A National Academies study will explore ethics and governance issues associated with the personal and social consequences of computing research and its applications. The study committee will gather input through at least one open meeting and a solicitation for written comments from relevant research communities and stakeholders. It will consider such topics as: (1) Guiding principles, tools, and practical approaches for identifying and addressing ethical issues; (2) The feasibility and likely performance of research governance frameworks and regulatory regimes, and related best practices that research funders, research-performing institutions, and individual researchers can leverage to formulate, conduct, and evaluate ethical research and associated activities; (3) Multidisciplinary approaches to understanding ethical issues in computing; (5) How these approaches can empower the research community to develop and pursue socially productive practices; and (6) Ways to promulgate ethical principles and responsible practices and sustain attention to them in the computing research community, including through education and training The study will consider these issues across different subdomains or application areas of computing, such as medicine, autonomous vehicles, and elections. The study will not focus on ethical issues associated with the conduct of research itself except where these relate to the implications of research results. In carrying out this study, the committee will also consider related questions such as: (a) How do ethics and governance issues and needs present differently in different research contexts? Are there other ethics and governance issues that apply more broadly across many or most areas of computing research? (b) What set of research governance frameworks or regulatory regimes are feasible in each of these contexts? (c) How might research governance take place at different granularities and modalities of governance, such as community, organizational, local, regional, national, and international? (d) What empirical evidence exists for how these research governance frameworks or regulatory regimes might correspond to ethically desirable outcomes? (e) What is the current relative maturity level of ethics and governance concepts in different aspects of the computing research space? Which areas are the most advanced and can their relative maturity be leveraged into use elsewhere in computing? (f) What incentives or contextual changes would be effective in helping computing researchers, and those who develop subsequent applications, place more emphasis on ethical considerations? For which existing, and likely future, stakeholders are such changes compatible with current incentives?
The committee will prepare a final report containing its analysis, findings, and (as appropriate) recommendations. The report will identify and (to the extent feasible) recommend practical steps that National Science Foundation-supported researchers and others in the computing research community can take to address ethics in all phases of their research from proposal to publication.