COMP8410 Data Mining S1 2021

Assignment 1

Maximum marks      100

Weight      15% of the total marks for the course

Length      Maximum of 8 pages excluding cover sheet, bibliography and appendices.

Layout      A4. At least 11 point type size. Use of typeface, margins and headings consistent with a professional style.

Submission deadline      9am, Monday 15th March

Submission mode      Electronic, PDF via Wattle, file-name includes u-number

Estimated time      15 hours

Penalty for lateness      100% after the deadline has passed

First posted:      22^nd Feb, 9am

Last modified:      22^nd Feb, 9am

Questions to:      Wattle Discussion Forum

This assignment specification may be updated to reflect clarifications and modifications after it is first issued.

In this assignment, you are required to submit a single essay in the form of a single PDF file with a file-name that includes your University u-number ID. The first page must have a clearly identified title and author, identified by both name and university u-number. You may also attach supporting information (appendices) in the same PDF file. Appendices will not be marked but may be treated as supporting information to your essay.

This is a single-person assignment and must be completed on your own. You must use quality reference material and carefully reference all the material that you use via in-text citations. Any material that you quote should have the source clearly referenced. It is unacceptable to present any portion of another author's work as your own. Anyone found doing so will be penalised in marks. In addition, CECS plagiarism procedures apply.

It is strongly suggested that you start working on the assignment right away. You can submit as many times as you wish. Only the most recent submission at the due date will be assessed.

Task

You are to write a well-researched essay that critically evaluates the ethics and social impact of a data mining project.

1. Select a Data Mining project and describe it.

You are asked to select a data mining project from your workplace. This could be a past, completed project, a current, active project, or a future project in planning stages. You may select a scientific project, but it must be the case that the project raises sufficient genuine ethical questions for you to have something to write about in the assignment. For example, the project may use data corresponding to attributes of individual people or organisations that could be privacy-sensitive or for whom the mining results could entrench bias against them. The project must involve data mining or analytics; simple data collection and release, whether intentional or not, is not sufficient.

If it is difficult for you to find any such project (for example, if you are not employed, or you cannot share sufficient information about a workplace project), then you may use a real-world project related to predictive policing, that is, using data mining or statistical analytics to predict the participants, locations, and/or times of criminal activities in order to allocate policing resources. There is an abundance of information available on specific predictive policing projects to be found in magazine and newspaper publications and in research papers. Remember to cite carefully.

On-campus and online You are expected to choose the predictive policing option here, although you may choose the workplace project option if you prefer.

In your essay you will need to describe the project in terms of its aims, its methods, the source and nature of the data it uses, the authority for the organisation’s access to the data, and the expected use and impact of any results obtained. For the impact you should consider not only how the results are planned to be used, but also how they otherwise could be or have been used. In every case, you will need to consider whether the data was provided with consent, whether it is or could be seen to be of a personal nature, and whether the outcomes of the data mining will contribute to social improvement or improved services to consumers or the public. You will also need to describe any other aspects of the project that are necessary for you to address the other aspects of your essay.

For a workplace project, you are encouraged to attach non-confidential background material, written by others, concerning the project about which you write, where this may help to support the information provided in your essay. This should be clearly marked as an appendix and its source and status identified.

2. Consider the ethical aspects of the project.

The Australian Computer Society (ACS) Code of Professional Conduct 2014 is expected to be applied by all Computing Professionals in Australia. It sets out 6 values but stresses the primacy of the public interest as the overriding value. In 2017, the US Branch of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), recognizing the ubiquity and far-reaching impact of algorithms in daily lives, issued a Statement on Algorithmic Transparency and Accountability including 7 principles designed to address potential harmful social discrimination due to bias. In 2018, the Australian Government Office of the Australian Information Commissioner released the Guide to Data Analytics and the Australian Privacy Principles (APP). The research community has been addressing the principle of explanation and is surveyed in Du, Liu and Hu, (2020) “Techniques for Interpretable Machine Learning”, Communications of the ACM 63(1).

You are asked to discuss the ethical aspects of your data mining project with particular reference to all of the ACS Code, the US ACM Statement (including the 7 Principles) and the APP. You must consider the privacy of individuals where personal information is involved: such as credit card transactions, health care records, personal financial records, biological traits, criminal or justice investigations, ethnicity or lifestyle choices.

You may need to address complex issues, like whether the potential cost to a few may be outweighed by the benefit to many. You are not expected to provide simple, one-directional answers. While your project may raise many ethical issues, paying attention to the page limit, you are advised to broadly introduce those that you recognise but then to focus your discussion more deeply on some particular issue(s) you choose.

3. Recommend how the project should, could, or should have, managed ethical issues related to data mining.

You are expected to form an opinion on the appropriate measures to put in place to address the ethical issues you have identified. You must place your opinion in the context of technological solutions available to address ethical issues in data mining. However, you are not asked to consider those methods in detail; a light coverage of the expected benefits of the approach is sufficient. The Du et al paper will assist you with technical approaches to some ethical issues you may encounter. Other potential technical approaches are summarised in the course notes for Week 1. You are also specifically required to go beyond such technical solutions alone to consider procedural, governance or educational approaches to managing ethical issues.

While you are asked to provide your own point of view of measures that could be taken, you are also asked to explicitly critique alternative views, such as, perhaps, the measures that were put in place when the project was conducted, or measures that relate to the project that you can discover from the literature or Web sources. Alternatively, you could interview colleagues in your workplace (but not students of this course) in order to gain alternative points of view about what measures could be taken that are ethically acceptable. You may also interview other people that are potentially affected by the results of the project. Consider attaching a transcript, recording or extracts from the interviews as appendices to your essay – such material, where relevant, will be considered as evidence of your research for the essay.

You are free to conclude that ethical considerations would recommend against the project going ahead, but any conclusion you make must be supported by a well-reasoned argument.

General Comments

An abstract or executive summary is not required. A cover sheet is optional and does not contribute to the page count. No particular layout is specified, but you should follow a professional style and use no smaller than 11 point typeface and stay within the maximum specified page count. It is a strict maximum: long-winded or irrelevant content within the limit will be penalised and text beyond the limit will be treated as non-existent. Page margins, heading sizes, paragraph breaks and so forth are not specified but a professional style must be maintained. Appendices may be used and do not contribute to the page count, but appendices may be only quickly scanned or used for reference and will not be specifically marked.

Your essay is expected to be a well-researched piece of critical writing. You may find this resource from Sydney University helpful information on what is expected in critical writing, and noting that critical writing necessarily includes elements of descriptive, analytical, and persuasive writing as well.

http://sydney.edu.au/stuserv/learning_centre/help/analysing/an_distinguishTypes.shtml.

You should play close attention to references, both to demonstrate the research component of your essay, to support your argument with expert opinion and evidence, and also to appropriately attribute the work of others including all reference documents made available to you (but not this assignment specification itself). No particular referencing style is required. However, you are expected to reference conventionally, conveniently, and consistently. Your references should be sufficient to both unambiguously identify the source, to describe the nature of the source, and also to retrieve the source in online and (if possible) traditional publisher formats.

An assessment rubric is provided. The rubric will be used to mark your assignment. You are advised to use it to supplement your understanding of what is expected for the assignment and to direct your effort towards the most rewarding parts of the work.

Your assignment submission will be treated confidentially, but it will be available to ANU staff involved in the course for the purposes of marking. Please respect your employer’s expectations of confidentiality in your assignment. If you cannot share sufficient information about your project in order to address the assignment questions, then please do choose a different project or take the alternative options given above. 

Assessment Rubric 

This rubric will be used to mark your assignment. You are advised to use it to supplement your understanding of what is expected for the assignment and to direct your effort towards the most rewarding parts of the work. Your assignment will be marked out of 100, and marks will be scaled back to contribute to the defined weighting for assessment of the course.