2016

The FAIR Guiding Principles for Scientific Data Management and Stewardship

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Author: Mark D. Wilkinson et al.; Publisher: Nature; Publication Year: 2016. The following article focuses on the need to improve data handling in order to ensure the reproducibility of results published in scientific literature. It sets forth the FAIR data principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reproducibility). The article argues that FAIRness is a prerequisite for proper data management and stewardship. The…

Downside of Fitness Trackers and Health Apps is Loss of Privacy

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Author: Victoria J. Palmer; Publisher: The Conversation; Publication Year: 2016. The following article starts off with a bold statement to capture the audience, saying the public have now become the study subjects and the collection tools. This article focuses heavily on the risks of health tracking through apps. As much as health apps can be an asset, if not handled properly sensitive data can easily be brought public. One example is…

Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings

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Author: Tolga Bolukbasi, Kai-Wei Chang, James Zou, et al.; Publisher: Arxiv; Publication Year: 2016. The following article discusses how machine learning applied blindly runs the risk of amplifying biases in data. Word embedding, a popular framework for representing text data as vectors that has been used in many machine learning and natural language processing tasks, poses such a risk. The authors demonstrate that even word embeddings…

Scientists Are Just as Confused About the Ethics of Big-Data Research as You

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Author: Sarah Zhang; Publisher: Wired; Publication Year: 2016. The following article discusses how ethical boundaries for data researchers are still developing as data research is still an emerging field. Under the Common Rule in the U.S., federally funded research has to go through ethical review. Rather than one unified system, though, every single university has its own institutional review board, or IRB. Very few…

A Beauty Contest was Judged by AI and the Robots Didn’t like Dark Skin

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Author: Sam Levin; Publisher: The Guardian; Publication Year: 2016. The following article discusses how in 2016, the first artificial intelligence (AI) judged beauty contest was conducted. The objective factors included facial symmetry and wrinkles. Beauty.AI, created by Youth Laboratories and supported by Microsoft, received 6,000 submissions from over 100 countries to identify those who resembled “human beauty…

Locating ethics in data science: responsibility and accountability in global and distributed knowledge production systems

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Author: Sabina Leonelli; Publisher: The Royal Society; Publication Year: 2016. The following article talks about the challenges produced in data science around the responsibilities and accountabilities of individuals in the industry. The author advocates a flexible, participative management of data practices. Regulatory agencies should be responsible for encouraging data scientists to examine ethical implications of their work…

The Ethics of Smart Cities and Urban Science

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Author: Rob Kitchin; Publisher: The Royal Society; Publication Year: 2016. The following article talks about how software-enabled technologies and urban big data have become essential to the functioning of cities. Consequently, urban operational governance and city services are becoming highly responsive to a form of data-driven urbanism that is the key mode of production for smart cities. At the heart of data-driven…

Privacy in the Digital Age

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Author: Nicholas Martino; Publisher: TEDx Talks; Publication Year: 2016. The following video features Martino who addresses the issues of privacy and individual rights in the era of digital age that everyone should treat seriously. It is not a thing that if you do not have anything bad, then you should not worry about people knowing about it. It is innate in people to want to take certain facts in certain details about our lives…

Social Media, Big Data, and Mental Health: Current Advances and Ethical Implications

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Author: Mike Conway, Daniel O’Connor; Publisher: Current Opinion in Psychology; Publication Year: 2016. The following article discusses how social media big data being combined with natural language processing (NLP) technology can address public health research questions. Mental health is the fifth greatest contributor to the global burden of disease. Population mental health systems require strengthening to address this need…

OkCupid Study Reveals the Perils of Big-Data Science

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Author: Michael Zimmer; Publisher: Wired; Publication Year: 2016. The following article describes how a group of Danish researchers publicly released a dataset of nearly 70,000 OkCupid users, including usernames, age, gender, location, the type of relationship (or sex) they are looking for, personality traits, and answers to thousands of profiling questions used by the site. Emil, the project’s lead, stated…