Committee on Ethics

The Committee on Ethics is concerned with how best to promote a culture of ethical research in data science, and also how to teach ethics of data science to our students. We are interested both in universal questions but also application-specific issues (i.e. privacy safeguards guaranteed by HIPAA in the medical domain, and FERPA in the educational domain) and how to design educational modules to best address these.

The current committee is chaired by

• Peter Levine, Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service

A main project of the committee has been designing the Tripods Undergraduate Ethics Case Studies collection in data science. We are creating a set of short case studies with expert opinions attached suitable for teaching undergraduate computer science and data science majors. The cases are being written by data science faculty, faculty who specialize in Ethics, students, etc. and all are welcome to contribute. You can learn more about the project and see an example case here. We will publish our first set of cases in Spring 2023. We currently are meeting monthly over zoom. Reach out to Lenore Cowen by email and introduce yourself if you would like to join the monthly zoom meetings.

New! In Spring 2023, we will be hosting, both virtually and on the Tufts campus the 1st Annual Workshop on Methods for Teaching Ethics in Data Science (MTEDS 23). Full details will be posted in mid-November.