Ethics in data science education

Abstract

There is a growing recognition of the importance of ethics education in data science programs. Recent news stories about data breaches and algorithmic biases indicate that big data projects raise ethical concerns with the potential to inflict harm on a wide societal or global scale. In this paper, we address three main research questions: (1) what curricular recommendations have been proposed for the teaching of ethics in undergraduate data science courses, (2) what codes of ethics are relevant to data science, and (3) how can we characterize the proposed codes to help an educator choose which to include in a data science course? We conclude with an overview of an approach to teaching ethics in undergraduate data science courses.