Ethics in computer science education
Ethical issues like privacy, biased algorithms, and unintended discriminating behavior from software are increasingly central in algorithm design and software development. At the department of informatics, there is no single course handling these issues; we try to incorporate these in all our courses, and it is so far left by large to the course lecturer. How can we achieve a more coherent and unified education and training in ethical issues in all our bachelor programs?
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At our department gathering which was to take place in Voss April 27-28, we had planned a series of talks on educational issues. One of the talks was by Marija Slavkovik. We are delighted to be able to offer this talk as a department seminar via Zoom instead.
Marija Slavkovik is an associate professor at the Department of information and media sciences of our university. Her specialty is within the areas of machine ethics, logic reasoning, collective reasoning and decision making. Her background is from computer science and informatics, with a specialization in computational logic. She has extensive collaboration with our machine learning and algorithms groups, and she has co-supervised students with the optimization group.
Marija is regularly teaching a master level course on ethics in AI, and she is a frequent invited speaker on ethical dilemmas in computer science, especially in AI. She is a member of several national and international organizations involved in AI and multiagent systems, and she is a member of the educational forum of NORA.
Marija will share with us her experiences with teaching ethics to information science students, and show us examples of unwanted behavior of software and unintended biases in algorithms design, which are very useful for informatics students to learn about and reflect upon. We hope that we will have a lively discussion at the end of the seminar about how we can achieve a more consolidated effort in educating our students on these ethical problems.
Everybody is very welcome to join the seminar via Zoom.