DATA 520: Research Methods for Socially Responsible AI

Role: Teaching Assistant · Fall 2025

DATA 520 — Research Methods for Socially Responsible AI: An Ethical Expedition — immerses students in socially and ethically responsible artificial intelligence. Emphasizing hands-on experience, it guides students through conducting ethically responsible AI research with a focus on AI fairness, societal impacts, and real-world applications.

Students collaborate in teams, selecting a research area and societal problem from broader data science themes, and pursue a semester-long project under the guidance of faculty and graduate teaching assistants. The course draws on science and technology studies, AI ethics, and social theory, building skills for finding and synthesizing research across disciplines and translating between technical and social perspectives on datafication, algorithms, and AI.

The material sits close to my own research on LLM alignment and bias auditing, which made TAing it unusually useful — the questions students asked about study design were frequently the same questions I had to answer in my own work.