Announcing the Web Science 2018 Ethics Workshop

Along with my co-organizers, Charles Ess and Anja Bechmann, I’m excited to announce the Web Science 2018 Ethics Workshop: “Confronting Ethical Challenges in Web Science Research“, scheduled for Sunday 27 May 2018 at VU Amsterdam.

This half-day workshop, organized by the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) Ethics Working Group in partnership with the PERVADE: Pervasive Data Ethics project, will foster community engagement with the ethical challenges faced by web science researchers working with big data sources, including from social media platforms, health apps, internet of things, and related pervasive data sets.

The growing prevalence of data-rich networked information technologies, such as the internet of things, wearable devices, ubiquitous sensing, and social sharing platforms, brings a similar increase in the flow of rich, deep, and often identifiable personal information. These data flows— across devices, platforms, and between users—are increasingly available to computational and web science researchers to capture and process to discover new insights about how all these domains intersect. The growth in the scale, scope, speed, and depth of data-intensive computational activities, however, requires that we continuously confront the ethical frameworks and assumptions that guide web science research agenda now, and in the future.

Please read our call for papers and workshop schedule for more information.