Jacob Metcalf

• Data & Society Research Institute

Ongoing calls from academic and civil society groups and regulatory demands for the central role of affected communities in development, evaluation, and deployment of artificial intelligence systems have created the conditions for an incipient “participatory turn” in AI. This turn encompasses a wide number of approaches — from legal requirements fo...

Policymakers are increasingly turning toward assessments of social, economic, and ethical impacts as a governance model for automated decision systems in sensitive or regulated domains. In both the United States and the European Union, recently proposed legislation would require developers to assess the impacts of their systems for individuals, com...

When algorithmic harms emerge, a reasonable response is to stop using the algorithm to resolve concerns related to fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics (FATE). However, just because an algorithm is removed does not imply its FATE-related issues cease to exist. In this paper, we introduce the notion of the "algorithmic imprint" to illu...

The use of big data research methods has grown tremendously in both academia and industry. One of the most fundamental rules of responsible big data research is the steadfast recognition that most data represent or impact people. For some projects, sharing data is an expectation of the human participants involved and thus a key part of ethical rese...

Central to a number of scholarly, regulatory, and public conversations about algorithmic accountability is the question of who should have access to documentation that reveals the inner workings, intended function, and anticipated consequences of algorithmic systems, potentially establishing new routes for impacted publics to contest the operations...

Ethics is arguably the hottest product in Silicon Valley’s1 hype cycle today, even as headlines decrying a lack of ethics in technology companies accumulate. After years of largely fruitless outside pres- sure to consider the consequences of digital technology products, the very recent past has seen a spike in the assignment of corporate resources...

The use of big data research methods has grown tremendously over the past five years in both academia and industry. As the size and complexity of available datasets has grown, so too have the ethical questions raised by big data research. These questions become increasingly urgent as data and research agendas move well beyond those typical of the c...

Reconsidering traditional research ethics given the emergence of big data analytics.

There are growing discontinuities between the research practices of data science and established tools of research ethics regulation. Some of the core commitments of existing research ethics regulations, such as the distinction between research and practice, cannot be cleanly exported from biomedical research to data science research. Such disconti...

Over the course of the last five years, a worldwide financial crisis combined with plummeting trust in institutions has led to significant changes in the organization and funding of research and education. These changes have troubled the very foundations of universities, but they also have created new opportunities to re-imagine and re-form practic...

The Science & Justice Training Program at UCSC has developed an innovative approach to ethics education for scientists and engineers that emphasizes interdisciplinary and collaborative research into shared objects and concerns.

Summary This project examines the intersection of ethical and evidential standards in claims made by genomics researchers regarding human evolution, human genetic differences, brain size, and cognitive capabilities. We focus on the claims made by Bruce Lahn and his collaborators at Univ. of Chicago in two articles published consecutively in Science...