Since September 2014, Uppsala University and Tokyo Tech have co-organized four joint scientific symposium annually and alternately at Uppsala University (2014, 2016) and Tokyo Tech (2015, 2017). This year Uppsala University is arranging the 5^th joint symposium on September 24-25 at Ångström Laboratory. Read more at http://teknat.uu.se/research/uu-tt/

As a part of the break-out session: Innovation ethics and design, there will be an event where Big Data and Ethics will be discussed as addressed below:

This symposium gives short talks about Big Data and Ethics.

You will get the opportunity to listen to three different aspects of Big Data and the ethics around it.

David J.T Sumpter Professor at Dept of Mathematics
will talk about ‘The Algorithms that control our lives’

Algorithms are running our society, and as the Cambridge Analytica story has revealed, we don't really know what they are up to.

Our increasing reliance on technology and the internet has opened a window for mathematicians and data researchers to gaze through into our lives. Using the data they are constantly collecting about where we travel, where we shop, what we buy and what interests us, they can begin to predict our daily habits. But how reliable is this data? Without understanding what mathematics can and can't do, it is impossible to get a handle on how it is changing our lives.

In this talk, I investigate the equations that analyse us, influence us and will (maybe) become like us, answering questions such as:

Who are Cambridge Analytica? And what are they doing with our data?

How does Facebook build a 100-dimensional picture of your personality?

Are Google algorithms racist and sexist?

Why do election predictions fail so drastically?

Are algorithms that are designed to find criminals making terrible mistakes?

What does the future hold as we relinquish our decision-making to machines?

I explain how mathematics and statistics work in the real world, and what we should and shouldn't worry about.

40 minutes (10 minutes for questions to David)

Break for 10 minutes

Raazesh Sainudiin Researcher at Dept. of Mathematics will talk about hate groups on Twitter and their impact on the US election. We will use scientific hypothesis testing to address this and a mathematical model to understand how close we are to each other when viewed as leaves of an ideological tree of the population.

40 minutes (10 minutes for questions to Raaz)

Break for 10 minutes

Open Discussion with the speakers and one another

(30 minutes or more)

Informal discussions with each other and visual exploration until 1600 hours

Ölof Bjorck and Gabriel Unesi, will help us visually explore publicly posted tweets in Swedish twitterverse in order to appreciate and reflect how communications shape one’s own world-views.