We use cookies to help you navigate efficiently and perform certain functions. You will find detailed information about all cookies under each consent category below.
The cookies that are categorized as "Necessary" are stored on your browser as they are essential for enabling the basic functionalities of the site. ...
Necessary cookies are required to enable the basic features of this site, such as providing secure log-in or adjusting your consent preferences. These cookies do not store any personally identifiable data.
Functional cookies help perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collecting feedback, and other third-party features.
Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics such as the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.
Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with customized advertisements based on the pages you visited previously and to analyze the effectiveness of the ad campaigns.
Thoughts on regulatory and ethical issues relating to the use of technology in education and research
After a couple of years when the question of data location had dropped a little down the priority list, two things have pushed it back up again. First, the Schrems II decision of the European Court, which cancelled the US-EU Privacy Shield and added some – but it’s not yet clear how onerous – new […]
To ensure a lively discussion at a recent round-table on AI Ethics participants were asked, provocatively, “was the A Level algorithm fair?”. OK, I can be provoked… It depends on what you mean by “fair”… As has been widely discussed, the main objective set for those who designed the algorithm seems to have been to […]
Alan Shark’s SOCITM ShareNational keynote looked at why regulation is not sufficient to deal with emerging technologies, and the complementary role that needs to be played by ethics. Although privacy is not the only threat posed by such technologies, it does seem to be the one that has got people interested in the debate, whether over […]
Allison Gardner’s keynote to the SOCTIM ShareNational conference last week highlighted how using AI responsibly is at least as much about how decisions are made as about the technology itself. Questions of “transparency” often focus on whether the AI is explainable, but how decisions were made – even how a particular problem was identified and […]
Perhaps surprisingly – given that its title was “Digital ethics” – last week’s SOCITM panel session spent a lot of time exploring things that aren’t “digital”. Although the discussion focussed on local government, a lot of the ideas seemed relevant to education, too. Don’t be solutionist: technology might not be the right option. When identifying […]
A panel on Algorithms at the UK IGF asked whether the summer of 2020 was a catastrophe – “mutant algorithm” having entered political discourse – or an opportunity to work with a population that is now much more aware of the personal significance of the debate? “Transparency” is often cited as a remedy, but we […]
A panel on “Building Trust in a Digital Identity” at the UK IGF may have raised more questions than answers, but at least highlighted why doing so is taking so long. Since terminology can be confusing, what was being discussed was how to prove facts about your real-world self to an online service: for example […]
Lilian Edwards gave a fascinating keynote at the UK IGF this morning, on Protecting Digital Rights During a Pandemic. Though privacy is the most often discussed right in the context of pandemic response, rights of free speech and free assembly also need to be borne in mind. Although the impact of national schemes (contact tracing […]
BEREC, the board of European Telecoms Regulators, has just published its updated guidance on enforcing the Network Neutrality Regulation. Jisc has been working with the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams (FIRST) for nearly five years to ensure that this legislation and guidance didn’t discourage legitimate practices to secure the operation of networks: this […]
Might some of the problems in applying data protection law to machine learning arise because we’re using too simple a model? Sometimes an over-simplified model can be hard to apply in practice. So here’s a model that’s a bit more complex but, I hope, a lot easier to apply. It’s also a lot more informative, […]