Issues in Ethical Data Management

Serge Abiteboul is a researcher at Inria, the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique, and is currently  a member of the DI Lab at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris.He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, and a "thèse d'Etat" from the University of Paris-Sud. He was a Lecturer at the École Polytechnique and Visiting Professor at Stanford and Oxford University. He has been Chaire Professor at Collège de France in 2011-12 and Francqui Chair Professor at Namur University in 2012-2013. He co-founded the company Xyleme in 2000. 

Serge Abiteboul has received the ACM SIGMOD Innovation Award in 1998, the EADS Award from the French Academy of sciences in 2007,  the Milner Award in 2013, and was PI of the Webdam ERC (2008-2013). He became a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 2008, and a member the Academy of Europe in 2011. His research work focuses mainly on data, information and knowledge management, particularly on the Web.

Data science holds incredible promise of improving people's lives, accelerating scientific discovery and innovation, and bringing about positive societal change. Yet, if not used responsibly, this technology can propel economic inequality, destabilize global markets and affirm systemic bias. In this talk, we consider issues such as violation of data privacy, or biases in data analysis. We discuss desirable properties in data analysis such as fairness, transparency, or diversity. A goal of the talk is to draw the attention of the computer science community to the important emerging subject of responsible data management and analysis. We will present our perspective on the issue, and motivate research directions.