Workshop: Advancing ethics for trustworthy cyberspace and data analytics

Virginia Polytechnic Institute And State University, Blacksburg VA

Investigators

Abstract

Big data analytics centers promise to address central public policy problems such as health disparities and access, mitigating natural and human disasters, contributing to social stability in urban settings, and managing and planning habitat for wildlife. Embedded in these problems are central ethical questions that take up issues of privacy, inequalities, validity, and meaningful use. National commitments to bringing new analytical skills to the collection and analysis of data make a theoretically and empirically driven analysis of ethics crucial to science and society. Those who develop new analytical tools are not always closely connected to those who use them, yet collaboration develops meaningful ethical practices. This workshop will develop a collaborative strategy for ethical big data practices by including data scientists, local government officials, community stakeholders, and social scientists. Bringing together these various stakeholders will build research teams and projects that combine ethics and big data in productive ways. Problems are better defined and gain better answers when people from diverse perspectives are included in the design of research and its use. Research concerning data analytics emphasizes the centrality of local stakeholders' definitions of problems and of where and how analyses are used, yet academic professions do not always build in incentives for collaboration. Building in validity, and a concern for privacy, surveillance and inequality requires working with multiple communities and analytical strategies. By including ethnographers of scientific practices of and users of data analytics who have tracked how analyses have been used, as well as data scientists who design problems and users of analyses, the workshop will develop a framework for the creation of big data with an emphasis on analysis of ethical issues.