The Office of the Vice President for Research, Creative Activities and Technology Transfer will present an Internet research seminar Monday, Sept. 14, from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. in the Memorial Union, Prairie Rose room. Guest speaker Joseph A. Konstan, Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, will lead an interactive discussion on “Internet Research from Surveys to Social Computing: Ethical Issues and Practical Advice.”

The presentation will discuss how Internet research can pose ethical challenges. The Internet enables and facilitates a broad range of research options including online surveys, observations of online behavior, online interventions and online experiments. Internet researchers must be sensitive to human subject risks and ethical concerns of online research, while also being sensitive to the norms of the online communities being studied. Konstan’s research focuses on a variety of human-computer interaction and social computing issues, including personalization, eliciting online participation and designing computer systems to improve public health.

The seminar is open to the NDSU community. Attendees will learn about ethical and practical issues of online research, risks and benefits, tools to help address legitimate human subject concerns and specific online research examples and cases.

For more information, contact Kristy Shirley, Institutional Review Board research compliance administrator, at 1-8995 or kristy.shirley@ndsu.edu.