Cassandra Huff, The Stanford Daily; How ethics is becoming a key part of research in tech
"Building off the IRB model, in 2020 the Ethics in Society Review (ESR) board was created under the McCoy Family Center, the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) and Human-Centered AI (HAI) to make ethics a core part of research in computer science. The ESR acts similarly to the IRB by examining ethical concerns to minimize potential harm of the research before a project is approved for funding.
This process is integrated into grant proposal applications in HAI. After HAI reviews the technical merits of a proposal, it is handed off to the ESR, which assigns an interdisciplinary panel of faculty to review each of them. This panel acts as advisors on ethical issues to identify challenges and provide additional guidance on the ethical component of the research. Once completed, the panel will either release research funds, or recommend more iterations of the review process.
The ESR is not meant to determine whether the proposal should be funded, but rather to analyze the unintended consequences of the research prior to the start of the project. In discussing what ESR does, Betsy Rajala, Program Director at CASBS said, “Everytime you touch research these questions come up and [it’s better to] think about them sooner rather than later.”"
