Over 150 scholars and practitioners from industry, academia, government, and civil society gathered this past weekend at IEEE ETHICS 2025 to examine questions of ethics and social justice in artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. The gathering was hosted by the Department of Black Studies at Northwestern University, and sponsored by the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology. The IEEE Chicago Section was also a technical co-sponsor of ETHICS 2025, and partner organizations included Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, the National Institute for Engineering Ethics (NIEE), the IEEE TechEthics Program, and the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Ethics Division..
Michael King
IEEE ETHICS 2025 featured three exemplary plenary sessions, starting on Friday evening with Michael King, of the Florida Institute of Technology, who spoke on “When Innovation Meets Injustice: Navigating the Ethical Frontiers of Face Recognition Technology.” In a riveting presentation, King dissected known cases of wrongful arrests in the U.S., where law enforcement personnel used face recognition technology (FRT) resulting in incorrect identification and arrest of suspects, including a case where an innocent man was imprisoned for 10 days before being released.
At Saturday’s opening plenary, Lai-Tze Fan, Canada Research Chair of Technology and Social Change at the University of Waterloo, presented “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Data Equity and Responsible AI Design,” with a focus on the problem of building “racially diverse and ethically produced” FRTs.
Lai-Tze Fan
Sunday’s plenary featured Stefanie Tompkins, Provost at the Colorado School of Mines, on “Thoughtful Acceleration of Technology Transition.” “To be a good engineer you need to be thinking about consequences and context,” Tompkins noted during the Q&A following her talk.
Stephanie Tompkins
The ETHICS-2025 event featured 12 paper sessions with over 50 papers, 14 workshops and panels, as well as a poster session and several pre-recorded “flash presentations” posted on the conference website. Innovative and insightful work by both graduate and undergraduate students enriched the conference program. The conference brought together participants from a range of academic and industry backgrounds, whose diverse disciplinary perspectives bridged technical, social scientific, humanities, and creative disciplines.
ETHICS-2025 Conference organizers included Sylvester Johnson of Northwestern University, Conference Chair; Heather Love of University of Waterloo, Organizing Chair; Joe Herkert, North Carolina State University, and Qin Zhu, Virginia Tech University, Technical Program Co-Chairs; Marc Cheong, University of Melbourne, Publications Chair; and Aayan Agarwal, Purdue University, and Abi Sipes, Butler University, Undergraduate Student Activities Coordinators. For additional photos and coverage visit https://attend.ieee.org/ethics-2025/gallery-3/, or the SSIT LinkedIn page at https://www.linkedin.com/groups/1790357/.
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