Community

Vast amounts of data are being generated across all segments of society. If taken advantage of, these data offer an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate scientific discovery, to improve healthcare and wellbeing, and to strengthen our communities. The data science community of Maastricht University is home to multiple institutes covering a wide range of expertise.

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences: The importance of ELSI

Data, information, knowledge and understanding has always driven society - the revolution of new methodologies and technologies that we are developing and discovering today push that drive into hyperspace!

Data as a commodity has commercial value, social value, and personal value. Privacy as the dynamic boundaries of relationships between people is challenged by this data revolution. We cannot necessarily rely on traditional, established understandings of society to meet the challenges of this revolution. The revolution challenges us to re-imagine who we are, how we relate to each other, and who we want to be. 

Our work examines how existing ethics and law approaches impact on the new methodologies of data science, and how those new data science methodologies challenge on our understandings of law and ethics. We work on the governance of data use. We look at how data are controlled, at the interfaces of privacy, of individuality and solidarity. We ask how we can achieve a consistency between individuals’ different and often competing and conflicting expectations in society. We seek to reconcile those different expectations - between expectations of privacy and the open data society.

What does ELSI stand for?

Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications

Links
FASoS Research Institute
Health, Ethics & Society (HES)  

Data science - the risks of convenience