Showing posts with label Craig Newmark. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Craig Newmark. Show all posts

Thursday, October 11, 2018

The founder of Craigslist is funding a competition to make computer science more ethical; Quartz, October 10, 2018

Simone Stolzoff, Quartz; The founder of Craigslist is funding a competition to make computer science more ethical

"What have you been doing to help promote democracy recently?

Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, has certainly been doing his part. His invention may have helped decimate classified-advertising revenue for print newspapers, but last month, he gave $20 million to a team of experienced journalists to investigate the power of Big Tech. In June, he gave $20 million to the CUNY journalism program, so the next generation of journalists can do the same. And today (Oct. 10), he announced he’s helping to fund a new competition called The Responsible Computer Science Challenge to incorporate more ethical training into undergraduate computer science curricula.

The initiative, which was incubated by Omidyar Network, and is also backed by Mozilla, and Schmidt Futures, is soliciting proposals from professors and graduate students about how to make ethics a central part of a software engineer’s education. A panel of independent judges will award up to $3.5 million in prizes to the winners.

The competition couldn’t come at a better time."