Curriculum of open source course modules developed at Harvard University in the Embedded EthiCS Teaching Lab. In this weekly seminar a team of graduate and postdoctoral fellows collaborate with one another to develop and refine course modules, identify pedagogical challenges and strategies for addressing them, and research topics of mutual interest in computer ethics.
Ethical reasoning is an essential skill for today’s computer scientists. The Embedded EthiCS distributed pedagogy embeds philosophers directly into computer science courses to teach students how to think through the ethical and social implications of their work. The modules teach students to identify ethical and social issues, reason through ethical and social issues, communicate their reasoned position and design ethically and socially responsible systems. The aim of Embedded EthiCS is to teach students to consider not merely what technologies they could create, but whether they should create them.
| Course | Course Level | Module | Module Author |
|---|---|---|---|
| CS 1: Great Ideas in Computer | Introductory undergraduate | Electronic Privacy | Diana Acosta-Navas |
| CS 61: Systems Programming and Machine Organization | Introductory undergraduate | ASCII, Unicode, and the Ethics of Natural Language Representation | Cat Wade |
| CS 124: Data Structures and Algorithms | Upper-level undergraduate | How can we design models that allocate goods and services fairly? | Cat Wade |
| CS 134: Networks | Upper-level undergraduate | Facebook, Fake News, and the Ethics of Censorship | David Gray Grant |
| CS 145/245: Cloud Networking and Computing | Upper-level undergraduate and graduate | The Ethics of Cloud Security | Cat Wade |
| CS 152: Programming Languages | Upper-level undergraduate | Ethics in Software Verification and Validation | David Gray Grant |
| CS 161: Operating Systems | Upper-level undergraduate | Ethical Tradeoffs in System Design: Performance versus Correctness | Kate Vredenburgh |
| CS 165: Data Systems | Upper-level undergraduate | Privacy in the Design of Data Systems | Kate Vredenburgh |
| CS179: Design of Useful and Usable Interactive Systems | Upper-level undergraduate | Ethical Perspectives on Accessible Video Game Design | Cat Wade |
| CS 181: Machine Learning | Upper-level undergraduate | Discrimination and Machine Learning | Kate Vredenburgh |
| CS 189: Autonomous Robot Systems | Upper-level undergraduate | Robots and work | Kate Vredenburgh |
| CS 236: Topics at the Interface of Economics and Computer Science | Graduate | Interpretability and Explanation | Kate Vredenburgh |
| CS 263: Systems Security | Graduate | The Ethics of Hacking Back | David Gray Grant |
| CS 265: Big Data Systems | Graduate | Electronic Privacy and Big Data Systems | Diana Acosta-Navas |
| CS 287: Natural Language Processing | Graduate | Bias and Stereotypes in Word Embedding software | Diana Acosta-Navas |
List retrieved on March 1, 2020.
These modules are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0).
Please see each module for copyright and attribution information for that module.