With big data and its consequences very much in the news this year, the conversation around the handling of information streams is turning toward issues such as privacy and bias. The big data era has moved from the technical requirements, such as ingestion and storage, into the realm of action, where enterprises need to put data to use with confidence that it will generate an unbiased outcome.

“How do we do privacy? How do we maintain the right level of data so we don’t have bias? How to we get diversity going?” asked Maribel Lopez (pictured), founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research LLC. “The next wave is around understanding how to use your data, understanding how to get third-party data in and being able to rapidly make decisions and change models based on that.”

Lopez spoke with Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the BigData SV event in San Jose, California. They discussed the importance of data ethics and how larger companies are working to provide the right machine learning tools that avoid bias.

A data science code of ethics

As companies rely more heavily on actionable data using tools such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, some organizations are beginning to explore codes of conduct and ethics guidelines for how data will be analyzed and used. Last fall, Bloomberg LP formed a partnership with BrightHive and Data for Democracy to develop a code of ethics for data scientists.

“We have to be really thoughtful about what we put into the system,” Lopez said. “We assume at some point the machines are going to start making decisions for us, and we want to make sure that they have the best information to do that and they don’t limit our opportunities as a society.”

As the data science landscape has evolved, companies are relying on vendors, including cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Azure, to provide entry-level tools for business information analysis.

“If you’re Microsoft, Google or Amazon, you’re trying very hard to make sure you’re giving tools that have the right ethics in them and can help kickstart peoples’ machine learning efforts” Lopez said. “I think that’s going to be a real win for us.”

Here’s the complete video interview, and there’s much more SiliconANGLE and theCUBE coverage of the BigData SV event:

Photo: SiliconANGLE