Ethical and Social Responsibility Committee (ESRC)
The Ethical and Social Responsibility Committee (ESRC) serves in an advisory capacity to IAIFI Management and Forums on issues related to ethics, including the well-being and fair treatment of IAIFI members per the IAIFI Code of Conduct, and research-related ethics considerations, particularly in AI. This also includes gathering feedback from IAIFI members about the IAIFI environment and triaging follow-up actions to IAIFI Management and Forums.
- View the IAIFI Code of Conduct, annually reviewed and updated by the ESRC.
- Fall 2025 - Summer 2026 ESRC: Lisa Barsotti, MIT (Chair); David Kaiser, MIT; Diego Vasquez, UPRM; Lesbia Lopez, UPRM; Vinicius Da Silva, Tufts; Marisa LaFleur, IAIFI Managing Director; Thomas Bradford, IAIFI Project Coordinator
- 2025 ECEC: Lisa Barsotti (Chair), Carolina Cuesta-Lazaro, Zeviel Imani, Yiding Song, Jamie Sullivan, Leo Yang, Marisa LaFleur, Thomas Bradford
- 2024 ECEC: Lisa Barsotti (Chair), Tess Smidt, Carolina Cuesta-Lazaro, Jessie Micallef, Elyssa Hofgard, Zeviel Imani, Leo Yang, Marisa LaFleur
- 2023 ECEC: Edo Berger (Chair), Tess Smidt, Sean Benevedes, Carolina Cuesta-Lazaro, Mehmet Demirtas, Zeviel Imani, Jessie Micallef, Rashmish Mishra
- 2022 ECEC: Tracy Slatyer (Chair), Edo Berger, Sean Benevedes, Mehmet Demirtas, Anindita Maiti, Rashmish Mishra, Siddharth Mishra-Sharma
- 2021 ECEC: Tracy Slatyer (Chair), Edo Berger, Harold Erbin, Katherine Fraser, Jasmine Gill, Anindita Maiti, Siddharth Mishra-Sharma
- Email Lisa Barsotti if you’d like to learn more.
- Learn more about all IAIFI Committees and Forums
Mentorship Resources
Check out the resources we have compiled on the Career Support Page.
Ethics and Social Responsibility
IAIFI appreciates that the responsible and ethical conduct of research is critical, not only for scientific excellence, but also to maintain the public’s trust in science. This goes beyond generating and disseminating knowledge with rigor and integrity; it also includes protecting intellectual property from inappropriate disclosure and treating everyone involved in the scientific process fairly and with respect.
Responsible Conduct of Research
All IAIFI Junior Investigators are required to complete an online training course in the responsible conduct of research (RCR).
Resources [This section is a work in progress]
General Resources
MIT
- MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC), from the MIT Schwartzman College of Computing
- Responsible AI, from MIT Sloan
- The sAIpien program, from the MIT Media Lab
- Ethics & AI @ MIT, from MIT Philosophy
Harvard
Details to come
Northeastern
Details to come
Tufts
- How Do We Make Sure AI Is Fair, Safe, and Secure?, with perspective from Ken Archer, A96, head of responsible AI at Microsoft
- AI Ethics, A Collection of Lectures on the Ethical implications of Data and Artificial Intelligence from Different Perspectives
IAIFI Talks related to Ethics and Social Responsibility
IAIFI regularly holds ethics-related IAIFI talks and events. Past events include:
- October 2025: IAIFI Journal Club with David Kaiser (MIT), “Generative AI and the Natural Sciences: Opportunities and Continuing Challenges”; View Slides (IAIFI Members Only)
- April 2025: IAIFI Thematic Discussion Session with Ziming Liu (MIT), Matthew Schwartz (Harvard), and Naomi Saphra (Harvard), “Interpretable AI”; View Recording (IAIFI Members Only); View Slides (IAIFI Members Only);
- October 2024: IAIFI Colloquium with Fernanda Viégas (Harvard University) and Martin Wattenberg (Harvard University), “From Victorian trains to chatbots, via high-dimensional geometry”; View Recording; View Slides;
- August 2024: IAIFI Summer Workshop Plenary Talk with David Kaiser (MIT), “Generative AI and the Natural Sciences: Opportunities and Continuing Challenges”; View Recording;
- March 24, 2023: IAIFI Seminar with Brian Nord (Fermilab/MIT MLK Scholar), “How do we build trustworthy AI models for physics?”
- December 16, 2022: IAIFI seminar with Aleksander Madry (MIT), “What (and how) the ML models learn”;
- November 29, 2022: IAIFI Journal Club with Anna Golubeva (IAIFI Fellow) and Matt Schwartz (Harvard), “Should artificial intelligence be interpretable to humans?”
- May 5, 2022: IAIFI Journal Club with Dylan Hadfield (MIT), “Overoptimization, Incompleteness, and Goodhart’s Law”
- December 3, 2021: IAIFI Seminar with Harini Suresh (MIT), “Understanding Sources of Harm through the Machine Learning Life Cycle”.
- April 22, 2021: IAIFI Seminar with David Kaiser (MIT), “Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC): New Activities at MIT”;