PUBL 634 - Data, Ethics and Governance

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This course will address ethical questions concerning public policy decisionmaking. Given the ubiquity of computing and the use of digital traces by both businesses and policy makers, the course will focus on emergent concerns about digitization, data and et hics. The course will analyze the ethics of data throughout what data scientists now call a data lifecycle. The course will especially focus on the current press to make data public, the regulatory concern about data privacy, and the move to automate decisionmaking through algorithms. The course will address both the ethics of practice, and ethics as outward facing, or concerning the purposes for which analytic work is done. In analyzing the ethics of work practices, the course will analyze inclusion and exclusion at work, including responses to discrimination. Public policy increasingly makes data publicly available, and as public policy is asked to govern use of data in private businesses. Both point to the importance of governance for privacy and equality. It will also address questions of assessing model validity as an ethical question. It will also address new scholarship on algorithms and algorithmic bias.
Course ID: 102679
Components: Lecture
Grading Method: R