This repository contains a summary of ethics-related materials of application computer science courses at Allegheny College. These materials are still in development and they will continue to be enhanced and more content will be added with time.
This is a class for the study of biological mechanisms, by the application of biological or life-science data to mathematical and statistical inquiry using programming and computational technology. The class traditionally attracts its scholars from Biology and Computer Science who are brought together by initial lessons in basic biology and basic computer science. After the students from each background have been given the fundamentals of each parent discipline, we take both fields together to study DNA, RNA and protein using automated means. Our studies take us into pandemics, viruses, gene-analysis, comparative biology and other very exciting pursuits. In addition, our studies cover the ethics of Bioinformatics. For this concentration, the class reads articles discussing what Dr. Bonham-Carter calls, “Famous Trainwrecks'' of research or obvious abuses of biotechnology. Written essays are then assigned to invite students to explore the consequences of completing tasks using biotechnology without ethical judgment.
In this class students work with data from the perspectives of marketing, the life-sciences, economics, psychology and others to study statistical models to make informed decisions and study policy generation. In addition, the class spends significant time to in labs and in classes to discuss ethical foundations which used to navigate in a constantly changing study of data. Here, questions about the uses of data to make general decisions and policies affecting people are carefully followed and presented in classes.
The learning objectives of the course include learning to implement a website that “takes into account user preferences and demographics, thereby ensuring that it is both accessible and in adherence to both the cultural expectations and legal and ethical frameworks of the intended audience”. The main way in which this learning objective is assessed is through the long-term web design portfolio project.
The learning objectives of this course include consideration of “the philosophical, ethical, social and political issues surrounding intelligent systems”. As students learn the foundations of AI and interrogate various machine learning algorithms, they also examine biases and unintended consequences that arise in intelligent systems.
Robotic Agents course has a designated “Civic Learning” tag, which requires a course to contain content that helps students to appreciate the ethical, social, and political dilemmas facing society. It is also a civic engagement course, requiring community service in the form of outreach.
Database systems is the study of designing and creating software to organize data to write queries to locate meaningful results. In the course, the pedagogy of ethical content largely centered around class discussions. After each database technology (SQL, Django, MongoDB and Neo4J) was covered, class time was given to addressing ethically-inclined questions about utilization.