VISION

To center justice and ethics in the conceptualization, design, and applications of data science research at Cal Poly.

To put into practice: "Data for all. Data for good."

Purpose

Data for ethics and social justice emerged from the larger Cal Poly Strategic Research Initiative (SRI) Program awarded by the division of Research, Economic Development & Graduate Education. The ideas and knowledge that have emerged from this interdisciplinary committee have been captured on this website.

Our goal is to go beyond ethical concerns where the goal is to ‘do no harm’, but to move towards more just outcomes. That is, our contribution to the field acknowledges that the world we live in, and those who hold decision making power hold biases, and these biases have resulted in systematic and historic inequities for those on the margins (i.e., Black, indigenous, people of color, disabled, etc.), especially pertaining to the area of data sciences and artificial intelligence (Benjamin et al., 2019; Charitidis, 2019; The IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, 2019; United Nations, 2015). To this end, our team aims to design solutions in the field of data sciences that not only mitigate harm but rather do good — and improve the lives of those who have been historically and systematically marginalized.

The objective of this work is to provide guidance for researchers to properly engage in ethical reflection & communicate those risks broadly. This includes ways to think critically about the harms that can be caused through their research process or outcomes, and address those issues.