Engineers Need to Think Beyond Engineering by Donald Martin, Jr. and Andrew Moore
It is very, very easy for a well-intentioned AI practitioner to inadvertently do harm when they set out to do good - AI has the power to amplify...
Blog 2
Community Based System Dynamics and Machine Learning Q&A: Donald Martin, Jr. by People + AI Research
Q&A with Donald Martin, Jr. to talk about community based system dynamics and how - when it comes to designing technology - partnering with communities early can help...
Blog 3
Exploring System Dynamics, inclusive ML and societal impact Q&A: Donald & Jamaal by Annie Jean-Baptiste
Q&A with Donald and Jamaal about a workshop on System Dynamics and the wealth gap that Google sponsored at 2019 Data for Black Lives (D4BL) conference...
Our research
Extending the Machine Learning Abstraction Boundary: A Complex Systems Approach to Incoporate Societal Context Donald Martin Jr., Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Jill Kuhlberg, Andrew Smart, William S. Isaac
Participatory Problem Formulation for Fairer Machine Learning Through Community Based System Dynamics Donald Martin Jr., Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Jill Kuhlberg, Andrew Smart, William S. Isaac