CORE024 Ethics and Information Technology

Faculty of Informatics
Spring 2024
Extent and Intensity
2/0/0. 3 credit(s). Type of Completion: k (colloquium).
Teacher(s)
Mgr. Tomáš Foltýnek, Ph.D. (lecturer)
Mgr. Jan Kvapil (assistant)
Guaranteed by
Mgr. Tomáš Foltýnek, Ph.D.
Department of Machine Learning and Data Processing – Faculty of Informatics
Supplier department: Department of Machine Learning and Data Processing – Faculty of Informatics
Timetable
Mon 19. 2. to Thu 9. 5. Thu 16:00–17:50 D2
Prerequisites (in Czech)
!FAKULTA(FI)
Course Enrolment Limitations
The course is offered to students of any study field.
Course objectives
To acquaint students with ethical problems associated with information technology, ethical dilemmas, and ways to solve them. The course deals with ethical issues related to the collection, storage, processing, and presentation of data and information, algorithms to support decision-making, and their social overlap.
Learning outcomes
The ability to identify problems related to information technology ethics and the ability to analyze these problems in a structured way. The ability to solve moral dilemmas related to information technology, including a thorough argumentation of the chosen solution. The ability to debate moral dilemmas, understand opponents' opinions, and be able to accept them, or deal with them in an argument.
Syllabus
  • 1. Introduction to ethics, basic concepts: Ethics, morality, values, virtues. Moral dilemma, Discussion of moral dilemmas: Debate and dialogue
  • 2. Ethical data handling: How to produce and collect data ethically? Who owns the data? Surveillance capitalism
  • 3. Ethical aspects of social media and news servers: Positive and negative content and its attractiveness, Pay-per-click and social responsibility
  • 4. ChatGPT: How does it disrupt education? And how to use it ethically?
  • 5. Media manipulation and misinformation on the Internet: Consequences of poor quality, misleading and hateful content on the Internet, How can information technology prevent or limit the spread of misinformation?
  • 6. Information filtering and censorship: When can information filtering be considered ethical? New Great Wall of China, The right to be forgotten in the EU
  • 7. Bias in algorithms: Ethical aspects of data transformation into information and knowledge, Ethical aspects of data presentation
  • 8. Ethical hacking: Hackers' mind, when is hacking ethical, Bug bounty programs
  • 9. Internet and copyright: "Remix" culture, Public domain and Creative Commons licence, Plagiarism issues
  • 10. Information technologies for prevention and detection of unethical behaviour: Plagiarism detection, Proctoring systems, AI-generated text detection
  • 11. Ethics of artificial intelligence: Ethics by design, ethics in design, ethics for design. Laws of robotics
  • 12. Professional ethics in IT: What does "being a good IT professional" mean? Ethical issues in IT design and development
Teaching methods
Lectures
Assessment methods
The colloquium is awarded after obtaining 60 points:
20 points: Short quizzes about articles
10 points: Active participation in discussion
10 points: Online activities - Tips on interesting articles in course discussion forum; Contributions on social media, blogs, etc.
20 points: Analysis of the influence of ChatGPT in a selected course
20 points: An essay on a selected topic
20 points: A presentation within a lecture
20 points: Active participation in a discussion evening in the exam period
10 points: Critical feedback on someone else's essay
Language of instruction
Czech
Further Comments
Study Materials
The course is taught annually.
The course is also listed under the following terms Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2025.
  • Enrolment Statistics (recent)
  • Permalink: https://is.muni.cz/course/fi/spring2024/CORE024