
Key Information
About the content
What does integrity in research mean and why is it important to follow ethical conduct in your research work? Entering a PhD program, you are moving from a student’s position, where your main responsibility was to acquire and demonstrate acquisition of knowledge, into a position of producing knowledge. This creates new relationships with coworkers and your hosting institutions, new expectations, and new responsibilities towards science and society in general.
To help you understand these changes, the STIC doctoral school of the University Paris-Saclay provides this course to all its students. It balances a pragmatic “must-know” perspective, which can and must be acquired easily and fast, with more conceptual developments aimed at opening you up to the uncertainties and risks that are specific to your scientific domain.
This course is focused on the specific types of ethical issues encountered in information technologies, which deserve specific attention. If answering an ethical dilemma in bioethics is often akin to answering the question "who are we?", technology ethics triggers more questions of the type "where are we going?". This, in our opinion, deserves broad exposure.
Prerequisite
This course is addressed to all PhD students and researchers in Information & Communication Sciences & Technologies, with no particular prerequisites.
Syllabus
- The Doctoral Contract (researcher as a subject under law and an employee),
- Research Integrity (producing science correctly),
- Research Ethics (producing science responsibly),
- Computer and Information Ethics (how these apply to your research context),
- Intellectual property (researcher as a producer and consumer of value),
- Scientific Communication and Open Science and Internet Ethics (disseminating knowledge publicly),
- Privacy and Personal data (protecting our digital selves),
- Emerging issues in Computer and Information Ethics (what’s next).
Instructors
Thomas Baudel
Research Director at the IBM France Lab and member-at-large of the STICs doctoral school of the University Paris-Saclay. An alumni of University of Paris-Sud, he has worked at Silicon Graphics, Alias|Wavefront, ILOG and IBM as a researcher in the industry. Conducting research in a private company involves addressing many legal, ethical and deontological considerations, which made him want to share his experience with young researchers.
Arnaud Billion
Arnaud Billion is specialized in International Copyright Law, graduated from King's College London and University of Strasbourg. He works as a referee for AI and IT ethics at IBM France Center for Advanced Studies, and operates several open innovation projects. His domains of interests encompass Intellectual Property Law applied to IT, Information Ethics and Computable Law.
Content Designer

The Université Paris-Saclay (French: Université Paris-Saclay) is a French federal research university which is currently under development. The project is part of the research-intensive and business cluster Paris-Saclay, located near Paris in the Plateau de Saclay. The University of Paris-Saclay is expected to be the training and research center of the Paris-Saclay technology cluster, such as Stanford University in Silicon Valley and the Technion in Israel.
Platform

France Université Numérique is the broadcaster of the online courses of French higher education institutions and their partners.
It operates several platforms of diffusion, of which the best known, FUN MOOC, is the first French-speaking academic platform worldwide. Thanks to many partner institutions, this platform offers a vast catalog of courses enriched daily with various themes and current events.