Societal Pressures for Trustworthy Data Analysis

Oregon Convention Center 

Data analysis is increasingly being performed on a wider-scale than ever before. The widening of scale includes the number of people doing data analysis, as well as the application of analysis to many different problems and fields. A challenge of this phenomena is that many people now performing data analysis may not have formal "data" training. Additionally, the applications of data analysis now routinely having wide and important impacts to human lives (e.g., loan qualification, health treatment access, etc). That such analyses be trustworthy seems important, but also challenging to ensure. This talk explores what societal pressures (moral, reputational and institutional) currently exist to promote trustworthy data analyses and whether they are sufficient to pressure data analysts to perform analysis that is "trustworthy enough". The aim of surveying this landscape is to understand the current state of affairs and identify where there may not be enough societal pressures to induce analysts into making their analyses trustworthy. Identifying the gaps will be an important starting point for the data analyst community to improve community standards and norms around trust.