• Question: What morals do you have within you work? Eg. Animal Testing, Human Testing etc

    Asked by anon-223304 to Valerio, Sreejita, Sam, Kate, Anastasia, Adam on 19 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Anastasia Aliferi

      Anastasia Aliferi answered on 19 Nov 2019:

      Everything we do has to be approved by our ethics committee. No matter what we use we have to make sure we don’t use more than we absolutely need and we do everything in the best possible way. I work with human samples like blood or saliva and we make sure we inform our volunteers about everything we do and give them the option to leave from the study at any point! We also have very strict guidelines on keeping information about people and we make sure it is safely stored and destroyed when it is not needed anymore.

    • Photo: Sreejita Ghosh

      Sreejita Ghosh answered on 20 Nov 2019:

      In computer science, like in any other science, I have to ensure that the results I get are reproducible by any other scientist trying to repeat my method. I have to provide my codes and a dataset when I publish my paper so that interested people can follow my steps and try to recreate my results. I shouldn’t try to fir my model to the data but rather try to see how much of the data fits into my mathematical model (so no tweaking, tweaking is cheating)- this ensures fairness in my code, so that people can use my code on other datasets as well and our theory/hypothesis remain true no matter which dataset is being used. We have to acknowledge in the paper the help we got for the research, for example I have to say how helpful the computer center of Peregrine (the supercomputer) was towards letting me use the machine. We also have to “cite references”, i.e, mention which previous works by other scientists influenced in finding the problem I am trying to solve and the methods I used or not used, and the method I developed for solving that problem.

    • Photo: Adam Wootton

      Adam Wootton answered on 20 Nov 2019:

      We don’t have a lot of ethical issues in Computer Science, beyond making sure that our work can be repeated by others and was performed legitimately. However, this is an increasing amount of debate about the ethics in Artificial Intelligence – will it be automatically biased against certain groups of people based on the data that we give it? What if we make AI so good that it can perform jobs currently performed by humans and it puts people out of work? We have to be very careful to consider all of these issues!

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