Janice Tsai | Disrupting IRB: A New Research Ethics Review | Jul 22, 2015

ABSTRACT

Research ethics is an important and timely topic. In academia, federally regulated Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) protect participants of human subjects research, and offer researchers a mechanism to assess the ethical implications of their work. Industry research labs are not subject to the same requirements, and may lack processes for research ethics review. We describe the creation of a new ethics framework and submission system within Microsoft Research (MSR). This system is customized to the needs of web researchers. We describe our iterative development process, including our assessment of the current state of web research, developing a framework of methods based on a survey of 358 research papers; build and evaluate our system with 14 users to identify the benefits and pitfalls of full deployment; evaluate how our system matches with existing federal regulations; and, suggest next steps for supporting ethical web research.

BIO

Janice Tsai is a Privacy Manager at Microsoft. As a Privacy Manager, she helps create new privacy solutions for products and ensures that data is collected and used in a manner that meets the Microsoft Privacy Standard. Janice is currently focused on privacy for the Internet of Things. She has spent time working in the California and New Jersey Legislatures. She has a PhD from Carnegie Mellon in usable privacy from the department of Engineering and Public Policy (EPP). Janice is also on the advisory board for the Office of Information Technology Policy (OITP) of the American Library Association (ALA).