Trustworthy and Ethical Data Science

The Data Science Institute (DSI) has recently established a newer research theme to look at the increasingly important area of trustworthy and ethical systems and data.

Trustworthy AI research at DSI specifically looks at how the artificial intelligence (AI)-based systems being developed and deployed by various people and societies can meet the essential prerequisite requirement of trustworthiness:

• If these AI systems, or the people who develop them, cannot be deemed trustworthy, their usage and uptake may be severely curtailed, and unintended or unfortunate consequences may ensue;
• More generally, the significant socioeconomic benefits that they could enable may never be realised.

This trust is not just in the technology alone, but in the combined socio-technical fabric that such an AI system is a part of. Research at DSI should therefore be cognisant of the EC’s ethics guidelines for trustworthy artificial intelligence, published via the Digital Single Market strategy of the European Commission in 2019. According to these guidelines, and with a nod to Asimov’s laws of robotics, trustworthy AI should be lawful, ethical, and robust.

Some of our projects and publications related to this theme include:

• Trusted P2P energy trading with blockchain in the CENTS Project.
• Blockchain for transaction transparency/immutability in “Develop, Deploy and Test Your First Blockchain Smart Contract” by Yapa and O’Donoghue in 2021.
• “Towards an Ethics by Design Methodology for AI Research Projects” by d’Aquin et al. from 2019.
• Data quality/provenance aspects of “RDF Dataset Profiling – A Survey of Features, Methods, Vocabularies And Applications” by Ellefi et al. from 2018.

Our research on “Trustworthy AI and Ethical Data Science” is supported by Science Foundation Ireland as part of its funding for the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics, Confirm SFI Research Centre for Smart Manufacturing, VistaMilk SFI Research Centre for Agri-Food Technologies, as well as through funding from the SFI Public Service Fellowship Programme, Enterprise Ireland, DTIF (Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment in the Government of Ireland), and the EU.