Join in#

Everyone is welcome to get involved in Data Ethics Club, as much or as little as you’d like to! We would love to hear your point of view at our discussion groups, to have your support in organising or running a meeting, or to add your contributions to our reading list.

You don’t need to be a data ethicist (we’re not!), or a data scientist - having a variety of different people is how we learn from each other. It’s a friendly and welcoming group and we often have new people drop by, so why not try it?

If you’re looking for information on how to set up your own Data Ethics Club then you should head to our section about re-using our materials.

Stay up to date

Sign up to the mailing list

If you would like an email before each meeting with the reading material and a link to the Zoom call then join the mailing list. Sometimes we also send out information about other data ethics related events being organised by our community.

How our meetings work#

We meet every other week (Wednesdays, 1pm, UK time) to talk about something from the reading list. Out upcoming meeting dates are available below. They last one hour and are held on Zoom. We usually hear a short summary of the piece, split into breakout rooms to discuss some prompts, and then come back together to share our thoughts as a group.

If you’d like a flavour of what we usually discuss then go to our Write Ups page and click on any of the summaries from past meetings to read about our discussions (these are also listed below).

We follow a code of conduct during Data Ethics Group which is designed to make sure everyone feels welcome and confortable sharing their experiences and take on the material. Please read it before attending.

Upcoming meetings#

Date (dd.mm.yyyy, UK time)

Discussion Material

27.09.2023, 1pm

Cancelled in support of UCU strikes

11.10.2023, 1pm

Privacy and Loyalty Card Data

25.10.2023, 1pm

To be decided

08.11.2023, 1pm

To be decided

22.11.2023, 1pm

To be decided

06.12.2023, 1pm

To be decided

Past Meetings#

You can see a record of what we have discussed previously here.

Date

Discussion Material

Summary

31.05.2023, 1pm

Classifying ‘toxic’ content online

Coming soon

05.06.2023, 2pm

JGI Data Week Special! Find out more here.

Coming soon

17.05.2023, 1pm

Designing Accountable Systems

Coming soon

03.05.2023, 1pm

Queer in AI: A Case Study in Community-Led Participatory AI

Coming soon

19.04.2023, 1pm

Social Biases in NLP Models as Barriers for Persons with Disabilities

Read the write up

29.03.2023, 1pm

The Tech We Won’t Build

Read the write up

08.03.2023, 3pm

Limits and Possibilities for “Ethical AI” in Open Source: A Study of Deepfakes, plus a related short talk from David Widder

Read the write up

08.02.2023, 1pm

ChatGPT listed as author on research papers: many scientists disapprove

Read the write up

25.01.2023, 1pm

Data Ethics New Years Resolutions discussion!

Read the write up

14.12.2022, 1pm

Defective Altruism

Read the write up

16.11.2022, 1pm

The Ethics of AI Generated Art

Read the write up

30.11.2022, 1pm

Cancelled in support of the UCU strikes

02.11.2022, 1pm

The data was there – so why did it take coronavirus to wake us up to racial health inequalities?

Read the write up

19.10.2022, 1pm

Patient and public involvement to build trust in artificial intelligence: A framework, tools, and case studies

Read the write up

05.10.2022, 1pm

The Failures of Algorithmic Fairness

Read the write up

21.09.2022, 1pm

Hacking the cis-tem

Read the write up

16.06.2022, 1pm

Data Week Special - We watched a video by Virginia Eubanks (author of Automating Inequality)

Read the write up

01.06.2022, 1pm

Participatory data stewardship

Read the write up

18.05.2022, 1pm

Why Data Is Never Raw

Read the write up

04.05.2022, 1pm

Economies of Virtue: The Circulation of “Ethics” in Big Tech

Read the write up

06.04.2022, 1pm

The Algorithmic Colonization of Africa

Read the write up

23.03.2022, 1pm

The Tyranny of Structurelessness

Read the write up

09.03.2022, 1pm

AI in Warfare

Read the write up

23.02.2022, 1pm

N/A

Cancelled due to UCU Strikes.

09.02.2022, 1pm

“You Social Scientists Love Mind Games”: Experimenting in the “divide” between data science and critical algorithm studies

Read the write up

26.01.2022, 1pm

Which Programming Languages Use The Least Electricity?

Read the write up

12.01.2022, 1pm

Data Ethics Club’s New Years Resolutions - read the meeting summary for an overview

Read the write up

15.12.2021, 1pm

The Reith Lectures: Onora O’Neill - A Question of Trust

Read the write up

01.12.2021, 1pm: CANCELLED UCU STRIKE

NA: CANCELLED UCU STRIKE

No meeting, but feel free to have a read about the strikes here

17.11.2021, 1pm

Statistics, Eugenics, and Me

Read the write up

03.11.2021, 1pm

UK’s National AI Strategy - Pillar 3: Governing AI Effectively

Read the write up

20.10.2021, 1pm

Towards decolonising computational sciences

Read the write up

06.10.2021, 1pm

Structural Injustice and Individual Responsibility

Read the write up

NO MEETING 22.08

NO MEETING 22.08

N/A

08.09.2021, 1pm

ESR: Ethics and Society Review of Artificial Intelligence Research

Read the write up

25.08.2021, 1pm

Participant’s Perceptions of Twitter Research Ethics

Read the write up

11.08.2021, 1pm

What an ancient lake in Nevada reveals about the future of tech

Read the write up

28.07.2021, 1pm

The Rise of Private Spies

Read the write up

14.07.2021, 1pm

Numberphile: The Mathematics of Crime and Terrorism - Numberphile

Read the write up

17.06.2021: Inclusive and Ethical Data Science Seminar

Responsible Data and AI by Anjali Mazumder, Intro to The Turing Way by Malvika Sharan, and FAT Forensics ToolBox by Alex Hepburn

N/A

16.06.2021: Screening of Coded Bias

Coded Bias

N/A

26.05.2021, 1pm

‘Living in the Hidden Realms of AI: The Workers Perspective’

Read the write up

12.05.2021, 1pm

Critical Perspectives on Computer Vision

Read the write up

28.04.2021, 1pm

We created poverty. Algorithms won’t make that go away

Read the write up

14.04.2021, 1pm

Identifying gaps, opportunities and priorities in the applied data ethics guidance landscape

Read the write up

31.03.2021, 1pm

Dataism is Our New God

Read the write up

17.03.2021, 1pm

#bropenscience is broken science

Read the write up

03.03.2021, 1pm

Algorithmic injustice: a relational ethics approach (Birhane, 2021)

Nina’s Twitter Summary

17.02.2021, 1pm

On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?

Natalie’s Twitter Summary

03.02.2021, 1pm

Ethics can’t be a side hustle

Nina’s Twitter Summary

20.01.2021, 1pm

Executive Summary of the Review into bias in algorithmic decision making

Brief summary on the meeting document