About the event
Organisers: Jon Crowcroft (The Alan Turing Institute and University of Cambridge, UK), Marina Jirotka (University of Oxford, UK)
This event is invite only, register using the code in your invitation.
A number of sessions will be recorded and publicly available on our YouTube channel following the event.
Motivation for the event
Researchers working in the field of data science are increasingly facing new challenges and dilemmas over what constitutes ethical practice. The types of data available now to researchers and the ways in which these data can be analysed are often so new that best practice criteria for them do not yet exist; dilemmas may also occur where the law is unclear or where what is legal might also be considered unethical. Not all research dilemmas undergo formal Research Ethics Committee (REC) or Legal Services review, and there is little sharing of experience between organisations: institutions and researchers are unable to get a clear overview of their exposure to risk in this area.
Over the past year we have been talking to researchers and research governance professionals at Oxford and beyond. We have established that researchers and institutions are increasingly running into ethical questions for which there are no ready answers. As a result we are developing a pathway for people to share and learn from each other’s experience. This workshop forms an important step in the development of this pathway
Workshop outline
The workshop will bring together key stakeholders in this area – researchers working with data, ethics experts, administration and oversight professionals, and other interested professionals. A series of interactive sessions will facilitate the sharing of experience and discussion to identify potential solutions to the issues at hand. Key questions to be addressed include:
- How can potentially risky research be supported?
- What can we learn from existing models, and what needs to be explored or developed?
- What steps can we take next, and who should be involved?
We hope the discussions at this workshop will help create a network of engaged practitioners, ideally leading to a joint study to engage with researchers, ethics and legal experts, to develop guidance, training materials, or other activities which the community deems necessary to proactively meet the challenge of ensuring best practice at the frontier of research.