CategoryThe Edinburgh Experience

A fair amount of research, specifically research concerning GDPR and AI Act law, is required for the assignment. But as I’ve been working on this over the past few weeks, I see the value in using a multidisciplinary approach to complex issues. Real-life challenges often aren’t one-dimensional (i.e., purely legal) and have adjacent ethical and policy issues. Thinking about a problem...

A major theme in the media is that governing or regulating AI stifles innovation. The former Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, has been consistently vocal about what I’ll call an “Innovation First” approach. He’s also been critical of the EU AI act. Schmidt said the EU should be an “innovation partner to the U.S.” to be able to compete with China. Schmidt made the claim, “the EU did regulation...

I spent two hours this morning discussing with my cohort and professor a single question based on ‘Open Data, Data Protection, and Group Privacy’: Can a group be harmed without an individual being harmed? The question is meant to help answer the question whether or not group privacy should be protected separate from the privacy of the individual.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Edinburgh has quite a lot to say about the topic of Research Ethics. This is a topic I’ve spent little time thinking about myself, other than the basics such as citation and attribution, transparency of source materials, etc. But Edinburgh goes much deeper. They have a formal research ethics policy that defines in detail their guiding principles...

These terms, while seemingly similar, are pretty different. Understanding their differences is, in some ways, the key to understanding one of them: interdisciplinarity. For many reasons, interdisciplinarity is essential when studying here at the Futures Institute (EFI). First, the philosophical construct holds each program—and all programs—together, irrespective of your specific topic of...

One of the things that makes the Data Ethics and Artificial Intelligence program so unique is that it is one of multiple interdisciplinary pursuits within the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI). It didn’t really occur to me previously, but as EFI helped me to see, ethics is interdisciplinary, and every cohort within every program takes a dedicated class (together) on the topic. As the course...

Understandably, there is a lot of reading in any post-graduate program. However, a data ethics program’s content types and formats vary greatly. There are course handbooks, formal academic texts, white papers, news articles, press releases, formal laws and ordinances, and more. Stepping back, this makes sense. As we heard during the “Welcome” lecture in week 1, ethics is not a single thing; it’s...

There are so many things that I learned about the MSc degree and program. One of which is that we have an assignment to design an “intervention.” There aren’t too many details about this yet, but the idea seems to be that you choose an area, topic, or domain struggling or dealing with an ethical AI issue and then design an intervention, be it legal, ethical, etc., to help mediate or solve it. The...

The Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) has historically been housed in a different part of the campus, in a less-than-inspiring building. Those days are over. The new home for EFI is in the historic Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, right in the middle of town. While it’s been recently renovated from top to bottom, its history still endures. I’ve met a few people in Edinburgh who were born there, and all...

This MSc program has a mix of mandatory courses and electives. There are two mandatory courses in Semester 1: Interdisciplinary Futures and Data and Artificial Intelligence Ethics, Law and Governance. Interdisciplinary Futures, taught by Dr Linda O’Keeffe, is something every cohort takes and is meant to help students develop the critical and creative skills necessary to...