Developing data scientists’ critical thinking skills in the workplace and in the classroom.

Data science that influences decisions about individuals and society requires more than technical training. Communicating social implications is as vital as an ability to combine algorithms, models, and digital material to find new discoveries. Some academic programs in data science focus solely on science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) courses without addressing the need for skills in interpretation. The goal of the project is to introduce critical thinking into data practices used to gain insight about human populations. Critical thinking can both add depth to existing technical classes and spread data fluency throughout the curriculum. It also introduces questions of policy and law that are essential to professional data science implementations. The project builds capacity in non-STEM skills for any analytics, cyber-security, or data science curriculum and will produce teaching guidelines for training curious and critical data science teams to reliably produce complex solutions with integrity.

Project Lead
Anne Washington
2016-2017 Fellow, Data & Society
Assistant Professor, Schar School of Policy and Government
George Mason University

Kickoff Discussions
October 27, 2016 – Governance, Standards, and Accountability
October 27, 2016 – Technology and Moral Philosophy
October 28, 2016 – Privacy in mobile apps (with Katie Shilton)
October 28, 2016 – Current Research (with Bonnie Tijerina and Anna Lauren Hoffman)

Participants
Anna Lauren Hoffman, Lecturer and Postdoctoral Scholar, Berkeley School of Information
Bonnie Tijerina, Researcher, Data & Society; President, Electronic Resources and Libraries
Katie Shilton, Associate Professor, College of Information Studies, University of Maryland
Mark Van Hollebeke, Privacy Practitioner-in-Residence, Data & Society
M. Lynne Markus, Professor, Information and Process Management, Bentley University; Research Affiliate, MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research
Solon Barocas, Affiliate, Data & Society Society; Ethics and AI Postdoc Researcher, NYC Lab, Microsoft Research
Suchana Seth, 2016-2017 Mozilla Open Web Fellow, Data & Society
Tara Whalen, Non-Resident Fellow, Stanford Center for Internet and Society; Adjunct Research Professor, Carleton University