COMP8410 Data Mining - Essay on the ethics and social impact of a data mining project
COMP8410 Data Mining S1 2023
Assignment 1
This assignment specification may be updated to reflect clarifications and modifications after it is first issued.
In this assignment, you are required to submit a single essay in the form of a single PDF file with a file-name that includes your University u-number ID. The first page must have a clearly identified title and author, identified by both name and university u-number, which may form a separate cover page. You may also attach supporting information (appendices) in the same PDF file. Appendices will not be marked but may be treated as supporting information to your essay.
It is strongly suggested that you start working on the assignment right away. You can submit as many times as you wish. Only the most recent submission at the due date will be assessed.
Task
You are to write a well-researched essay that critically evaluates the ethics and social impact of a data mining project.
1. Select a Data Mining project and describe it
You are asked to select a data mining project. This could be a project from your workplace; a past, completed project, a current, active project, or a future project in planning stages. You may select a scientific project, but it must be the case that the project raises sufficient genuine ethical questions for you to have something to write about in the assignment. For example, the project may use data corresponding to attributes of individual people or organisations that could be privacy-sensitive or for whom the mining results could entrench bias against them. The project must involve data mining or analytics; simple data collection and release, whether intentional or not, is not sufficient. The project must be conducted by your employer and its agents, and you must be sufficiently involved in a professional capacity to have access to organisational information or insight.
Alternatively, select Foresight or Med-PaLM, both data mining projects applying language models to health care, as discussed in New Scientist 28 Jan 2023 p 28 (provided). You will be able to find other information, including academic literature on these works online. Remember to cite carefully.
Hybrid, on-campus and online You are expected to choose the Foresight/Med-PALM option here, although you may choose the workplace project option if you prefer and are involved in it as above. Blended only You are expected to choose the workplace project but if it is difficult for you to find one (e.g., if you are not employed, or you cannot share sufficient information about a workplace project), then you may select Foresight/Med-PALM.
In your essay you will need to describe the project in terms of its aims, its methods, the source and nature of the data it uses, the authority for the organisation’s access to the data, and the expected use and impact of any results obtained. For the impact you should consider not only how the results are planned to be used, but also how they otherwise could be or have been used. In every case, you will need to consider whether the data was provided with informed consent, whether it is or could be seen to be of a personal nature, and whether the outcomes of the data mining will contribute to social improvement or improved services to consumers or the public. You will also need to describe any other aspects of the project that are necessary for you to address the other aspects of your essay. If you are describing a workplace project you must declare your involvement.
For a workplace project, you are encouraged to attach non-confidential background material, written by others, concerning the project about which you write, where this may help to support the information provided in your essay. This should be clearly marked as an appendix and its source and status identified.
2. Consider the ethical aspects of the project.
In 2022 UNESCO published the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (SHS/BIO/PI/2021/1) for voluntary application by Member States. The recommendation is broad in scope and far-reaching in implementation responsibilities over the whole AI system lifecycle. It includes a statement of values and 10 principles that should be respected by all actors in the AI lifecycle, including “data scientists, end-users, business enterprises, universities and public and private entities” (p10). In 2018, the Australian Government Office of the Australian Information Commissioner released the Guide to Data Analytics and the Australian Privacy Principles (APP). Meanwhile, the research community has been actively addressing the principle of explainability and progress is surveyed in Du, Liu and Hu, (2020) “Techniques for Interpretable Machine Learning”, Communications of the ACM 63(1).
You are asked to discuss the ethical aspects of your data mining project with particular reference to both the UNESCO recommendation and the APP. You must consider the privacy of individuals where personal information is involved: such as credit card transactions, health care records, personal financial records, biological traits, criminal or justice investigations, ethnicity or lifestyle choices.
You may need to address complex issues, like whether the potential cost to a few may be outweighed by the benefit to many. You are not expected to provide simple, one-directional answers. While your project may raise many ethical issues, paying attention to the page limit, you are advised to broadly introduce those that you recognise but then to focus your discussion more deeply on some particular issue(s) you choose.
3. Rcommend how the project should, could, or should have, managed ethical issues related to data mining.
You are expected to form an opinion on the appropriate measures to put in place to address the ethical issues you have identified. You must place your opinion in the context of technological solutions available to address ethical issues in data mining. However, you are not asked to consider those methods in detail; a light coverage of the expected benefits of the approach is sufficient. The Du et al paper will assist you with technical approaches to some ethical issues you may encounter. Other potential technical approaches are summarised in the course notes for Week 1. You are also specifically required to go beyond such technical solutions alone to consider procedural, governance or educational approaches to managing ethical issues.
While you are asked to provide your own point of view of measures that could or should be taken, you are also asked to explicitly critique alternative views, such as, perhaps, the measures that were put in place when the project was conducted, or measures that relate to the project that you can discover from the literature or Web sources. Alternatively, you could interview colleagues in your workplace (but not students of this course) in order to gain alternative points of view about what measures could be taken that are ethically acceptable and proportionate. You may also interview other people that are potentially affected by the results of the project. Consider attaching a transcript, recording or extracts from the interviews as appendices to your essay – such material, where relevant, will be considered as evidence of your research for the essay.
You are free to conclude that ethical considerations would recommend against the project going ahead, but any conclusion you make must be supported by a well-reasoned argument.
General Comments
An abstract or executive summary is not required. A cover sheet is optional and does not contribute to the page count. No particular layout is specified, but you should follow a professional style and use no smaller than 11 point typeface and stay within the maximum specified page count. It is a strict maximum: long-winded or irrelevant content within the limit will be penalised and text beyond the limit will be treated as non-existent. Page margins, heading sizes, paragraph breaks and so forth are not specified but a professional style must be maintained. Appendices may be used and do not contribute to the page count, but appendices may be only quickly scanned or used for reference and will not be specifically marked.
Your essay is expected to be a well-researched piece of critical writing. You may find this resource from Sydney University helpful information on what is expected in critical writing, and noting that critical writing necessarily includes elements of descriptive, analytical, and persuasive writing as well.
You should play close attention to references, both to demonstrate the research component of your essay, to support your argument with expert opinion and evidence, and also to appropriately attribute the work of others including all reference documents made available to you (but not this assignment specification itself). No particular referencing style is required. However, you are expected to reference conventionally, conveniently, and consistently. Your references should be sufficient to both unambiguously identify the source, to describe the nature of the source, and also to retrieve the source in online and (if possible) traditional publisher formats.
An assessment rubric is provided. The rubric will be used to mark your assignment. You are advised to use it to supplement your understanding of what is expected for the assignment and to direct your effort towards the most rewarding parts of the work.
