A Conversation about “Data Ecology”

Bridget Fahey (Assistant Professor of Law)

Raul Castro Fernandez (Assistant Professor of Computer Science)

(Morton D. Hull Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science; Faculty Co-Director, Data Science Institute)

Data is an indispensable resource for virtually all private enterprise and public governance, and its importance will only grow with the dramatic expansion of AI. But data is not an organic material. It does not simply exist. It must be affirmatively produced, stored, moved, aggregated, mined, and deployed. Given data’s value and its risks, however, we know far less than we should about how to design coherent and continuous technical, legal, social, and economic systems that can shape data’s uses to our desired ends—that can render data a productive and legitimate instrument of human flourishing. We lack, in short, a vocabulary for conceptualizing data’s ecosystem and how to control it.

This talk will begin with a preliminary framework for “data ecology”—a way of thinking about data that can speak across fields—and conclude with a multi-disciplinary conversation about pathways for future research.

IMAGE: Myriam Thyes, Four Spaces with Planes, Circles, and Cross (2017). Via Creative Commons.