Who We Are
The Institute on Disability and Public Policy at American University is a multidisciplinary, cross-campus research center that creates and disseminates knowledge that enables all persons to participate effectively in local, national, and global governance through the use of accessible information and communication technologies. IDPP leads the AU 2030 Strategic Initiative on Global Disability and Development, and helps to facilitate collaborative research, teaching and outreach programs through its partnerships.
Since 2009, IDPP has been creating groundbreaking, innovative pathways to accessible learning. It built the world's first virtual graduate institute on disability and public policy through the vision and support of The Nippon Foundation.
Our Core Focus Areas:
Global, Regional and National Disability Policy
Inclusive Sustainable Development
Accessible Global Governance
Inclusive Cities and Urban Development
Inclusive Disaster Risk Reduction
Information and Communication Technologies for Development
Accessible Robotics
Accessible Cyberlearning
Accessibility, Assistive Technologies and Universal Design
News
GigaNet's 2025 Online Symposium on Feb 18th & 20th explores digital sovereignty and online governance for inclusivity for all.
IDPP’s participation at HICSS 58 showcased innovative uses of AI and text analytics to advance global disability inclusion and policy research.
Ambassador Luis Gallegos, IDPP Advisory Board Chair, will be honored with the International Advocate Award at the 2024 USICD Virtual Gala. Buy tickets now for October 21!
IDPP hosted the Colombian delegation of the U.S. State Department IVLP program to discuss global, regional, and national disability policies.
Join us for an insightful AI and LLM workshop on prompt engineering led by IDPP Executive Director, Dr. Derrick Cogburn.
IDPP Executive Director Dr. Cogburn will be a panelist in “AI: Promise or Peril? Navigating the Uncharted Territory of AI” on October 17th.
IDPP Executive Director gives insight into the impact of the 2024 CrowdStrike global IT outage in new Mashable article.
Submit your paper to the AI Safety, Cybersecurity, and Inclusion Through Advanced Text Analytics minitrack, which seeks a wide range of theoretical and empirical papers that employ natural language processing (NLP), text mining, and text analytics techniques to better understand and improve decision making in AI safety, cybersecurity, and inclusion.