McCourt School’s Massive Data Institute and Georgetown’s Ethics Lab partner to embed ethics into technical research

It seems only appropriate that the pilot partnership between the McCourt School of Public Policy’s Massive Data Institute (MDI) and Georgetown’s Ethics Lab began with an ethical question.

MDI Director Lisa Singh , who is also a professor in the Department of Computer Science in the College of Arts and Sciences and in the McCourt School, was trying to bring ethics into the technical discussions students had about their data science research when she realized it raised some difficult questions.

“We were focused on moving data-driven knowledge and methods forward so quickly that we were forgetting to think about the fact that data represent people, and a lot of the data we use may be sensitive or biased — and all of these things lead to ethical challenges,” said Singh, who is also a 2024 William and Karen Sonneborn Chair for Interdisciplinary Collaboration award winner. “Because MDI has so many touch points with so many students, not exposing them to the potential harms data can cause would be negligent.”

That’s when Singh sat down with longtime friend and colleague Maggie Little , Ethics Lab director. “We realized we were very like-minded about the implications of connecting the highly technical expertise and ethical exploration that is intersecting with those technical issues,” said Little. “We want McCourt to be a locus for producing data-driven policies that combine world-class technical rigor with deep ethical roots.”

The two quickly agreed the ideal place to begin their partnership was the MDI Scholars program , in which undergraduate and graduate students work alongside researchers and practitioners to engage in interdisciplinary data science and public policy research.

In practice, the pilot partnership consisted of an initial meeting with MDI Scholars that focused on developing ethical considerations around the research projects each student was developing. Toward the semester’s end, another session followed, and the Ethics Lab team made themselves available for office hours to further explore those considerations. As a result, ethical questions and considerations became part of the MDI Scholars Showcase, a capstone poster presentation of students’ research findings.

Both Singh and Little were delighted with the results. “It was really incredible to see the increase in sophistication of their drafts from beginning to end,” said Little.

But what’s even more valuable is the lasting impact of injecting ethics into what, for most students, is a highly technical process, Little added. “Ethics Lab was founded on our conviction that the world needs ethics not just as a theory but woven into the work people do,” she said. “The MDI Scholars partnership is a prime example of embedding ethical thinking into the very design of the project.”

Both Little and Singh are so happy with the pilot project’s outcomes that they are now developing the formal components of the partnership and looking for grant funding to scale it. 

“We were quite successful with it this year, and so we are thinking about expanding it more broadly within research at Georgetown,” said Singh. “I am really excited about this partnership’s potential.”