
DATA8013 - Ethical Issues in Big Data
Course Instructor

Professor Boris BABIC
Associate Professor,
HKU Musketeers Foundation Institute of Data Science and Department of Philosophy, HKU
Associate Professor, (by courtesy) Faculty of Law, HKU
Professor Boris Babic is HKU-100 Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong, jointly appointed in the Musketeers Foundation Institute of Data Science, the Department of Philosophy, and (by courtesy) the Faculty of Law, from Fall 2023. He also serves as an occasional visiting professor in the Decision Sciences department at INSEAD.
Professor Babic received a JD, cum laude, from Harvard Law School, an MS in Statistics and a PhD in Philosophy, from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He also practiced law at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP in Los Angeles, USA. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Professor Babic’s primary research interests are in Bayesian inference and decision-making, ethics, law, and policy of artificial intelligence and machine learning, especially in medical applications. His research has been published extensively in leading journals such as Science, Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Digital Medicine, and the Harvard Business Review.
Professor Babic will be on leave from the University of Toronto, where he is Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics and the Department of Philosophy and a faculty fellow of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology & Society.
Course Description
This course will be an introduction to ethical dimensions arising in the practice of statistics and data science, including in particular moral puzzles, problems and dilemmas that arise in the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence to everyday decision making in politics, business, and ordinary life. Throughout the course we will gradually develop an interdisciplinary systematic framework for thinking about such problems which draws on multiple philosophical traditions, reasoning tools, and statistical methods. We will also draw on legal theory and case law.
Prerequisites
Some background in philosophy and statistics is recommended.
HKU IDS
Research Postgraduate Programme
DATA8013 - Ethical Issues in Big Data (Application)
Course Description
This course will be an introduction to ethical dimensions arising in the practice of statistics and data science, including in particular moral puzzles, problems and dilemmas that arise in the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence to everyday decision making in politics, business, and ordinary life. Throughout the course we will gradually develop an interdisciplinary systematic framework for thinking about such problems which draws on multiple philosophical traditions, reasoning tools, and statistical methods. We will also draw on legal theory and case law.
Prerequisites
Some background in philosophy and statistics is recommended.