Workshop on Ethics in Networked Systems Research

Co-located with ACM SIGCOMM’15
August 21st 2015
London, UK

A full day workshop titled “Ethics in Networked Systems Research” will be held at the ACM SIGCOMM 2015 in London. This multidisciplinary workshop will bring together two distinct groups of researchers:

• Computer scientists, network scientists and other technical researchers who are interested in the ethical and legal aspects of their work;
• Researchers studying the various ethical, social scientific and legal aspects of data-driven projects in the field of computer and data communication networks.

This workshop seeks 1 to 4 page summaries, focussing on ethical considerations of papers, publications and projects from the two disciplines, for example:

• Technical research in the field of computer and data communication networks that either operates in an ethical grey zone, collects and processes personal data/personal identifiable information, or has been rejected from another venue on ethical grounds;
• Ethical, social scientific or legal research that reflects on – or aims to guide – technical research and projects in the field of computer and data communication networks, especially an analysis to minimise the potential harm whilst enabling a broad range of Internet research to be conducted.

Selected authors and invited speakers will present their work, which will be followed by a structured discussion. The workshop will also facilitate an interactive session in which participants will split into multidisciplinary groups and address emerging ethical dilemmas in Internet measurement and information controls research, partly based on the submitted summaries. This session will be informed by a website (currently under development), that presents ethical guidelines for the fields of Internet measurement and information control. Papers submitted to this workshop will not be archived in the formal sense, so authors can submit papers elsewhere, or submit summaries of previously accepted papers.

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline – March 31st, 2015

Paper acceptance notification – April 30th, 2015

Organisers

Prof. Ian Brown – Oxford Internet Institute
Dr. Joss Wright – Oxford Internet Institute
Bendert Zevenbergen – Oxford Internet Institute
Erin Kenneally – University of California San Diego, Center for Applied Internet Research & Elchemy, Inc.
Dr. Malavika Jayaram – Harvard Berkman Centre
Allen Gunn – Aspiration Tech
Meredith Whittaker – Measurement Lab
Christopher Wilson – the engine room
Stuart Schechter – Microsoft Research

Please email papers to bendert.zevenbergen@oii.ox.ac.uk