This closed workshop is promoted by the Alan Turing Institute (ATI) in order to define the national and international landscape around data science, and to support the ATI’s scientific programme.

Data science provides huge opportunities to improve private and public life. However, such a potentially highly positive impact is coupled to significant ethical challenges. The extensive use of increasingly more data (Big Data), the growing reliance on algorithms to analyse them and to reach decisions (machine learning), as well as the gradual reduction of human oversight over many automatic processes pose pressing issues of fairness, responsibility, and respect of human rights.

These issues can be addressed successfully. However, if they are overlooked, underestimated or left unresolved, they risk hindering the innovation and the progress that data science can bring to society at large and to future generations. Furthermore, data science projects may face a double bottleneck: ethical mistakes or misunderstandings may lead to social rejection and/or distorted legislation and policies, which in turn may cripple the acceptance and advancement of data science.

Clearly, ethical analysis should be incorporated at all stages of any data science project and since the beginning, in order to understand impact, anticipate risks of unethical consequences, suggest early interventions to avoid or mitigate them, foster resilience, reinforce ethical goals and outcomes, and ensure that ethical best practices are developed, implemented, and appreciated.

In order to pursue these goals, the workshop will:

  1. map the range of ethical issues that may challenge data science projects;
  2. outline the agenda for the development of the conceptual framework needed to address them successfully;
  3. identify potential data science projects that may benchmark such a framework as pilot studies;
  4. start to build the ethico-methodological capacity for data science at the ATI across the five universities in the consortium; and
  5. deliver a landscape document.

Programme

Programme
Start End Schedule
08:45:00 09:00:00

Registration
09:00:00 09:10:00

Welcome & Opening Remarks
09:10:00 09:30:00

What does the recent English attempt to share health data (care.data) tell us about data ethics?

Hetan Shah, The Royal Statistical Society
09:30:00 09:50:00

IP for resilience: data spills and the ethics of information ownership

Burkhard Schafer, Law School, University of Edinburgh

09:50:00 10:10:00

Data science in government

Cat Drew, UK Policy Lab & Data Science, Cabinet Office
10:10:00 10:30:00

The ethics of data as used by algorithms

Jonathan Cave, Department of Economics, University of Warwick
10:30:00 11:10:00

Discussion
11:10:00 11:40:00

Coffee Break
11:40:00 12:00:00

How data teach machines to discriminate

Solon Barocas, Center for Information Technology Policy, Princeton University
12:00:00 12:20:00

Managing distributed accountabilities: on locating ethics in data science

Sabina Leonelli, Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology, University of Exeter
12:20:00 12:40:00

Different understandings of privacy relevant to data science

Deirdre Mulligan, School of Information, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, University of California Berkeley
12:40:00 13:20:00

Discussion
13:20:00 14:30:00

Lunch
14:30:00 14:50:00

Ethics of data-driven, networked urbanism

Rob Kitchin, National Institute of Regional and Spatial Analysis, National University of Ireland Maynooth
14:50:00 15:10:00

Designing better ethical futures: a rhetorical challenge

Annette Markham, School of Communication and Culture, Centre for Science-Technology-Society Studies, Aarhus University
15:10:00 15:30:00

Big Data implications for citizens, governments and business

Barry O’Sullivan, Insight Centre for Data Analytics, University College Cork, Ireland
15:30:00 16:10:00

Discussion
16:10:00 16:40:00

Coffee Break
16:40:00 17:00:00

Measuring and predicting human behaviour with Internet data

Suzy Moat, Business School, University of Warwick
17:00:00 17:20:00

The value of respect: reclaiming the philosophical and political foundations of informed consent

Anna Lauren Hoffmann, School of Information, University of California Berkeley
17:20:00 17:40:00

Strict and distributed responsibility

Luciano Floridi, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
17:40:00 18:30:00

Round Table

Chair: Sofia Charlotta Olhede, Department of Statistical Science, UCL

Delegates: Marina Jirotka, Computer Science Department, University of Oxford; Richard Pinch, GCHQ; Ben Wagner, Centre for Internet & Human Rights, European University Viadrina.
18:30:00 19:30:00

Wine Reception