Toward Equitable and Sustainable Data Handling in AI and Biomedical Research

Date: October 10, 2025 (Friday)

Time: 12pm – 1pm

Venue: Room 723, 7/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong 

Speaker: Chien-Yi Chang (Assistant Professor of Law and Computer Science, Durham University)

Artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly depends on vast amounts of high-quality data, making practices of annotation, fetching, and generation central to progress. Yet these practices also expose deep challenges of equity and sustainability. Annotation often relies on precarious labor in the Global South; data fetching, such as large-scale web scraping, operates in legal and ethical grey zones when guidelines like robots.txt are disregarded; and scaling laws behind large models demand ever-greater data, computation, and energy, raising serious environmental concerns. This talk examines pathways toward more equitable and sustainable AI. I highlight weak supervision techniques that reduce reliance on manual labeling, analyze the legal liabilities of robots.txt as a governance mechanism for data access, and turn to biomedical research as a case study in minimizing environmental impact through simulation and dataset repurposing. Bringing legal, ethical, and technical perspectives into conversation, I argue for development practices that preserve innovation while ensuring accountability, fairness, and sustainability.

Dr. Chien-Yi Chang is an Assistant Professor of Law and an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Durham University. She is also affiliated with the Center for Sustainable Development Law and Policy and the JusTN0W initiative. Her research bridges law and technology, combining doctrinal analysis, empirical study, and computational experimentation to explore the legal, social, and technical dimensions of artificial intelligence. She holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, a J.D. from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and a B.S. in Physics from Caltech.

Moderator: Taorui Guan, Assistant Professor and Deputy Director of Law and Technology Centre, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law

To register, please go to https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=102723.