Meenakshi Mani, PhD student in Digital Education and PhD Fellow at the Centre for Technomoral Futures (CTMF), worked as a Teaching Assistant on the Edinburgh Futures Institute postgraduate course Translational Data And AI Ethics. In a recent CTMF blog post, James Gartforth, Benedetta Catanzariti, and Meenakshi shared their experience designing and teaching the course at the intersection of social science and computer science.
The contributors considered the "translation" that happens in the conceptualization and implementation of AI ethics, a notion originally defined in medical ethics as “the work required to bridge the gap between laboratory research and real-world clinical practice”.
The course was divided into three sections: an overview of research investigating the actors involved in the data and AI industry; the contexts and environments of tech work; and finally, examples of translational approaches to data and AI ethics. A practical activity, in which students were paired with Informatics undergraduates to develop start-up-style projects, concluded the course.
James, Benedetta and Meenakshi highlighted that the student response to the course represented an opportunity for discussion on the importance and the challenges of implementing translational ethics teaching programmes in more traditional computer and data science degrees.
Read the full blog post on the Centre for Technomoral Futures website: Bridging the Gap: Reflections from teaching translational data and AI ethics.