We invite contributions for the joint online workshop "Ethics of Big Data for Migration Research" organised by the HumMingBird consortium (Enhanced Migration Measures from a Multidimensional Perspective, H2020 project - GA 870661), the SoBigData++ consortium (European Integrated Infrastructure for Social Mining and Big Data Analytics, H2020 Project - GA 871042) and the IMISCOE Meth@Mig (Methodological Approaches and Tools in Migration Research) standing committee.

The concept of Big Data is gaining popularity with respect to every aspect of life given the influence of technology on individuals and governance. Big Data applications have been used widely for commercial purposes and for scientific use, several methodologies are adopted for various disciplines. Nevertheless, migration research has only recently adopted the possibility of Big Data use for studying human mobility. Analytical methods and advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms required to extract meaningful insights from Big Data and transform these data into “value” (De Maura et al., 2016) and several studies and projects have demonstrated that big data technologies are novel sources to develop proxies and indicators for migration (Dijstelbloem 2017; Zagheni et al., 2017; Spyratos et al., 2019; Böhme, et al., 2020; IOM, 2020). Along with the opportunities of the use of Big Data for migration research, concerns with ethical and secure data collection, privacy-preserving and human-rights-compliant data usage and unintended consequences of AI algorithms have been brought up regularly (Dignum, 2018; Floridi et al., 2018; McGregor et al., 2019; Molnar, 2019; Beduschi, 2020). Hence, with this workshop we intend to provide the space to reflect on ethical implications of Big Data use in migration research in a more systematic way.

Information

Accepting full-paper and extended-abstract submissions
Submission Deadline: 10 June 2021
Notification of acceptance: 15 July 2021