Broadening Research Collaborations

This workshop aims to discuss the challenges and opportunities of expanding research collaborations in light of the changing landscape of where, how, and by whom research is produced. Progress toward democratizing AI research has been centered around making knowledge (e.g. class materials), established ideas (e.g. papers), and technologies (e.g. code, compute) more accessible. However, open, online resources are only part of the equation. Growth as a researcher requires not only learning by consuming information individually, but hands-on practice whiteboarding, coding, plotting, debugging, and writing collaboratively, with either mentors or peers. Of course, making "collaborators" more universally accessible is fundamentally more difficult than, say, ensuring all can access arXiv papers because scaling people and research groups is much harder than scaling websites. Can we nevertheless make access to collaboration itself more open?