About
Antwi Akom
Expert

Antwi Akom

Nonresident Senior Fellow – Brookings Metro

Dr. Akom is a senior nonresident fellow with the Center for Community Uplift. His research focuses on the intersection between AI, race, technology, data, design, and health innovation, and falls into three thematic areas:  

  1. Real-time data, community-powered data, and asset-based community design 
  2. Data equity, data bias, data power, data modernization, and data transformation
  3. AI, big data, and climate justice  

As a globally recognized thought-leader in co-designing local data ecosystems to improve community health; connecting data across local communities, government, and health sectors; and democratizing data and design to lift the voices, values, priorities, and needs of communities from the margins to the epicenter, Dr. Akom’s research and scholarship includes: 1) utilizing real-time community-driven, community-powered data to modernize and transform our public health data ecosystems; 2) advancing the building and ownership of AI solutions tailored to local contexts as a pathway to ensure equitable community development; and 3) developing community-based AI systems dynamics throughout the United States, Europe, and the Global South, including Africa, India, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America, in order to build guardrails around AI that prevent AI harm toward vulnerable populations, stop the weaponization of biometric AI, reimagine algorithmic surveillance technologies, and develop more inclusive, ethical, equitable, nondiscriminatory, and democratized AI models and metrics for all (Hovmand, 2014; Martin, 2021). 

Dr. Akom’s commitment to technology for liberation and ensuring, if the community agrees, that there is broadband access is important because a delay of access to safe, responsible, trustworthy, culturally and community-responsive technologies of even a few years in Africa or other developing places can potentially lead to a few decades of economic delay and a host of other community benefits being lost or delayed that could change and save millions of lives. 

Currently, Dr. Akom is a distinguished professor and founding director of the University of California, San Francisco and San Francisco State University’s Social Innovation and Universal Opportunity Lab (SOUL Lab), where his work challenges the “New Jim Code” and demonstrates how ableist, sexist, and racist habits, attitudes, and behaviors can be invisibly coded into tech design in ways that amplify hierarchies and create discriminatory designs (Benjamin, 2019). While working to reimagine and dismantle the digital caste system, Dr. Akom’s research and scholarship explores the flipside of the New Jim Code: how global, rural, urban, and suburban communities in general—and Black, Latino or Hispanic, Indigenous, and rural communities in particular—are transforming from consumers to producers of knowledge and developing underground tech tools, social media, and community-powered data and design innovations that can be used to build community power and economic and human capital, as well as advance sustainability, health, healing, justice, equity, diversity, inclusivity, and thriving. 

Committed to transforming the relationship between AI, data, design, power, and innovation, Dr. Akom is also the founder and CEO of DOPE Labs, which stands for Digital Organizing Power Building and Engagement Labs, as well as an award-winning mobile, mapping, and SMS community-driven data platform called Streetwyze 2.0. DOPE Labs and Streetwyze are two of the leading community-based organizations and platforms in the world that work with communities to examine opportunities and threats to open societies, explore how local context matters when designing AI and other emerging technologies, identify socio-technical harms before they get to machine learning, and reimagine data transformation by building culturally and community-responsive technologies and methodologies that democratize data and inspire scalable, community-driven design solutions.   

As a transdisciplinary professor of African American studies, sociology, community informatics, AI, public health, data science, and design innovation, Dr. Akom writes, teaches, and speaks widely about democratizing data, community-centric design, algorithmic justice, equitable AI, ethical AI, AI policy, AI leadership, AI governance, AI bias, data bias, data visualization, co-creating community health and well-being indicators, and prototyping and testing new ways that BIPOC, disabled, neurodiverse, LGBQTIA, and rural populations can co-design with cities, communities, hospitals, and health care providers to build power and self-determination, reduce disparities, create healthier neighborhoods, increase health and climate equity, and use the power of real-time data, community- and patient-driven data, big data, and predictive analytics to create local knowledge ecosystems that improve public health data infrastructure.   

As a thought-leader, motivational speaker, and mentor, Dr. Akom’s work on developing tech for social good and data and design justice for all has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, featured at the White House Frontiers conference and the White House Opportunity Project, published in top-tier research journals, and featured in award-winning publications such as The Nation, CityLab, Wired, and The Root. Dr. Akom has also appeared on the PBS NewsHour, NPR, Breakfast TVNZ (New Zealand), and NBC. 

As a data scientist, design thinker, and community-engaged scholar who lives on the front lines of generating real-time community-powered solutions to address vital social conditions and community needs, examining AI’s benefits and burdens, and analyzing the impacts of data, design, technology, and power on society, Dr. Akom is a nationally and internationally recognized thought leader who has been invited to share his work on community-powered health innovation, participatory machine learning, climate and AI, empowering artists with AI, and building culturally and community-responsive technologies and methodologies with leading academic institutions, policy think tanks, conferences, and groups of change-makers around the world, including: Harvard University, Stanford University, Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, Howard University, Spelman College, University of California, Los Angeles, University of California, Berkeley, University of California San Diego, the Urban Institute, and more. Dr. Akom has also shared research on socio-technical harm and tech for liberation with leading industry research labs, including Google, YouTube, Fitbit, Meta, Nickelodeon, Paramount, and Uber, as well as with leading grassroots and community-based organizations such as the National Association for Chronic Disease Directors, WE in the World, Roots, and the Unity Council. Dr. Akom is a recipient of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Pioneer Award, and his TEDx Talk is called “Innovation Out of Poverty.” Dr. Akom received his BA in political science and economics from University of California, Berkeley; an MA from Stanford University; and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania.