Events

CDS Lunch Seminar : Data Is People: Unintended Consequences in AI and Data Science

Speaker: Casey Fiesler

Location: On-Line

Date: Wednesday, December 8, 2021

Hardly a day passes without a new technology ethics scandal in the news, and many of them touch on AI, machine learning, and data science—from privacy violations in data collection to biased data feeding algorithms to unexpected uses of research. This talk builds on two threads of my research: (1) empirical work towards best practices for research ethics in data science, including understanding possible harms of using public data without consent; and (2) ethical debt (as a parallel to technical debt) in technology design and research as the precursor to the types of unintended consequences that underly many ethical controversies. I will suggest strategies for being more forward-thinking and for remembering the people present in data.