Paper on Research Ethics at CHI 2022

An extended abstract that I co-authored with Nicolas Gold, Raul Masu, and Cecile Chevalier has been published in the proceedings of CHI 2022. investigated a method to bypass digital platforms’ unwillingness to share information on their algorithmic recommendations by analysing the evolution of their Privacy Policies and Terms of Use documents.

*Share Your Values! Community-Driven Embedding of Ethics in Research**

Ethically-defensible research requires wide-ranging, holistic, and deep consideration. It is often overseen by Research Ethics Committees, Institutional Research Boards or equivalents but not all organisations have these and where they do, their degree of independence from organisational priorities varies (perhaps leading to research that would create reputational or other difficulties for organisations being left unpublished or unacknowledged). Conflicts of interest can therefore be left unmanaged, participants may be exploited, and society may not benefit. In this paper, we claim that publishing communities (e.g. scholarly conferences) can play a larger role in supporting improved ethical practice by defining and communicating the ethical values of their community’s collective identity and aspirations. This approach is not prescriptive like procedural ethics nor as broad as general research ethics codes (both are important) but offers a tangible way to unify ethics concerns across research contexts.