Berkeley CS wins major award to integrate ethics into undergraduate curriculum

The EECS Computer Science program is one of the inaugural recipients of the “Responsible Computer Science Challenge” award, an ambitious $3.5 million initiative designed to help integrate ethics into undergraduate computer science education.  The CS Division, which was the only leading CS program selected, will combine forces with the Division of Data Sciences to continue to develop and scale a curriculum that will “equip students to recognize and grapple with the complex, high-stakes questions” that arise in today’s world.  Since technologies like facial recognition can help find missing children or perpetuate bias, and social media platforms can be used to both build human rights movements and hack elections, students need to learn how to reason clearly about what technology should and should not do.  Berkeley students will be active participants in developing and testing the new course material.  “We hope the toolkit we’re developing at Berkeley can help other colleges and universities integrate ethics into their classes at scale,” said EECS chair James Demmel.