Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing
The MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) aims to advance efforts within and beyond the Schwarzman College of Computing. The specially commissioned and peer-reviewed cases are brief and intended to be effective for undergraduate instruction across a range of classes and fields of study, and may also be of interest for computing professionals, policy specialists, and general readers.
The series editors interpret “social and ethical responsibilities of computing” broadly. Some cases focus closely on particular technologies, others on trends across technological platforms. Others examine social, historical, philosophical, legal, and cultural facets that are essential for thinking critically about present-day efforts in computing activities. Special efforts are made to solicit cases on topics ranging beyond the United States and that highlight perspectives of people who are affected by various technologies in addition to perspectives of designers and engineers.
New sets of case studies, produced with support from the MIT Press’ Open Publishing Services program, are published twice a year and made available via the Knowledge Futures Group’s PubPub platform. The SERC case studies are made available for free on an open-access basis, under Creative Commons licensing terms. Authors retain copyright, enabling them to re-use and re-publish their work in more specialized scholarly publications.
If you have suggestions for a new case study or comments on a published case, the series editors would like to hear from you! Please reach out to serc-cases@mit.edu.
Past Issues
The Puzzling Persistence of Age Progression Technology
Sharrona Pearl
“Explainable” AI Has Some Explaining to Do
Ho Chit Siu, Ashley Suh, Nora Smith, Isabelle Hurley
Robert Mahari, Pat Pataranutaporn
Lelia Hampton, Madeline Schlegel, Ellie Bultena, Jasmin Liu, Anastasia Dunca, Mrinalini Singha, Sungmoon Lim, Lauren Higgins, Christopher Rabe
Integrals and Integrity: Generative AI Tries to Learn Cosmology
Bruce A. Basset
How Interpretable Is “Interpretable” Machine Learning?
Ho Chit Siu, Kevin Leahy, Makai Mann
AI’s Regimes of Representation: A Community-Centered Study of Text-to-Image Models in South Asia
Rida Qadri, Renee Shelby, Cynthia L. Bennett, Remi Denton
Pretrial Risk Assessment on the Ground: Algorithms, Judgments, Meaning, and Policy
Cristopher Moore, Elise Ferguson, Paul Guerin
To Search and Protect? Content Moderation and Platform Governance of Explicit Image Material
Mitali Thakor, Sumaiya Sabnam, Ransho Ueno, Ella Zaslow
Algorithmic Fairness in Chest X-ray Diagnosis: A Case Study
Haoran Zhang, Thomas Hartvigsen, Marzyeh Ghassemi
The Right to Be an Exception to a Data-Driven Rule
Sarah H. Cen, Manish Raghavan
Twitter Gamifies the Conversation
C. Thi Nguyen, Meica Magnani, Susan Kennedy
“Porsche Girl”: When a Dead Body Becomes a Meme
Nadia de Vries
Privacy and Paternalism: The Ethics of Student Data Collection
Kathleen Creel, Tara Dixit
Differential Privacy and the 2020 US Census
Simson Garfinkel
The Puzzle of the Missing Robots
Suzanne Berger, Benjamin Armstrong
The Cloud Is Material: On the Environmental Impacts of Computation and Data Storage
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate
Algorithmic Redistricting and Black Representation in US Elections
Zachary Schutzman
Hacking Technology, Hacking Communities: Codes of Conduct and Community Standards in Open Source
Christina Dunbar-Hester
Understanding Potential Sources of Harm throughout the Machine Learning Life Cycle
Harini Suresh, John Guttag
Public Debate on Facial Recognition Technologies in China
Tristan G. Brown, Alexander Statman, Celine Sui
The Case of the Nosy Neighbors
Johanna Gunawan, Woodrow Hartzog
Who Collects the Data? A Tale of Three Maps
Catherine D’Ignazio, Lauren Klein
The Dangers of Risk Prediction in the Criminal Justice System
Julia Dressel, Hany Farid