Fostering the Ecosystem of AI for Social Impact Requires Expanding and Strengthening Evaluation Standards

There has been increasing research interest in AI/ML for social impact, and correspondingly more publication venues refining review criteria for practice-driven AI/ML research. However, these review guidelines tend to most concretely recognize projects that simultaneously achieve deployment and novel ML methodological innovation. We argue that this introduces incentives for researchers that undermine the sustainability of a broader research ecosystem of social impact, which benefits from projects that make contributions on one front (applied or methodological) that may better meet project partner needs. Our position is that researchers and reviewers in machine learning for social impact must simultaneously adopt: 1) a more expansive conception of social impacts beyond deployment and 2) more rigorous evaluations of the impact of deployed systems.