Dr. Michael Zimmer, professor of computer science in the Klingler College of Arts and Sciences and director of the Center for Data, Ethics, and Society, participated in an invitation-only workshop on “Operationalizing Ethics into Online Safety and AI Research” organized by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The workshop is part of an ongoing project led by OSTP and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to draft privacy and ethics guidelines for researchers working with online platform data.
Many in the computing research community are aware that research ethics regulations centered on human subjects were not designed for the computing and AI research community and have crafted alternative ethics boards, rubrics, check lists and assessment tools to help researchers, funders and publications navigate ethics and privacy concerns in the computing space. This event brought together people and organizations that have been operationalizing or deeply thinking about operationalizing researcher access to pervasive data to discuss and simulate operationalizing ethics in computing research.
Zimmer presented findings and ongoing research from his NSF-funded projects “PERVADE: Pervasive Data Ethics for Computational Research” and “Developing Educational Resources for the Ethical Use of Pervasive Data”
