The DSI at the University of Toronto Mississauga, DSI@UTM, leads a tri-campus initiative to encourage research activity in Responsible Data Science that includes community-building, workshops and seed funding for research.

Data science has tremendous potential to inspire positive outcomes in the world. However, there are concerns about the ethical deployment of data science techniques and the ways that the effects of data science may reify inequities and biases.

The promotion of data science requires a dedicated understanding of the power within societies and knowledge communities to ameliorate negative, unjust effects. Data science is and will continue to restructure multiple aspects of our world and it is important to maintain a commitment to questions of power, inequity, responsibility, surveillance, justice, and harm to ensure that collecting, manipulating, storing, visualizing, learning from, and extracting useful information from data is done in a reproducible, fair, and ethical way.