Workshop: Societal Impact, Ethics, and Big-Data-Enabled Social Sciences

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

General Audience Summary This award will support US participation in the Global Science Forum (GSF) of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). GSF provides a venue for mutual consultation among senior science policy officials of OECD member countries. It produces findings on high-priority science-policy issues that require international co-operation, and identifies opportunities for collaboration on major scientific undertakings. This award will support the participation of two PIs in planning meetings with GSF experts for an international conference tentatively entitled "The Ethics of Using New Forms of Data for Social Research." The conference is to be held in Chicago, and it will bring US scientists together with OECD experts to develop an international framework for the ethical use of big data in research. The analysis and application of large datasets, also known as big data research, is an important area of research supported by NSF's Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE). The conference will be organized as plenary, breakout and poster sessions. It will bring together scientists, policy makers, industry, funding agencies, and public interest groups who have an interest in addressing the ethical use of big data in the SBE sciences. Big data is growing in importance for many areas critical to society, including health, finance and science. The outputs of this conference will help researchers identify the key issues in research ethics and explore an international framework related to the ethics of the use of big data in research. Technical Summary The conference being planned will advance the SBE subfields of Research Ethics and Privacy Protection in Big Data by developing a forward-looking framework on how to overcome the tradeoff between big data and research ethics to effectively pursue the potential of big data without sacrificing privacy rights or violating research ethics. These goals are particularly challenging because satisfying them will require inherently interdisciplinary approaches, and they will require anticipatory approaches (scenario development), which are just starting to be developed. The proposed activities will serve to improve insights and to provide a framework for approaching the reuse of new forms of data. They will inform policy making and scientific practice with regards to data reuse, as well as provide a foundation for conducting ethical analysis of relevant data use scenarios. The proposed effort will result in a framework for internationally acceptable guidelines for the use of big data in SBE research, and it will thereby have profound implications not only for data-related research but also for data-related governance and policies.