Seminar period 3 2020/2021: Ethical responsibilities

Reflection seminar in February 2021

Here you find instructions for how to prepare for the seminar and the group schedule of the seminar. Before the seminar, you also need to write a reflection document and read and comment on other group members' reflection documents.

The first two qualitative targets of the Swedish degree of master are:

• demonstrate the ability to make assessments in the main field of study informed by relevant disciplinary, social and ethical issues and also to demonstrate awareness of ethical aspects of research and development work
• demonstrate insight into the possibilities and limitations of research, its role in society and the responsibility of the individual for how it is used

In this seminar, you will reflect on your ethical responsibilities for how your work is used.

Preparations for the reflection

• There will be new groups during the seminars in period 3 and 4. The groups are based on the (sub)track that you reported in the track/subtrack quiz before Christmas. The groups are now fixed and cannot be changed. Find your new group number in Grades/Omdömen (under Group number, spring 2021), a number between 101 and 124. Also look up in the course memo (or below) who is the mentor of your group.
• An influential 2018 study found that state-of-the-art facial-recognition software performed much worse at identifying the gender of women and people of colour than at classifying the faces of white men.  Since then, calls for bans of facial-recognition software have frequently quoted concerns over demographic bias. ACLU attorney Phil Mayor says "[the technology] remains too dangerous a tool for governments to use to surveil their own citizens for no compelling return." Please read the following article: Castelvecchi, Davide (November 18, 2020). "Is facial recognition too biased to be let loose?" Nature 587, 347-349 (2020). doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03186-4 Links to an external site.
• The 2021 storming of the United States Capitol was a violent attack against the US Congress at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. According to Renee DiResta, a researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory, the violence was the result of online movements operating in closed social media networks. Please read the following article: Frenkel, Sheera (January 6, 2021). "The storming of Capitol Hill was organized on social media". The New York Times. Archived from the original on January 6, 2021. Retrieved January 6, 2021.
  https://web.archive.org/web/20210106220539/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/us/politics/protesters-storm-capitol-hill-building.html Links to an external site.
• Watch the first 8m30s of the talk "Code Is Not Neutral: the Ethics of Programming"
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7tRWuXlOak Links to an external site. by Clarissa Peterson.
• Through an app called "This Is Your Digital Life", British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica obtained personal data of up to 87 million Facebook profiles. Answers to questions shown in the app enabled building psychological profiles of users, which were used by Cambridge Analytica to provide "analytical assistance" to the 2016 US presidential campaign of Donald Trump, among others. Please read the Wikipedia article about the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal Links to an external site.).

Group schedule

The seminar will due to the pandemic be given in Zoom this time. During the seminar, you will need to have the camera on, because you have to take an active role in the discussions, and this is part of the examination of the course.

Find your group number in the table below and look up when and where your seminar will be. The seminar is about 50 minutes, and it is important to be on time. Notice the odd starting times (10 minutes past)!