H.V. Jagadish

I've been disappointed with the course overall. it's a very interesting topic, one that's relevant to the times we live in. But I feel that many of the big questions are neither asked nor answered in the course. The presenter's background is in engineering, not philosophy. This isn't a fundamental problem in itself, but it does mean that concepts are left very vaguely defined. So 'ethics' is, at one point, defined more or less as 'what's socially agreed-up'. But in the questions as well as the videos, the terminology shifts between 'ethically right/wrong', 'appropriate', 'have to do something,' 'by rights', 'legally', and lots more besides. So it's far from clear what the right or wrong position might be in many of the thought-experiments described in the quiz questions. What's more, if an action isn't in itself ethically right, that doesn't entail that it must be ethically wrong: it could be neither. There's virtually no input from other voices, too: no discussions with, say, experts in the field of data ethics, or moral philosophers, or whatever. At one point in week 1, the presenter correctly points out that ''data ownership is really complex''. So it'd be useful to have a MOOC that makes it less complex: that asks hard questions, and critically examines the range of possible answers. Unfortunately, this MOOC isn't it.
- Review by Daithi M W on Data Science Ethics