# Artificial Intelligence for Social Good: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.01818 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01818/

## Key facts

- Cited by 29 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jan 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Envisioning Communities: A Participatory Approach Towards AI for Social Good](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01774/) (2021)
- [`It is currently hodgepodge'': Examining AI/ML Practitioners' Challenges during Co-production of Responsible AI Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10221/) (2023)
- [Multilingual and Explainable Text Detoxification with Parallel Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11691/) (2024)
- [AgriGPT: a Large Language Model Ecosystem for Agriculture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08632/) (2025)
- [On the Actionability of Outcome Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04470/) (2023)
- [Towards Foundation-model-based Multiagent System to Accelerate AI for Social Impact](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07880/) (2024)
- [Beyond Good Intentions: Reporting the Research Landscape of NLP for Social Good](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05471/) (2023)
- [Proactive and Reactive Engagement of Artificial Intelligence Methods for Education: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10231/) (2023)
- [Is a Seat at the Table Enough? Engaging Teachers and Students in Dataset Specification for ML in Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05792/) (2023)
- [Can Language Representation Models Think in Bets?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07519/) (2022)
- [The Arc of the Data Scientific Universe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10050/) (2021)
- [Generating Synthetic Satellite Imagery for Rare Objects: An Empirical Comparison of Models and Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01138/) (2024)
- [Lost in Translation: Reimagining the Machine Learning Life Cycle in Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03929/) (2022)
- [PAIL: Performance based Adversarial Imitation Learning Engine for Carbon Neutral Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08910/) (2024)
- [HumVI: A Multilingual Dataset for Detecting Violent Incidents Impacting Humanitarian Aid](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06370/) (2024)
- [Medical Imaging Complexity and its Effects on GAN Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17959/) (2024)
- [Towards Automated Scoping of AI for Social Good Projects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20010/) (2025)
- [HatePRISM: Policies, Platforms, and Research Integration. Advancing NLP for Hate Speech Proactive Mitigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04350/) (2025)
- [Optimizing Health Coverage in Ethiopia: A Learning-augmented Approach and Persistent Proportionality Under an Online Budget](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00135/) (2025)
- [VORTEX: Aligning Task Utility and Human Preferences through LLM-Guided Reward Shaping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16399/) (2025)
- [Good Intentions Beyond ACL: Who Does NLP for Social Good, and Where?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04434/) (2025)
- [Classification, Slippage, Failure and Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03886/) (2021)
- [A resource-constrained stochastic scheduling algorithm for homeless street outreach and gleaning edible food](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10638/) (2024)
- [Demarked: A Strategy for Enhanced Abusive Speech Moderation through Counterspeech, Detoxification, and Message Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19543/) (2024)
- [Predicting Internet Connectivity in Schools: A Feasibility Study Leveraging Multi-modal Data and Location Encoders in Low-Resource Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12188/) (2024)
- [RAGAT-Mind: A Multi-Granular Modeling Approach for Rumor Detection Based on MindSpore](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17574/) (2025)
- [RescueLens: LLM-Powered Triage and Action on Volunteer Feedback for Food Rescue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15698/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models for Sentiment Analysis to Detect Social Challenges: A Use Case with South African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17301/) (2025)
- [Whose Good, Whose Place? The Moral Geography of Agentic AI for Social Good](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22995/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Artificial intelligence for social good (AI4SG) is a research theme that aims to use and advance artificial intelligence to address societal issues and improve the well-being of the world. AI4SG has received lots of attention from the research community in the past decade with several successful applications. Building on the most comprehensive collection of the AI4SG literature to date with over 1000 contributed papers, we provide a detailed account and analysis of the work under the theme in the following ways. (1) We quantitatively analyze the distribution and trend of the AI4SG literature in terms of application domains and AI techniques used. (2) We propose three conceptual methods to systematically group the existing literature and analyze the eight AI4SG application domains in a unified framework. (3) We distill five research topics that represent the common challenges in AI4SG across various application domains. (4) We discuss five issues that, we hope, can shed light on the future development of the AI4SG research.