CS 5/692, Winter 2020

Assignments

Readings & Sakai Posts

Before each class session, you will write a brief discussion forum post on Sakai containing your personal reflections on that week’s reading assignments. These reflections are intended to be open-ended, and you may focus on any aspect(s) of the readings that caught your interest. What did you find interesting? Troubling? Did you disagree with something that one of the authors said? Did one of the readings make you think about a recent event?

The grading rubric for each post will be as follows:

• 20%: Is the post present? Was it turned in on time? Is it at least vaguely related to the week’s reading?
• 40%: Does the post give evidence of having done the reading? Are you using vocabulary from the readings to talk about them? Are you referring to ideas, themes, issues, etc. from more than one of the readings?
• 40%: Does the post demonstrate that you not only have read the material, but have thought about it? Raising questions about the authors’ work and their conclusions, bringing in new ideas and questions of your own, drawing comparisons to topics and readings from previous weeks, etc.

These forum posts are a required component of your participation grade for each week, and must be completed at least one hour before class starts. This will give me time to review everybody’s posts and prepare for our class session. Posts uploaded after class has started are welcome, but will not count towards your participation grade!

During each week’s class session, everybody is expected to actively participate in the discussion at least once.

KWLA paper

As we progress through the term, you will be working on a “KWLA” paper:

• At the beginning of the term, you will write the first section (~1 page) about what you already know about research ethics and ethics in machine learning…
• … and a second section (~1 page) about what you want to learn during the class.
• At the end of the term, you will write a longer summary (~3 pages) of what you learned …
• … as well as how you plan to apply it in your future studies, research, and work (~2 pages).

You will keep notes for the “L” and “A” sections throughout the class.

Due dates:

• “K”, “W” essays: Jan. 13
• “L”, “A” (appended ot the “K”/”W” sections): Mar. 20

Note that these are not intended to be research papers. They are meant to be personal essays. If you are unclear about the difference, the Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab has a useful set of resources about different types of writing assignments. Also, please feel free to come to office hours to discuss or anything else relating to the class.

Final Paper: Case study

Choose an incident, event, occurrence, experiment, application of machine learning, etc. that has both computational and ethical considerations. You may pick anything you find interesting or compelling, and you should feel free to either choose something that was discussed in one of our reading sets or to pick something entirely different that you find on your own. It can be an example of an ethical lapse or failure, an example of a company/organization/individual acting properly, or a more nuanced situation altogether. This is intentionally open-ended, and we expect you to have to do some reading and research on your own to identify an interesting topic.

Once you have made your selection, generate an analysis following the analytical framework outlined in section 9.3.1 of Gift of Fire, 5th edition. We expect your analysis to be in the 3-5 page range, and to include appropriately-cited external sources (don’t worry, citations do not count towards the page count).

Due date: Mar. 20