Three Lessons Towards Ethical Tech: Research Ethics, Ethics Education, and Broadening Participation in Computing

Hardly a week passes without a new technology ethics scandal—from privacy violations on social media platforms to biased algorithms to controversial data collection for training facial recognition systems. This talk describes three research projects from my lab that are working towards informing ethical practices in studying, designing, and building technology: (1) empirical work that informs best practices for research ethics in data science, including guidelines for collecting public data; (2) a philosophy towards ethics education in computer science, including an in-progress effort towards ethics integration in introductory programming courses here at CU; and (3) research on computational projects in online fandom communities as an example of underrepresented groups building their own technologies. Taken together, these projects suggest several principles of everyday ethics in computing research and design.