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This article establishes and addresses opportunities for ethics integration into Machine-learning (ML) courses. Following a survey of the history of computing ethics and the current need for ethical consideration within ML, we consider the current state of ML ethics education via an exploratory analysis of course syllabi in computing programs. The results reveal that though ethics is part of the overall educational landscape in these programs, it is not frequently a part of core technical ML courses. To help address this gap, we offer a preliminary framework, developed via a systematic literature review, of relevant ethics questions that should be addressed within an ML project. A pilot study with 85 students confirms that this framework helped them identify and articulate key ethical considerations within their ML projects. Building from this work, we also provide three example ML course modules that bring ethical thinking directly into learning core ML content. Collectively, this research demonstrates: (1) the need for ethics to be taught as integrated within ML coursework, (2) a structured set of questions useful for identifying and addressing potential issues within an ML project, and (3) novel course models that provide examples for how to practically teach ML ethics without sacrificing core course content. An additional by-product of this research is the collection and integration of recent publications in the emerging field of ML ethics education.

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Over the past four years, the Big Data and Exascale Computing (BDEC) project organized a series of five international workshops that aimed to explore the ways in which the new forms of data-centric discovery introduced by the ongoing revolution in high-end data analysis (HDA) might be integrated with the established, simulation-centric paradigm of the high-performance computing (HPC) community. Based on those meetings, we argue that the rapid proliferation of digital data generators, the unprecedented growth in the volume and diversity of the data they generate, and the intense evolution of the methods for analyzing and using that data are radically reshaping the landscape of scientific computing. The most critical problems involve the logistics of wide-area, multistage workflows that will move back and forth across the computing continuum, between the multitude of distributed sensors, instruments and other devices at the networks edge, and the centralized resources of commercial clouds and HPC centers. We suggest that the prospects for the future integration of technological infrastructures and research ecosystems need to be considered at three different levels. First, we discuss the convergence of research applications and workflows that establish a research paradigm that combines both HPC and HDA, where ongoing progress is already motivating efforts at the other two levels. Second, we offer an account of some of the problems involved with creating a converged infrastructure for peripheral environments, that is, a shared infrastructure that can be deployed throughout the network in a scalable manner to meet the highly diverse requirements for processing, communication, and buffering/storage of massive data workflows of many different scientific domains. Third, we focus on some opportunities for software ecosystem convergence in big, logically centralized facilities that execute large-scale simulations and models and/or perform large-scale data analytics. We close by offering some conclusions and recommendations for future investment and policy review.