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).

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?”

Resources