About Us

The Embedded Ethics Education Initiative (E3I) is a high-impact teaching and learning venture that embeds paired ethics-technology education modules into computer science courses across all four years of the Department of Computer Science undergraduate curriculum. Transformative advances in technology have provoked global concern over AI safety, data privacy, algorithmic discrimination, and the future of work. E3I aims to endow computer science students with the awareness, skills, and incentive to incorporate such ethical considerations in the design and deployment of technology. The program’s high impact is reflected in the thousands of students it engages annually, the effectiveness of that engagement, and in the broader perspective and skills it provides to our students as they enter the workforce.

E3I was launched as a two-year pilot in 2020 reaching 400 computer science students in its first year of operation. It has now expanded to a mature initiative in computer science. In the 2023-24 academic year, student enrollment in computer science courses with E3I modules reached just shy of 5000, with an additional 3200 enrollments in other computer science E3I programming. By 2025, a typical undergraduate student in computer science will experience a minimum of one E3I module per year across their four-year undergraduate program. The initiative is also being piloted in other disciplines: five modules were delivered to more than 1500 students in disciplines outside computer science, ranging from statistics to ecology and evolutionary biology. The team’s internationally recognized scholarly assessment confirms the effectiveness and impact of E3I, both within and beyond the classroom.

E3I is a collaborative venture at the University of Toronto between the Department of Computer Science and the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, in association with the Department of Philosophy.

Contact us at: embedded-ethics@cs.toronto.edu

Acknowledgements

The Embedded Ethics Education Initiative has received generous funding from the Faculty of Arts and Science and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, and the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.

We also gratefully acknowledge funding from UnitE Investments which supports the SRI Embedded Ethics Graduate Teaching Fellows program.

Finally, we thank Barbara Grosz and Jeff Behrends at Harvard University for sharing their inspiration and wisdom from the Embedded EthiCS @ Harvard program.