Early Career and Equity Committee
The Early Career & Equity Committee (ECEC) serves as an advisory body to IAIFI Management on aspects related to early career researchers and DEI, as well as to oversee the well-being and working environment of all IAIFI members. Their goal is to create an equitable, inclusive, welcoming, and enjoyable place of work, where people of all backgrounds and career stages can feel supported to do their best work and advance forward in their careers in an environment free from discrimination and injustice.
- View the IAIFI Code of Conduct, developed by the ECEC
- View the ECEC expectations
- 2021 ECEC: Tracy Slatyer (Chair), Edo Berger, Harold Erbin, Katherine Fraser, Jasmine Gill, Anindita Maiti, Siddharth Mishra-Sharma
- 2022 ECEC: Tracy Slatyer (Chair), Edo Berger, Sean Benevedes, Mehmet Demirtas, Anindita Maiti, Rashmish Mishra, Siddharth Mishra-Sharma
- 2023 ECEC: Edo Berger (Chair), Tess Smidt, Sean Benevedes, Carolina Cuesta-Lazaro, Mehmet Demirtas, Zeviel Imani, Jessie Micallef, Rashmish Mishra
- 2024 ECEC: Lisa Barsotti (Chair), Tess Smidt, Carolina Cuesta-Lazaro, Jessie Micallef, Elyssa Hofgard, Zeviel Imani, Leo Yang, Marisa LaFleur
- The ECEC will rotate membership in January 2025. Email Lisa Barsotti if you’d like to learn more.
- Learn more about all IAIFI Committees
Ethics
The 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).
Ethics-related IAIFI talks
Each semester we hold at least one ethics-related IAIFI talk (colloquium, seminar, or journal club). Past events include:
- April 22, 2021: IAIFI Seminar with David Kaiser (MIT), “Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC): New Activities at MIT”;
- December 3, 2021: IAIFI Seminar with Harini Suresh (MIT), “Understanding Sources of Harm through the Machine Learning Life Cycle”.
- May 5, 2022: IAIFI Journal Club with Dylan Hadfield (MIT), “Overoptimization, Incompleteness, and Goodhart’s Law”
- November 29, 2022: IAIFI Journal Club with Anna Golubeva (IAIFI Fellow) and Matt Schwartz (Harvard), “Should artificial intelligence be interpretable to humans?”
- December 16, 2022: IAIFI seminar with Aleksander Madry (MIT), “What (and how) the ML models learn”;
- March 24, 2023: IAIFI Seminar with Brian Nord (Fermilab/MIT MLK Scholar), “How do we build trustworthy AI models for physics?”