Course organized by students tackles ethics in CS; Janet Chang, April 15, 2019

Janet Chang, The Brown Daily Herald; 

Course organized by students tackles ethics in CS

"Last spring, students in a new computer science social change course developed software tools for a disaster relief organization to teach refugee children about science and technology, a Chrome extension to filter hate speech on the internet and a mobile app to help doctors during a patient visits.

Called CSCI 1951I: “CS for Social Change,” the course — now in its second iteration — was developed for computer science, design and engineering students to discuss and reflect on the social impact of their work while building practical software tools to help local and national partner nonprofits over the 15-week semester.

The course was initially conceived by Nikita Ramoji ’20, among others, who was a co-founder of CS for Social Change, a student organization that aims to addethics education to college computer science departments. “The (general consensus) was that we were getting a really great computer science education, but we didn’t really have that social component,” she said."

Why Software Developers Should Take Ethics Into Consideration; InfoQ, March 8, 2018

Ben Linders, InfoQ; 

"Most of the software that influences the behavior of human beings wasn’t created with strong ethical constructs around it. Software developers should ask themselves ethical questions like "who does this affect?", "who could get hurt by this?", and "who does this disadvantage or advantage?", try to answer them, and be comfortable with questions they can’t answer yet.

Theo Schlossnagle, CEO of Circonus, spoke about professional ethics for software developers atQCon London 2018. InfoQ is covering this conference with Q&As, presentations, summaries, and articles.

InfoQ interviewed Schlossnagle about the importance of ethics, what developers can do to incorporate ethical considerations, and asked him what the consequences of unethical software should be.

InfoQ: What makes ethics important for software developers?

Theo Schlossnagle: If you look around, the vast majority of people that are working today in our industry, writing code, making decisions that impact users, haven’t had an intense ethics course in their life. They haven’t taken an ethics course in high school, they haven’t taken an ethics course in college. It doesn’t mean that they don’t know ethics, ethics are pretty innate in human beings. There’s a playbook for discussing ethics; there’s a playbook for contemplating them; there’s not a playbook for answering them.The question is what your mental model is for making yourself answer those questions instead of just avoiding them and pretend they don’t exist.

We have 30 years of software development, and the last 10 to 15 of those have been hyper-accelerated software development. We have software all over the place that influences the behavior of human beings, and we didn’t create that software with strong ethical constructs around it."

UT computer science adding ethics courses to curriculum; KXAN, March 5, 2018

Alyssa Goard, KXAN; UT computer science adding ethics courses to curriculum

"Barbary Brunner, CEO of the Austin Technology Council, believes that what these ethics courses at UT are “a really valuable thing.” She explained that as companies in the tech world search for new ways to disrupt old ideas, it’s important to look at the human implications of what they’re setting out to do.

“This may be where the university leads the industry and the industry wakes up and says, ‘Wow that’s really smart,'” Brunner said. “For Texas to become a real tech powerhouse– which I think it can become — it needs to engage in the same sort of collaboration between higher education and the technology community that you see in California, that you see in the Seattle area.”

Brunner hasn’t heard many overarching discussions of ethics within the Austin tech world, but knows that individual discussions about ethics are going on at many companies, especially those related to security and artificial intelligence.

In the long run she thinks that ethics training may become one of many qualities tech companies look for in the recent graduates they hire."

Federal Judge in Texas Demands Justice Dept. Lawyers Take Ethics Class; New York Times, 5/19/16

Michael D. Shear, New York Times; Federal Judge in Texas Demands Justice Dept. Lawyers Take Ethics Class:

"A federal judge in Texas on Thursday excoriated the Justice Department, demanding ethics classes for the department’s lawyers and ordering other sanctions for those who argued the case involving President Obama’s immigration executive actions...

In a blistering order, Judge Andrew S. Hanen of Federal District Court in Brownsville accused the Justice Department lawyers of lying to him during arguments in the case, and he barred them from appearing in his courtroom.

He also demanded that Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch provide a “comprehensive plan” within 60 days describing how she will prevent unethical conduct in the future, as well as making sure the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility effectively prevents misconduct among its lawyers.

He also said that any Justice Department lawyer who wants to appear in a state or federal court in any of the 26 states who filed suit to block Mr. Obama’s executive actions should be required to take an annual three-hour ethics course for the next five years.

“Clearly, there seems to be a lack of knowledge about or adherence to the duties of professional responsibility in the halls of the Justice Department,” Judge Hanen wrote in the 28-page order."