☰ Rosa Antonia Kowalewski

SAMBa Ethics in Maths

Reading and Discussion Group


About us

Mathematical research arises ethical questions. Will my research be used for good? Can it be used to do harm? Can it be misunderstood and unintentionally casue harm? Could or should the money, time and other resources be better spent on elsewhere to create more direct or more efficient societal benefit?
Questions like these arise in applied mathematics, statistics, and with recent technological developments even in 'pure' mathematics like number theory or algebra. The concept of the mathematician in the ivory tower belongs to the past.

In the SAMBa Ethics in Mathematics group we explore ethical questions in mathematical research, discuss cases and opinions. We want to raise awareness of moral issues, and build confidence in reacting to them.

If you are a PhD and undergraduate student, we warmly welcome you to join our meetings, and we look forward to having your valuable input in our discussion!

Upcoming meetings

These are scheduled meetings for 2022/2023

Date Topic Chair
19th October Welcome, Introduction to ethics, and Agreement on Code of conduct Rosa
9th November Can Science speak truth to power? Rosa
23rd November AI art Seb
7th December

Past meetings

These are our pastmeetings

Date Topic Chair
27th October First meeting: Welcome!
24th November Contestability and law for algorithmic decisions Rosa
12th January The mathematics of voting Alex
26th January Targeted advertising and cookies Seb
9th February Algorithm predicts sexual orientation (scientific paper) (guardian article) (replication study) Rosa
23rd February Variability Theory Rosa

Literature

Here we collect ideas of interesting topics and articles or books we would like to cover in future meetings.

Artificial Intelligence
The Alignment Problem
 Optimal policies tend to seek power Turner et. al (2021)
 Goal misgeneralisation in deep reinforcement learning Langosco et. al (2022)
 Consequences of misaligned AI Zhuang and Hadfield-Menell (2020)
 The alignment problem from a deep learning perspective Ngo(2022)
AI and social justice
 Harm Assessment Risk Tool (HART) algorithm

Statistics
  Statistics is essential for professional ethics. Hutton (1995)
Medical statistics
  Statistics and ethics in medical research. Misuse of statistics is unethical. Altmann (1980)
  Many randomized clinical trials may not be justified: a cross-sectional analysis of ethics and science of randomized clinical trials. De Meulemeester et. al (2018)
  Ethics and Statistics in Randomized Clinical Trials.Rovall (1991)
  The Ethics of Randomised Controlled Trials: A Matter of Statistical Belief?Hutton (1996)
Case Studies
  Sally Clark trial

Applied Mathematics
  Use of 'Lena' image in imaging science

Cryptography
  The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work P. Rogoway (2015)
  Encryption Backdoors: a discussion of feasibility, ethics, and the future of cryptography. J. Martin (2017)
  Cryptography in context: co-teaching ethics and mathematics. N. Karst and R Slegers (2019)

Research communication
Public Outreach
Policy information

Ethics and Mathematics
  Mathematics, ethics and purism: an application of McIntyre's virtue theory Paul Ernest (2020)

Events

Here are our past and upcoming events.

Title Type of event Date
Maurice Chiodo (University of Cambridge):
Guidelines of ethical research in mathematics		 Talk and Social 3rd November 2021, 4.30pm

Join us!

We would be delighted to have in the study group, to learn and discuss with you!
Come along, or contact us:

Meeting times and place:
Wednesdays (fortnightly, see calendar), 1.30pm
Social space (4W 4.5)
4 West, 4th floor
Dept of Mathematical Sciences
University of Bath

Contact:
rak53@bath.ac.uk