  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.
