It’s that time of year again when many of us are taking time off for summer holidays and drawing up our summer reading lists. At Ethics Dialogues we have started to put together our summer reading list covering some of the areas we are currently busy with including brain research initiatives, data governance and ethics of Artificial Intelligence (AI). We include some interesting articles and documents published in recent months. To make sure that everyone can easily get a hold of the texts, we only include open access publications.
If you have suggestions what else we should read, please let us know either by sending email to ethicsdialogues@dmu.ac.uk or leaving your reading recommendations in the comments area below this post. We look forward to hearing from you!
Brain research initiatives
As members of the EU’s Human Brain Project, we are interested in current and future developments of the HBP and other brain initiatives. The recent article by Amunts and her co-authors provides an overview of the HBP efforts of developing the European brain research infrastructure. The Neuroethics Roadmap of the US Brain initiative allows us to learn about the ethics agenda of our American colleagues and see what they have learned from the HBP.
- Amunts K, Knoll AC, Lippert T, Pennartz CMA, Ryvlin P, Destexhe A, Jirsa VK, D’Angelo E and Bjaalie JG (2019) The Human Brain Project—Synergy between neuroscience, computing, informatics, and brain-inspired technologies. PLoS Biol 17(7): e3000344. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000344
- Neuroethics Roadmap for NIH Brain Initiative, 2019.
Data Governance
Ethics-related data governance is one of the key tasks of Ethics Support. In this work we combine research and practice. The article by Lefaivre et al provides an opportunity to learn about good data governance practices in other parts of the world. The article by Leonelli focuses on underlying questions on how data are conceptualized and what data are included and excluded from databases. Her contribution is part of an inaugural issue of a new open access journal Harvard Data Science Review that includes a number of other interesting articles on data governance and AI.
- Lefaivre S, Behan B, Vaccarino A, Evans K, Dharsee M, Gee T, Dafnas C, Mikkelsen T and Theriault E (2019) Big Data Needs Big Governance: Best Practices From Brain-CODE, the Ontario-Brain Institute’s Neuroinformatics Platform. Front. Genet. 10:191. doi: 10.3389/fgene.2019.00191
- Leonelli S (2019) Data Governance is Key to Interpretation: Reconceptualizing Data in Data Science. Harvard Data Science Review. https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.17405bb6
AI ethics
One of the topics on our agenda recently has been AI ethics. Recently AI ethics has been a very busy field with many stakeholders around the world developing their principles and guidelines. The article by Jobin et al provides a much-needed mapping of numerous initiatives in this field. Well-known challenges of AI include gender and diversity. The report from the Leverhulme Centre for Future Intelligence outlines four proposals for tackling these issues.
- Jobin A, Ienca M and Vayena E (2019) Artificial Intelligence: the global landscape of ethics guidelines arXiv:1906.11668
- Collet, C and Dillon, S (2019) AI and Gender: Four Proposals for Future Research. Report. Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.41459
Future of EU research and innovation policy
As members of one of the EU FET Flagship projects, we are interested in future directions of EU research and innovation policy. Mazzucato’s report elaborates on mission-oriented research and innovation policy that is expected to be one of the cornerstones of the next EU research and innovation framework programme Horizon Europe (2021-2027).
- Mazzucato M (2019) Governing Missions in the European Union. Independent Expert Report. Brussels: European Commission. doi:10.2777/618697
We wish a very good summer and inspiring reads to everyone!