Author: Travis Greene
Publisher: Medium
Publication Year: 2020
Summary: In the following article, Travis Greene discusses the idea of data scientists becoming activist data scientists. Loosely basing the idea on a concept called “activist engineering” which was developed in 2015, Greene describes an activist data scientist as someone who realizes the social and political community they live in, and who realizes that solving problems in data science cannot always be achieved by data scientists only. As those who create machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms, data scientists hold the power over creating ethical algorithms. This power also bears the responsibility of acting towards those that an algorithm serves. In the article, Greene further elaborates on the different responsibilities of data scientists, the definition of power, and who this power should be executed towards. Greene is a Ph.D. student in Business Analytics at the Institute of Service Science at National Tsing Hua University. Some of his other works include posts around the GDPR, and the regulation around AI.
