OxTalks is Changing
OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Big Data Ethics Forum: Fake news? Epistemic and ethical challenges for synthetic datasets
Synthetic data is data that are generated by an algorithm to have properties similar to real data. They may be useful whenever real data is too sensitive, too valuable, or too limited to meet research needs. Synthetic data may be used, for example, to teach population health science without releasing real patient data to students, or to develop statistical analyses while avoiding Gelman and Loken’s “garden of forking paths”. But the more closely synthetic data replicate the properties and patterns of real data, i.e. the more realistic they are, the greater the risk that they fail to achieve some of these objectives. Information contained in synthetic data could be used to learn about the real data on which they are based, potentially risking participant privacy or exhausting the utility of the real data for hypothesis testing. Conversely, attempts to reduce bias in certain machine learning models by augmenting real data with synthetic data may be defeated by a lack of realism. The ethical and epistemic problems that might motivate use of synthetic data, and the issues which may affect how it is generated and used, will be presented for discussion.
Date:
4 February 2020, 14:15
Venue:
Big Data Institute (NDM), Old Road Campus OX3 7LF
Venue Details:
Seminar Room 0
Speakers:
Ben Cairns (University of Oxford),
Angeliki Kerasidou (University of Oxford)
Organising department:
Ethox Centre
Organiser:
Christa Henrichs (Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities)
Part of:
Ethox Centre Seminars
Booking required?:
Not required
Audience:
Members of the University only
Editors:
Graham Bagley,
Hannah Freeman
