Information Ethics
The Ethics Institute has a robust and diverse research agenda in information ethics, including AI and data ethics. Below are issues on which Institute faculty work. The Ethics Institute also hosts an annual Information Ethics Roundtable that brings together researchers from around the world. More on information ethics related centers and programs across Northeastern’s colleges and campuses can be found here.
As part of a larger NSF-funded project on the integration of autonomous robotic systems into seafood processing plants, this project looks at the ethical issues that arise when developing systems that require close human-robot interactions and how best to address those issues.
Researcher: John Basl
This project involves developing a conceptual framework for social justice as it relates to the treatment of persons as seekers, sources, and subjects of information.
Researcher: Kay Mathiesen
This project concerns the use of oversight committees for building AI and data ethics capacity within organizations and society more broadly.
A roadmap for how to build AI and data ethics oversight committees can be found here.
Researchers: Ronald Sandler and John Basl
This project concerns how to approach incorporating ethics into autonomous vehicles and other machine learning systems.
Researcher: John Basl
This project concerns whether and in what ways artificial intelligence could have moral status that requires us to take its interests into consideration.
Researchers: John Basl and Ronald Sandler
This project involves conceptual and epistemological analysis of different forms of disinformation, as well as ethical analysis of possible responses to it.
Researchers: Don Fallis, Kay Mathiesen, Ronald Sandler, and John Wihbey
This project studies how different approaches to soliciting and aggregating individual preferences can result in different social choice outcomes, with an emphasis on its implications for democracy and electoral practices.
Researchers: Rory Smead, John Basl, and Ronald Sandler
This project analyzes and assesses the extent to which hacktivism is a form of civil disobedience and what it implies for its justifiability.
Researcher: Candice Delmas
This project clarifies that conceptions of justice and fairness appropriate to different machine learning systems and applications, as well as evaluates strategies for operationalizing them in practice through technology design and implementation.
Researchers: John Basl, Kay Mathiesen, Will Fleisher, Tina Eliassi-Rad and Ronald Sandler
This project concerns how to effectively and responsibly engage in ethics labeling of information technology products and services.
Researchers: Ronald Sandler, John Wihbey, and Kay Mathiesen