Publications

ND TEC faculty affiliates and postdoctoral fellows publish in a diverse range of both disciplines and outlets. This section of our site houses some of their most recent sole- and coauthored tech ethics scholarship as well as pieces by Notre Dame graduate students working with them.

The library is searchable, and we add to it regularly, so be sure to check back often for updates.

• Commentary

  Why I Fired My AI Agent

  By: Clayton O’Dell

  Appeared In: The New Atlantis

  O’Dell, an undergraduate minoring in tech ethics, talks about trying out two autonomous “agents” that are applications of ChatGPT. Her experiences lead her to ask if we are okay with handing so much power over to AI.

• Article

  Aporophobia: An Overlooked Type of Toxic Language Targeting the Poor

  By: Georgina Curto Rex, Kathleen C. Fraser, Svetlana Kiritchenko, Isar Nejadgholi

  Appeared In: ACL Anthology

  While many types of hate speech and online toxicity have been the focus of extensive research in NLP, toxic language stigmatizing poor people has been mostly disregarded. This paper shines light on the issue, starting with an examination of Twitter posts.

• Article

  SAF: Stakeholders’ Agreement on Fairness in the Practice of Machine Learning Development

  By: Flavio Comim, Georgina Curto Rex

  Appeared In: Science and Engineering Ethics

  This paper clarifies why bias can’t be completely mitigated in machine learning (ML) and proposes an end-to-end methodology to translate the principle of justice and fairness into the practice of ML development as an ongoing agreement with stakeholders.

• Article

  Optimizing whose engagement? Beliefs and protest participation of social media users in South Korea

  By: Yong Suk Lee

  Appeared In: AI and Ethics

  Studying the impeachment of former South Korean President Park Geun-hye, Lee finds that people who use social media as their primary news source are significantly more polarized in their ideological views and rigid in their beliefs in controversial news.

• Article

  An Agent-Based Model for Poverty and Discrimination Policy-Making

  By: Georgina Curto Rex, Nieves Montes, Nardine Osman, Carles Sierra

  Appeared In: AMPM 2022: 2nd Workshop in Agent-based Modeling & Policy-Making

  This article describes the architecture of an Agent-Based Model (AI) that will generate simulations showing the impact that potential changes in the law would have on poverty levels.

• Article

  Moral distance, AI, and the ethics of care

  By: Kirsten Martin, Carolina Villegas-Galaviz

  Appeared In: AI & Society

  Villegas-Galaviz and Martin investigate how the introduction of AI to decision-making increases what’s known as moral distance, a concept used to explain why individuals behave unethically towards those who are not seen.

• Commentary

  Virtual Reality has arrived, but are humans ready for it?

  By: Trenton Ford

  Appeared In: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

  Ford writes that nearly a century after author Stanley Weinbaum managed a conceptualization of virtual reality eerily similar to modern-day notions, we’re finally in a position where the questions Weinbaum raised aren’t futuristic science fiction.

• Article

  The Evolving Impact of Robots on Jobs

  By: John Chung, Yong Suk Lee

  Appeared In: ILR Review

  This paper examines a key concern related to technology adoption: whether or not new technologies replace workers and create adverse labor market consequences.

• Article

  Predatory predictions and the ethics of predictive analytics

  By: Kirsten Martin

  Appeared In: Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology

  Martin examines ethical issues introduced by predictive analytics—which use data from the past to create a model that predicts future human behavior—arguing firms can have a market incentive to construct deceptively inflated true-positive outcomes.

• Article

  On Contemporary Image-Making: Celebrity Holograms, Tricky Ghosts, and Other Technologies of Political Bodies

  By: Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal

  Appeared In: transmediale

  In this essay, Dhaliwal discusses the use of holograms for pop cultural resurrections and political fame along with the resulting impact on public perception, drawing on examples of holographic representations ranging from Narendra Modi to Tupac Shakur.

• Article

  HoloFoldit and Hologrammatically Extended Cognition

  By: Cody Turner

  Appeared In: Philosophy & Technology

  Turner considers how emerging mixed-reality devices—such as the Microsoft HoloLens, a headset that enables users to project 3D virtual objects onto their perceptual fields—are poised to impact the mind from a metaphysical perspective.

• Article

  On Addressability, or What Even Is Computation?

  By: Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal

  Appeared In: Critical Inquiry

  Dhaliwal argues against the conflation of “digital” and “computational” and searches for a common logic among the three modes of computing, focusing on the individuating backbone that runs through histories of postal, civic, and technological addresses.

• Article

  How does information about AI regulation affect managers’ choices?

  By: Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, Benjamin Cedric Larsen, Yong Suk Lee, Michael Webb

  Appeared In: The Brookings Institution

  This report provides a summary of and builds upon a study by the authors that appeared in The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization in April 2022.

• Article

  A Norm Optimisation Approach to SDGs: Tackling Poverty by Acting on Discrimination

  By: Flavio Comim, Georgina Curto Rex, Nieves Montes, Nardine Osman, Carles Sierra

  Appeared In: Proceedings of the 31st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence

  This paper describes how AI can provide new insights to mitigate poverty by using the technique of Agent Based Modeling.

• Article

  Governing algorithmic decisions: The role of decision importance and governance on perceived legitimacy of algorithmic decisions

  By: Kirsten Martin, Ari Waldman

  Appeared In: Big Data & Society

  Martin and Waldman explore the relative importance of the type of decision, the procedural governance, the input data used, and outcome errors on perceptions of the legitimacy of algorithmic public policy decisions as compared to similar human decisions.

• Article

  What is the Bureaucratic Counterfactual? Categorical Versus Algorithmic Prioritization in U.S. Social Policy

  By: Rebecca Johnson, Simone Zhang

  Appeared In: ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency

  This paper outlines the benefits and drawbacks of using predictive models to allocate scarce social resources relative to social policy's dominant status quo approach, manual category-based prioritization.

• Article

  Subreddit Links Drive Community Creation and User Engagement on Reddit

  By: Rachel Krohn, Tim Weninger

  Appeared In: Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

  Krohn and Weninger have undertaken a study on subreddit links on Reddit, with the goal of understanding their impact on both the referenced subreddit, and on the subreddit landscape as a whole.

• Commentary

  Is your face gay? Conservative? Criminal? AI researchers are asking the wrong questions

  By: Trenton Ford

  Appeared In: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

  Ford discusses how troublingly, some modern AI applications are delving into physiognomy, a set of pseudoscientific ideas that first appeared thousands of years ago and purport to link facial attributes to aspects of human character.

• Review

  Review of “Algorithmic bias: on the implicit biases of social technology”

  By: Kirsten Martin, Warren von Eschenbach

  ND TEC’s Martin and von Eschenbach write that this article by Gabbrielle Johnson “makes a rigorous, compelling, and clear argument against the fabled ‘objectivity’ of computer science.”

• Book

  Ethics of Data and Analytics: Concepts and Cases

  By: Kirsten Martin

  As the collection of our personal data has become pervasive, with the details gathered themselves a commodity, traditional norms of business ethics have often proven inadequate. This anthology aims to jumpstart the conversation on how to adapt.

• Commentary

  Collaborative Climate Futures? Envisioning the Role of Open Data Infrastructures for Collaborative Socio-Environmental Research

  By: Shannon Dosemagen, Luis Felipe Murillo

  Appeared In: Commonplace

  Arguing that effective data stewardship requires community and sovereignty, especially when the data is about the environment, Murillo and Dosemagen explore how we use can digital infrastructure with sustainability in mind.

• Article

  Does Information About AI Regulation Change Manager Evaluation of Ethical Concerns and Intent to Adopt AI?

  By: Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, Benjamin Cedric Larsen, Yong Suk Lee, Michael Webb

  Appeared In: The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization

  The authors examine the impacts of potential artificial intelligence regulations on managers’ perceptions on ethical issues related to AI and their intentions to adopt AI technologies.

• Article

  Analysis of Moral Judgment on Reddit

  By: Nicholas Botzer, Shawn Gu, Tim Weninger

  Appeared In: IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems

  Moral outrage has become synonymous with social media in recent years. However, the preponderance of academic analysis on social media websites has focused on hate speech and misinformation. This article aims to help address that gap.

• Article

  Manipulation, Privacy, and Choice

  By: Kirsten Martin

  Appeared In: North Carolina Journal of Law & Technology

  This article examines targeted manipulation as the covert leveraging of a specific target’s vulnerabilities to steer their decisions and positions online targeted manipulation as undermining the core economic assumptions of authentic choice in the market.

• Article

  AI and Corporate Responsibility: How and Why Firms Are Responsible for AI

  By: Kirsten Martin, Carolina Villegas-Galaviz

  Appeared In: Encyclopedia of Business and Professional Ethics

  This entry from the Encyclopedia of Business and Professional Ethics explains how we think about corporate responsibility around the design, development, and use of AI.

• Commentary

  Crypto’s “Freedom to Transact” May Actually Threaten Human Rights

  By: Elizabeth Renieris

  Appeared In: CIGI Online

  In this commentary, Renieris challenges the notion of “the freedom to transact” routinely associated with cryptocurrency, noting that this freedom is too often “touted or treated as absolute.”

• Article

  AI Ethics, Regulation & Firm Implications

  By: Benjamin Cedric Larsen, Yong Suk Lee

  Appeared In: CPI TECHReg Chronicle

  This article outlines distinct approaches to AI governance and regulation and discusses the implications for firms and their managers in terms of adopting AI and ethical practices going forward.

• Article

  A Friendly Critique of Levinasian Machine Ethics

  By: Patrick Gamez

  Appeared In: The Southern Journal of Philosophy

  This is an intervention in the field of machine ethics, broadly supporting but modifying recent “relational” approaches to robot rights, especially those based on the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.

• Article

  Are Algorithmic Decisions Legitimate? The Effect of Process and Outcomes on Perceptions of Legitimacy of AI Decisions

  By: Kirsten Martin, Ari Waldman

  Appeared In: Journal of Business Ethics

  To date, the algorithmic accountability literature has elided a fundamentally empirical question important to business ethics and management: Under what circumstances, if any, are algorithmic decision-making systems considered legitimate?

• Book

  Future Peace: Technology, Aggression, and the Rush to War

  By: Robert Latiff

  Future Peace urges extreme caution in the adoption of new weapons technology and is an impassioned plea for peace from an individual who spent decades preparing for war.

• Article

  RFI Response: Biometric Technologies

  By: Yong Suk Lee, Elizabeth Renieris

  Renieris and Lee responded to a request for information (RFI) from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy concerning the “Public and Private Sector Uses of Biometric Technologies.”

• Commentary

  Amid the Hype over Web3, Informed Skepticism Is Critical

  By: Elizabeth Renieris

  Appeared In: CIGI Online

  Writing in the Center for International Governance (CIGI) Online, Renieris points to “a kind of imaginative obsolescence” in the discourse around Web3.

• Article

  Can Lethal Autonomous Weapons Be Just?

  By: Noreen Herzfeld, Robert Latiff

  Appeared In: Peace Review

  This article attempts to put artificial intelligence and autonomy in weapons in the perspective of moral decision-making and points out the limitations of such technologies in that regard.

• Article

  Algorithmic Bias and Corporate Responsibility: How companies hide behind the false veil of the technological imperative

  By: Kirsten Martin

  Appeared In: Ethics of Data and Analytics

  In this book chapter, Martin argues that acknowledging the value-laden biases of algorithms as inscribed in design allows us to identify the associated responsibility of corporations that design, develop, and deploy algorithms.

• Commentary

  It’s time to address facial recognition, the most troubling law enforcement AI tool

  By: Trenton Ford

  Appeared In: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

  Amid the push for police reform, Ford writes that one trend is in urgent need of overhaul: police departments’ expanding use of artificial intelligence, namely facial recognition, to aid crime fighting.

• Commentary

  AI and the Future of Labor

  By: Yong Suk Lee

  Appeared In: Dignity and Development

  Writing for the Dignity and Development blog published by Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, Lee discusses the challenges workers may face with the rapid adoption of AI in the near future.

• Article

  Designing Ethical Technology Requires Systems for Anticipation and Resilience

  By: Kirsten Martin, Bidhan (Bobby) Parmar

  Appeared In: MIT Sloan Management Review

  The increased speed and scale of emerging technologies can make ethical lapses more likely, more costly, and harder to recover from. To reduce ethical lapses, organizations need two kinds of systems: systems for anticipation and systems for resilience.

• Article

  The Golden Thread for Humanity

  By: Warren von Eschenbach

  Appeared In: Culture e Fede Journal

  What is the relationship between faith and science and how do they inform an ethical approach to using technology?

• Article

  Transparency and the Black Box Problem: Why We Do Not Trust AI

  By: Warren von Eschenbach

  Appeared In: Philosophy & Technology

  How can we trust an unsupervised intelligent system to analyze data or even make decisions on our behalf when its decision-making process remains opaque or unintelligible to us?

• Article

  Virtue Ethics and the Social Responsibilities of Researchers

  By: Mark Bourgeois

  Appeared In: Science, Technology, and Virtues: Contemporary Perspectives

  Technology ethics often involves contested and ambiguous notions of responsibility. This book chapter describes a deep notion of social responsibility and a training program for it.

• Book

  Science, Technology, and Virtues: Contemporary Perspectives

  By: Emanuele Ratti, Thomas Stapleford

  This co-edited volume illustrates how a range of scholars have found concepts of virtue valuable for thinking about contemporary science and technology, including technology ethics.

• Article

  Whence and W(h)ither Technology Ethics

  By: Don Howard

  Appeared In: Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Technology

  Howard surveys the history of technology ethics focusing on why the field developed with such a strong emphasis on risk and harmful social, cultural, and political impacts of new technologies.

• Article

  Automatic Discovery of Meme Genres with Diverse Appearances

  By: Joel Brogan, Daniel Moreira, Pascal Phoa, Walter Scheirer, William Theisen, Pamela Bilo Thomas, Tim Weninger

  Appeared In: Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

  This paper introduces a scalable automated visual recognition pipeline for discovering meme genres of diverse appearance, work relevant to the study of political disinformation campaigns.

• Article

  Meme Warfare: AI countermeasures to disinformation should focus on popular, not perfect, fakes

  By: Walter Scheirer, Tim Weninger, Michael Yankoski

  Appeared In: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

  From QAnon conspiracy theories to Russian government-sponsored election interference, social media disinformation campaigns are a part of online life, and identifying these threats is a challenge.

• Article

  Pitfalls in Machine Learning Research: Reexamining the Development Cycle

  By: Stella Biderman, Walter Scheirer

  Appeared In: NeurIPS Conference

  Machine learning research has the potential to fuel further advances in data science, but it is greatly hindered by an ad hoc design process, poor data hygiene, and a lack of statistical rigor.

• Article

  The “Criminality From Face” Illusion

  By: Kevin Bowyer, Michael King, Walter Scheirer, Kushal Vangara

  Appeared In: IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society

  A few recent publications have claimed success in analyzing an image of a person’s face in order to predict the person’s status as criminal/non-criminal. This is very dangerous.

• Article

  A Pandemic of Bad Science

  By: Walter Scheirer

  Appeared In: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

  That there has been an extraordinary level of interest in coronavirus science during the COVID-19 pandemic should come as no surprise, but this has unintended consequences.

• Article

  What Is It About Location?

  By: Kirsten Martin, Helen Nissenbaum

  Appeared In: Berkeley Technology Law Journal

  This article reports on a set of empirical studies that reveal how people think about location data, how these conceptions relate to expectations of privacy, and what this might mean for law, regulation, and technological design.

• Article

  An AI Early Warning System to Monitor Online Disinformation, Stop Violence, and Protect Elections

  By: Walter Scheirer, Tim Weninger, Michael Yankoski

  Appeared In: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

  The authors are developing an AI early warning system to monitor how manipulated content online—such as altered photos in memes—leads, in some cases, to violent conflict and societal instability.

• Article

  Breaking the Privacy Paradox: The Value of Privacy and Associated Duty of Firms

  By: Kirsten Martin

  Appeared In: Business Ethics Quarterly

  The privacy paradox is the perceived disconnect between individuals’ stated privacy expectations and consumer market behavior in going online. This paper empirically examines the conceptualization of privacy post-disclosure assumed in the privacy paradox.