Keynote Presentations: 

Join public sector technologists for an address on the state of affairs at the intersection of government data usage and ethics. This talk will contextualize the upcoming conversations within the broader consideration of working for the common good.

Data Privacy and Ownership: 

This panel centers on the tension between protecting individuals’ personal information and the corporate and government interests in the collection and use of that data. We will explore the legal, security, and economic frameworks that influence the personal information marketplace. The conversation will address human data rights and what it means to maintain control of the self in the digital sphere. From that perspective: What does it mean to control or own another human’s information? What rights do individual humans have to their data? How can those rights be protected?

Transparency and Explainability: 

This panel will investigate the reasons to fight for interpretability of black box algorithms, and the challenges with doing so. Beyond the explainability of models themselves: How does one articulate, publicize, and assess the ethics of the decisions that went into making an algorithm? What are the best practices and tradeoffs for this transparency? How do we hold ourselves and others accountable for the impact of our algorithms: is this the role of the government, investigative journalists, the creators themselves? How do we prevent tools, built with good intentions, from morphing beyond the intentions of their creators?

Bias & Fairness:

Algorithms are at risk of replicating and amplifying human biases. This panel will reflect on some troubling examples of discriminatory outcomes led or influenced by algorithmic biases. Given these problems, the panel will discuss what we can do both individually and collectively to address the unfair consequences of data and AI bias. How does one anticipate and evaluate the potential implicit biases of the algorithms we built? What steps do we need to take to ensure that our data-driven processes do not contribute to systemic inequalities?

Role of Data in Society: 

This panel will explore the ethical dilemmas created by quantitative data’s growing place in business and policy. Cutting through the hype around new data-focused techniques, when and where is the use of data and algorithms (in)appropriate? How do we expand our notion of what constitutes data, acknowledge its lack of neutrality, and balance its use with other forms of knowledge- and decision-making?

The Future:

How does one think about ethics and data? How do we define harms and establish pathways for policymakers to communicate the threats of Artificial Intelligence to its users? This panel will bring perspectives across academia, government, and the private sector to grapple with how our society can meaningfully "quantify" ethics as we move forward.