Tag: ethics
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How the National AI Research Resource can steward the datasets it hosts
Last week I participated on a panel about the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR), a proposed computing and data resource for academic AI researchers. The NAIRR’s goal is to subsidize the spiraling costs of many types of AI research that have put them out of reach of most academic groups. My comments on the panel…
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Holding Purveyors of “Dark Patterns” for Online Travel Bookings Accountable
Last week, my former colleagues at the New York Attorney General’s Office (NYAG), scored a $2.6 million settlement with Fareportal – a large online travel agency that used deceptive practices, known as “dark patterns,” to manipulate consumers to book online travel. The investigation exposes how Fareportal, which operates under several brands, including CheapOair and OneTravel…
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Can Classes on Field Experiments Scale? Lessons from SOC412
Last semester, I taught a Princeton undergrad/grad seminar on the craft, politics, and ethics of behavioral experimentation. The idea was simple: since large-scale human subjects research is now common outside universities, we need to equip students to make sense of that kind of power and think critically about it. In this post, I share lessons for teaching…
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Teaching the Craft, Ethics, and Politics of Field Experiments
How can we manage the politics and ethics of large-scale online behavioral research? When this question came up in April during a forum on Defending Democracy at Princeton, Ed Felten mentioned on stage that I was teaching a Princeton undergrad class on this very topic. No pressure! Ed was right about the need: people with…
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Princeton Dialogues of AI and Ethics: Launching case studies
Summary: We are releasing four case studies on AI and ethics, as part of the Princeton Dialogues on AI and Ethics. The impacts of rapid developments in artificial intelligence (“AI”) on society—both real and not yet realized—raise deep and pressing questions about our philosophical ideals and institutional arrangements. AI is currently applied in a wide…
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Ethics Education in Data Science
Data scientists in academia and industry are increasingly recognizing the importance of integrating ethics into data science curricula. Recently, a group of faculty and students gathered at New York University before the annual FAT* conference to discuss the promises and challenges of teaching data science ethics, and to learn from one another’s experiences in the…
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Getting serious about research ethics: Security and Internet Measurement
[This blog post is a continuation of our series about research ethics in computer science that we started last week] Research projects in the information security and Internet measurement sub-disciplines typically interact with third-party systems or devices to collect a large amounts of data. Scholars engaging in these fields are interested to collect data about…
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Design Ethics for Gender-Based Violence and Safety Technologies
Authored (and organized) by Kate Sim and Ben Zevenbergen. Digital technologies are increasingly proposed as innovative solution to the problems and threats faced by vulnerable groups such as children, women, and LGBTQ people. However, there exists a structural lack of consideration for gender and power relations in the design of Internet technologies, as previously discussed…
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Robots don't threaten, but may be useful threats
Hi, I’m Joanna Bryson, and I’m just starting as a fellow at CITP, on sabbatical from the University of Bath. I’ve been blogging about natural and artificial intelligence since 2007, increasingly with attention to public policy. I’ve been writing about AI ethics since 1998. This is my first blog post for Freedom to Tinker. Will…
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On the Ethics of A/B Testing
The discussion triggered by Facebook’s mood manipulation experiment has been enlightening and frustrating at the same time. An enlightening aspect is how it has exposed divergent views on a practice called A/B testing, in which a company provides two versions of its service to randomly-chosen groups of users, and then measures how the users react.…