Ethical Considerations for Responsible Data Curation

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (NeurIPS 2023) Datasets and Benchmarks Track

Bibtex Paper

Authors

Jerone Andrews, Dora Zhao, William Thong, Apostolos Modas, Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, Alice Xiang

Abstract

Human-centric computer vision (HCCV) data curation practices often neglect privacy and bias concerns, leading to dataset retractions and unfair models. HCCV datasets constructed through nonconsensual web scraping lack crucial metadata for comprehensive fairness and robustness evaluations. Current remedies are post hoc, lack persuasive justification for adoption, or fail to provide proper contextualization for appropriate application. Our research focuses on proactive, domain-specific recommendations, covering purpose, privacy and consent, and diversity, for curating HCCV evaluation datasets, addressing privacy and bias concerns. We adopt an ante hoc reflective perspective, drawing from current practices, guidelines, dataset withdrawals, and audits, to inform our considerations and recommendations.