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The project website offers instructors hundreds of narratives, from film and TV clips, plus other sources, to help them tackle the intersection of ethics and computer science

Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Cinema Studies Allison Cooper, Assistant Professor of Digital and Computational Studies Fernando Nascimento, and Stacy Doore, who is the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Colby College, have announced the completion of a pioneering project theyve been working on for two and a half years.

In April 2019, Bowdoin was among those institutions selected to take part in a highly competitive national initiative (Doore was on the Bowdoin faculty back then, moving to Colby in 2020). TheResponsible Computer Science Challenge,spearheaded by the Mozilla Foundation, among others, is a $3.5 million competition aimed at integrating ethics into undergraduate computer science curricula at American colleges and universities.

Central to the Computing Ethics Narratives project, as its called, is the idea of storytelling. The newly launched website features a repository with hundreds of nonfiction narrativesincluding academic articles, tech news articles, podcasts, blogs. and video clips such as TED talksand fictional narratives, which include literary sources, as well technology-themed film clips from movies and TV shows, all carefully curated by cinema studies faculty and students.

Films include science fiction classics such as Fritz Langs Metropolis (1927), Ridley Scotts Blade Runner (1982), and A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), directed by Stephen Spielberg, while featured TV shows include Black Mirror (20112013) and Devs (2020). The website is designed to help instructors in computer science, offering them guidance on how to tackle ethically challenging subjects like predictive policing or algorithmic bias, and pointing them toward the relevant film clips that help tell the story.*

Cooper, Doore, and Nascimento shared their thoughts on the project in a YouTube video featured on the project website. The full video can be accessed below, but here is an edited selection of their comments.

Go here to read the rest:

Considering the Why and Not Just the How of Computer Science - Bowdoin News