People who do PhDs seem to have either strongly positive or strongly negative experiences — for some, it’s the best time of their lives, while others regret the decision to do a PhD. Few career choices involve such a colossal time commitment, so it’s worth thinking carefully about whether a PhD is right for you, […]
Can Classes on Field Experiments Scale? Lessons from SOC412
July 16, 2018 by
Last semester, I taught a Princeton undergrad/grad seminar on the craft, politics, and ethics of behavioral experimentation. The idea was simple: since large-scale human subjects research is now common outside universities, we need to equip students to make sense of that kind of power and think critically about it. In this post, I share lessons for teaching […]
Teaching the Craft, Ethics, and Politics of Field Experiments
July 3, 2018 by
How can we manage the politics and ethics of large-scale online behavioral research? When this question came up in April during a forum on Defending Democracy at Princeton, Ed Felten mentioned on stage that I was teaching a Princeton undergrad class on this very topic. No pressure! Ed was right about the need: people with […]
Refining the Concept of a Nutritional Label for Data and Models
May 3, 2018 by
By Julia Stoyanovich (Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Drexel University) and Bill Howe (Associate Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington) In August 2016, Julia Stoyanovich and Ellen P. Goodman spoke in this forum about the importance of bringing interpretability to the algorithmic transparency debate. They focused on algorithmic rankers, discussed the harms […]
Ethics Education in Data Science: Classroom Topics and Assignments
April 26, 2018 by
[This blog post is a continuation of a recap of a recent workshop on data science ethics education.] The creation of ethics modules that can be inserted into a variety of classes may help ensure that ethics as a subject is not marginalized and enable professors with little experience in philosophy or with fewer resources […]
