Ethical and societal responsibility debated at 2018 conference

The 2018 Oxford Computer Science conference took place on 1 June at the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. This year, the conference was sponsored by Google DeepMind, Accenture and Ocado, and featured more than 25 talk and poster presentations of cutting-edge research by DPhil and masters' students.

One of the highlights of the day was the keynote panel 'Coding the Future: Values in Computer Science', where Head of Department Professor Michael Wooldridge, Head of Human Centered Computing Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Deputy Director of the Digital Ethics Lab Mariarosaria Taddeo, and Microsoft's Govermental Affairs Manager David Franke debated how to integrate ethical and societal responsibility into Computer Science.

Among other points, the panel provided a great discussion of the challenges around designing ethics courses that in a useful way can prepare tomorrow's computer science students for careers where their work has a high impact on society.

Thanks to the industry sponsors, the conference also featured a number of prizes for outstanding submissions and presentations: 'Best talk' was won by Martin Dehnel-Wild, with Gareth Molyneux as runner-up. 'Best poster' was won by Meredydd Williams, with Prince Abudu as runner-up. 'Best abstract' was won by Anna Bialas, with David Tena Cucala runner-up.