Annual Research Ethics Day Conference - The Ethical Use of Artificial Intelligence in Research: Challenges & Emerging Guidance

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Webinar: Wednesday, March 5, 2025; 9am-3pm Central Time
Online -- Zoom
 

Researchers across many disciplines are increasingly utilizing artificial intelligence (AI), including large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT to support empirical research and data analysis, academic writing, peer review, and development of new tools. The broad reach of AI in research raises pressing ethical questions about scientific integrity, authorship, data privacy, bias, and equity. Related issues include how trainees and students should be instructed to use and acknowledge the use of AI tools in their research. Ethical guidance from research institutions, professional organizations, journals, and governmental oversight authorities is only beginning to emerge, and ethical oversight of AI in research also remains in flux.

This conference will bring together leading experts from a range of disciplines, from biomedical sciences to the humanities, to confront the challenge of ethical use of AI in research. National leaders will discuss how AI is being used in research, the challenges to research ethics and integrity, current guidance on using AI in research and publication, including how to address concerns that training sets for LLMs may not be sufficiently representative, leading to biased models. Speakers will also debate how LLMs should be used in academic writing and peer review, and how students should use these tools. The conference will consider when and how researchers should seek informed consent to use of AI in research protocols, and how IRBs can effectively provide oversight for research with AI tools. The conference will offer recommendations for researchers, students, administrators, and IRB professionals on how to ensure ethical use of AI in research.

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Conference Agenda

Annual Research Ethics Day Conference - The Ethical Use of Artificial Intelligence in Research & Scholarship: Challenges & Emerging Guidance

9:00am Central TimeWelcome & Land Acknowledgment
 

Moderator: Susan M. Wolf, JD, Regents Professor; McKnight Presidential Professor of Law, Medicine & Public Policy; Faegre Drinker Professor of Law; Professor of Medicine; Chair, Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment & the Life Sciences, University of Minnesota

  • Shashank Priya, PhD, Vice President for Research & Innovation Office; Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of Minnesota 
9:15amEthical Use of AI in Research -- How is AI being used in research? What guidance is emerging on ethical and trustworthy AI?
 

Moderator:  Francis X. Shen, JD, PhD, Professor of Law; Co-Chair, Consortium on Law on Values in Health, Environment & the Life Sciences, University of Minnesota

  • Jeannette M. Wing, PhD, Professor of Computer Science; Executive Vice President for Research, Columbia University
  • Mary L. Gray, PhD, Senior Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research; Faculty Associate, Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University; Associate Professor of Informatics, Luddy School of Informatics, Computing & Engineering, Indiana University
10:15amBias & Inclusion -- How should AI/ML tools be developed and used to avoid bias and ensure responsible use?
 

Moderator: Genevieve Melton-Meaux, MD, PhD, FACMI, FACS, FACSRS, Professor of Surgery; Senior Associate Dean of Health Informatics & Data Science; Director, Center for Learning Health System Sciences; Core Faculty, Institute for Health Informatics; Co-Chair, Data Science Initiative; Associate Director for the Clinical NLP Research Group; Program Director for the Clinical Informatics Fellowship, University of Minnesota; Chief Health Informatics & AI Officer, MHealth Fairview

  • Leo Anthony Celi, MD, MSc, MPH, Editor-in-Chief of PLoS Digital Health; Senior Research Scientist, MIT; Clinical Research Director, Laboratory of Computational Physiology; Staff Physician, Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care & Sleep Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
  • Judy Wawira Gichoya, MD, MS, Associate Professor of Radiology & Imaging Sciences, Emory University School of Medicine; Co-Director, Healthcare AI Innovation and Translational Informatics (HITI) Lab
11:15amBreak
11:30amNorms on AI/ML in Scholarship -- How should AI and large language models (LLM) be used in academic writing and peer review? What ethical norms should apply to students, faculty, researchers, peer reviewers, and journals?
 

ModeratorConnie White Delaney, PhD, RN, FAAN, FACMI, Professor and Dean, School of Nursing, University of Minnesota; Knowledge Generation Lead, National Center for Interprofessional Practice & Education

  • Isaac S. Kohane, MD, PhD, Editor-in-Chief, NEJM AI; Marion V. Nelson Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Chair, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School
  • David B. Resnik, JD, PhD, Bioethicist, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences; Senior Advisor for Research Integrity, Office of Intramural Research, National Institutes of Health (NIH)
12:30pmLunch Break
1:00pmInformed Consent – When does use of AI constitute research with human subjects? Do researchers have duties to secure participant consent to the use of AI in a research protocol? Should informed consent address potential uses of AI in secondary research on the data collected?
 

ModeratorConstantin Aliferis, MD, PhD, FACMI, Professor of Medicine; Director, Institute for Health Informatics; Chief Research Informatics Officer, Clinical and Translational Science Institute, University of Minnesota

  • Alex John London, PhD, K&L Gates Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies; Co-Lead, K&L Gates Initiative in Ethics and Computational Technologies; Director, Center for Ethics and Policy; Chief Ethicist, Block Center for Technology and Society, Carnegie Mellon University
  • Vardit Ravitsky, PhD, President & CEO, The Hastings Center; Senior Lecturer on Global Health & Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School
2:00pmOversight of AI in Research – How should IRBs & other oversight bodies evaluate use of AI in research? Should research oversight programs themselves use AI to evaluate protocols and compliance?
 

Moderator: Stevie Chancellor, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Minnesota

  • Bradley Malin, PhD, Accenture Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Biostatistics & Computer Science; Vice Chair for Research Affairs, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University Medical Center
  • Effy Vayena, PhD, Professor of Bioethics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETHZ)
2:55pmClosing Remarks
 
  • Susan M. Wolf, JD, Regents Professor; McKnight Presidential Professor of Law, Medicine & Public Policy; Faegre Drinker Professor of Law; Professor of Medicine; Chair, Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment & the Life Sciences, University of Minnesota
3:00pmAdjourn

Speaker Biographies

Constantin Aliferis

Constantin Aliferis, MD, PhD, FACMI, is Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota and serves as the University's CTSI Chief Research Informatics Officer as well as Director of the Institute for Health Informatics (IHI). Dr. Aliferis leads CTSI’s Biomedical Informatics Program, where he oversees the Best Practices Informatics Core, a consulting and collaborative science core created to generate and link datasets on demand, architect systems, perform sophisticated modeling and analysis, and assemble multidisciplinary teams to meet researcher needs. His research is focused on high dimensional modeling and analysis designed to transform biomedical data into novel actionable scientific knowledge. Areas of broad interest are: use of advanced informatics and analytics to accelerate the sophistication, volume, quality, and reproducibility of scientific research; precision medicine; and quality and cost improvements in healthcare using Big Data approaches.

Photo of Leo Anthony Celi

Leo Anthony Celi, MD, MSc, MPH, is Clinical Research Director and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Laboratory for Computational Physiology (LCP), Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, and a practicing intensive care unit (ICU) physician at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). He is also Editor-in-Chief of PLoS Digital Health. Dr. Celi is the Principal Investigator behind the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC) and its offsprings, MIMIC-CXR, MIMIC-ED, MIMIC-ECHO, and MIMIC-ECG. With close to 100k users worldwide, an open codebase, and close to 10k publications in Google Scholar, the datasets have shaped the course of machine learning in healthcare in the United States and beyond. In partnership with hospitals, universities, and professional societies across the globe, Dr. Celi and his team have organized over 50 datathons in 22 countries, bringing together students, clinicians, researchers, and engineers to leverage data routinely collected in the process of care.

Stevie Chancellor, PhD

Stevie Chancellor, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Minnesota. Her research combines approaches from Human-Computer Interaction and AI to build and critically evaluate human-centered AI systems, focusing on high-risk health behaviors in online communities. Using machine learning, she uses digital trace data from millions of interactions on social media to identify high-risk behaviors. At the same time, she critically evaluates these predictive approaches and develops more ethical and compassionate research practices for computer science.

 
 

Connie White Delaney

Connie White Delaney, PhD, RN, FAAN, FACMI, serves as Professor and Dean in the School of Nursing at the University of Minnesota, and is the Knowledge Generation Lead for the National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education. She served as Associate Director of the Clinical Translational Science Institute – Biomedical Informatics, and Acting Director of the Institute for Health Informatics (IHI) in the Academic Health Center from 2010-15. She is an active researcher in data and information technology standards for nursing, health care, and interprofessional practice and education; big data science; and integrative informatics. Dean Delaney is the first Fellow in the College of Medical Informatics to serve as a Dean of Nursing, and was an inaugural appointee to the USA Health Information Technology Policy Committee, Office of the National Coordinator, and Office of the Secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Judy Gichoya

Judy Wawira Gichoya, MD, MS, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at Emory University School of Medicine, where she serves as Co-Director of the Healthcare AI Innovation and Translational Informatics (HITI) Lab. Trained as both an informatician and an interventional radiologist, her work is centered around using data science to study health equity. Her group works in four areas -- building diverse datasets for machine learning (e.g., the Emory Breast dataset), evaluating AI for bias and fairness, validating AI in real world settings, and training the next generation of data scientists (both clinical and technical students) through hive learning and village mentoring. She serves as Associate Editor and Program Director for the RSNA’s Radiology: Artificial Intelligence Trainee Editorial Board and the medical students machine learning elective. She was recognized as a 2023 Emerging Scholar by the National Academy of Medicine.

Mary Gray

Mary L. Gray, PhD, is Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and a Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She is on research leave from Indiana University, where she holds a faculty position in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering with affiliations in Anthropology, Gender Studies, and the Media School. Dr. Gray chairs the Microsoft Research Ethics Review Program — the only federally-registered institutional review board of its kind in Tech. She is a leading expert in the field of AI and ethics, particularly research methods at the intersections of computer and social sciences. Her research looks at how technology access, material conditions, and everyday uses of technologies transform people’s lives. In 2020, Dr. Gray was named a MacArthur Fellow(opens in new tab) for her contributions to anthropology and the study of technology, digital economies, and society.
 

Isaac Kohane

Isaac (Zak) Kohane, MD, PhD, is the inaugural Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics, the Marion V. Nelson Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, and Professor of Pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital. He is also Editor-in-Chief of NEJM AI. Over the last 30 years, Dr. Kohane’s research agenda has been driven by the vision of what biomedical researchers could do to find new cures, provide new diagnoses, and deliver the best care available if data could be converted more rapidly to knowledge and knowledge to practice. He develops and applies computational techniques to address disease at multiple scales: from whole healthcare systems as “living laboratories” to the functional genomics of neurodevelopment with a focus on autism. Prof. Kohane has published several hundred papers in the medical literature and coauthored The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond (2023). He is a member of the Institute of Medicine and the American Society for Clinical Investigation.

Photo of Alex John London

Alex John London, PhD, is the K&L Gates Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies, co-lead of the K&L Gates Initiative in Ethics and Computational Technologies, Director of the Center for Ethics and Policy, and Chief Ethicist at the Block Center for Technology and Society at Carnegie Mellon University. An elected Fellow of The Hastings Center, Prof. London’s work focuses on ethical and policy issues surrounding the development and deployment of novel technologies in medicine, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence, on methodological issues in theoretical and practical ethics, and on cross-national issues of justice and fairness. He is a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) Expert Group on Ethics and Governance of AI and is currently a co-leader of the ethics core for the NSF AI Institute for Collaborative Assistance and Responsive Interaction for Networked Groups (AI-CARING).
 

Bradley Malin

Bradley Malin, PhD, is the Accenture Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Biostatistics, and Computer Science, as well as Vice Chair for Research Affairs in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. His research is on the development of technologies to enable artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) in the context of organizational, political, and health information architectures. He co-directs the AI Discovery and Vigilance to Accelerate Innovation and Clinical Excellence (ADVANCE) Center. He is also co-director of the Center for Genetic Privacy and Identity in Community Settings (GetPreCiSe), an NIH Center of Excellence on Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications Research (CEER); the Ethics Core of the NIH Bridge2AI program; and the Infrastructure Core of the NIH Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity (AIM-AHEAD).

Genevieve Melton-Meaux

Genevieve Melton-Meaux, MD, PhD, FACMI, FACS, FACSRS, serves as Professor of Surgery, Senior Associate Dean of Health Informatics and Data Science, Director for the Center for Learning Health System Sciences, and Faculty Fellow, Core Faculty in the Institute for Health Informatics at the University of Minnesota. She serves as the Chief Health Informatics and AI Officer for M Health Fairview leading informatics including Clinical Decision Support (CDS) and Health IT optimization and Fairview's AI program. Her research interests include surgical informatics, improving note usage in EHRs, evaluating technology solutions in practice, clinical colorectal surgery, advancing learning health system capabilities and the generation of real-world evidence, and clinical natural language processing (NLP). National leadership includes serving as Immediate Past-President of the American College of Medical Informatics and President of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Shashank Priya

Shashank Priya, PhD, serves as the University of Minnesota’s Vice President for Research & Innovation. In this position, he oversees a $1+ billion research enterprise across all campuses and facilities. He manages units responsible for administration of sponsored projects, research and regulatory compliance, and technology commercialization, as well as 10 interdisciplinary academic centers and institutes. He also oversees a growing corporate engagement portfolio for the University. Dr. Priya is a Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science.
 
 
 

David Resnik, PhD

David B. Resnik, JD, PhD, is a Bioethicist at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Senior Advisor for Research Integrity to the NIH Director of Intramural Research. He was an Associate and Full Professor of Medical Humanities at the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University (ECU) from 1998 to 2004, and an Associate Director of the Bioethics Center at ECU and University Health Systems from 1998 to 2004. He has published more than 300 articles and 10 books on ethical, social, legal, and philosophical issues in science, technology, and medicine. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Resnik is an Associate Editor of the journal Accountability in Research and has written extensively on the ethics of using AI in research and publication.
 

Vardit Ravitsky

Vardit Ravitsky, PhD, is the President and CEO of The Hastings Center, an independent, nonpartisan bioethics research institute. Dr. Ravitsky joined the Center from the University of Montreal where she was a Professor in the Bioethics Program, School of Public Health. She is also a Senior Lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Her research in bioethics focuses on ethical, legal, and social implications of genomics and assisted reproductive technologies, with an emphasis on emerging biotechnologies and their implications for women’s autonomy and for disability rights. She also studies the ethics of AI in biomedicine. She is a Principal Investigator on two Bridge2AI research projects funded by the National Institutes of Health that expand the use of AI in biomedical and behavioral research. She is immediate past-President, and currently Vice President, of the International Association of Bioethics.

Francis Shen

Francis X. Shen, JD, PhD, is a Professor and Solly Robins Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Minnesota Law School, and also a Faculty Member in the UMN Graduate Program in Neuroscience. He is Co-Chair of the Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment & the Life Sciences. He directs the Shen Neurolaw Lab and is Chief Innovation Officer of the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior at Massachusetts General Hospital. His research interests include the ethical, legal, and social implications of emerging neuroimaging and neuromodulation technologies and AI.
 
 
 

Effy Vayena

Effy Vayena, PhD, is a Professor of Bioethics at the Swiss Institute of Technology (ETH) whose research focuses on issues at the intersection of medicine, data, and ethics. As a professor of health policy, she founded the Health Ethics and Policy Lab to tackle pressing questions that arise through technological advances such as genomic technologies in healthcare and research. She has been appointed a Visiting Professor at the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, where she was previously a Fellow. Prof. Vayena is an elected member of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences, and co-chairs the WHO expert advisory group on Artificial Intelligence health ethics and governance.

 

Jeannette Wing

Jeannette M. Wing, PhD, is the Executive Vice President for Research at Columbia University and Professor of Computer Science. In her EVPR role, she has overall responsibility for the University’s research enterprise. She joined Columbia in 2017 as the inaugural Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute. Prior to Columbia, Dr. Wing was Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research and served as Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the National Science Foundation. Dr. Wing’s research contributions have been in the areas of trustworthy AI, security and privacy, specification and verification, concurrent and distributed systems, programming languages, and software engineering. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Susan M. Wolf, JD, is a Regents Professor; McKnight Presidential Professor of Law, Medicine & Public Policy; Faegre Drinker Professor of Law; and Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota. She is Chair of the University’s Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment & the Life Sciences. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Prof. Wolf is a member of the National Academies Strategic Council for Research Excellence, Integrity, and Trust. Her research focuses on ethical, legal, and societal issues in biomedicine and the implications of emerging technologies including genomics, neuroscience, and bioengineering.

Planning Committee

Joanne Billings

Joanne Billings, MD, MPH, is an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine (PACCS). She holds a leadership role with the Research and Innovation Office (RIO) as Associate Vice President for Research Integrity and Compliance. She serves as Co-Medical Director of CTSI’s Clinical Translational Research Services (CTRS) core. Dr. Billings's primary research and clinical work focuses on people with cystic fibrosis. She oversees the PACCS Division clinical research program.



 

Shashank Priya, PhD, serves as the University of Minnesota’s Vice President for Research and Innovation. In this position, he oversees a $1+ billion research enterprise across all campuses and facilities. He manages units responsible for administration of sponsored projects, research and regulatory compliance, and technology commercialization, as well as 10 interdisciplinary academic centers and institutes. He also oversees a growing corporate engagement portfolio for the University. Dr. Priya is a Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science.

 

 

Danielle Rintala, MS, directs the Risk Intelligence and Compliance Team (RIACT) in the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation (RIO) at the University of Minnesota. RIACT monitors near- and long-term research risks; conducts compliance investigations, ensuring compliance in research-associated financial transactions and research registries; and manages Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) training and the Certified Approver program. Prior to joining the University of Minnesota, she was the Associate Director of Research Compliance and Biosafety Officer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

 
 

Francis Shen

Francis Shen, JD, PhD, is an expert at the intersection of law and neuroscience, as well as law and artificial intelligence. He is a Member of the Faculty of the UMN Graduate Program in Neuroscience, and Co-Chair of the UMN Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment & the Life Sciences. He directs the Shen Neurolaw Lab and conducts empirical, legal, and ethical research to examine how insights from neuroscience and artificial intelligence can make the legal system more just and effective. He also explores the ethical, legal, and social implications of advances in neurotechnology.
 
 
 

Susan M. Wolf, JD, is a Regents Professor; McKnight Presidential Professor of Law, Medicine & Public Policy; Faegre Drinker Professor of Law; and Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota. She is Chair of the University’s Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment & the Life Sciences. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Prof. Wolf is a member of the National Academies Strategic Council for Research Excellence, Integrity, and Trust. Her research focuses on ethical, legal, and societal issues in biomedicine and the implications of emerging technologies including genomics, neuroscience, and bioengineering.

Resources

 

Presented by the Research & Innovation Office (RIO)Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment & the Life SciencesMasonic Cancer Center; and Clinical Translational Science Institute, University of Minnesota.

This conference is part of Research Ethics Week (March 3 - March 7, 2025), during which the University of Minnesota focuses on professional development and best practices to ensure safety and integrity in research. A list of Research Ethics Week events is posted at this link.

Follow us on Twitter: @UMNconsortium
Join the conversation by using #ResearchEthics2025

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