CCE STEM: Finding Practices that Cultivate Ethical Computing in Mobile and Wearable Application Research & Development

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Cultivating ethical computing researchers is an ongoing challenge. Much current research focuses on framing ethics (e.g., privacy, equity, or accessibility) as explicit software design goals. This has resulted in dedicated design techniques (e.g., value sensitive design, privacy by design) meant to eliminate bias, ensure privacy, or enable accessibility. Less studied have been existing ethical cultures within software research and development. Researchers don't know when and how ethical discussions and decisions emerge within development, or what encourages these discussions and decisions. In this project the PI and her research team will study academic and commercial software research and development (R&D), to discover factors that encourage discussion and action on ethical challenges. They will then incorporate their findings into curricular materials for computer ethics, by building interactive R&D simulations both for the classroom and for massive online open courseware (MOOCs). Project outcomes will answer questions such as "What practices within mobile application research and development encourage discussion of, and decisions about, ethics?" and "How can these practices be incorporated into computer ethics education?" and also "How do simulations based on these practices impact computer ethics education?" Understanding how work practices influence ethical deliberation within software R&D will influence computing research and the design of emerging technologies by encouraging in situ ethical debate and decision-making, which in turn will cultivate ethical stem researchers by encouraging ethical debate and reflection as integral, embedded parts of technical work. Dissemination of findings from this project will focus on bridging domains; the PI and her research team have extensive interdisciplinary experience, and findings will be published in information and computer science, ethics, and policy.The PI's previous ethnographic work suggests that the day-to-day work of software R&D can include work practices that pry open discussions about values and help teams build consensus around social values as design criteria. The PI refers to these work practices as values levers. This project will build upon and test those preliminary findings by collecting comparative data from contrasting software R&D environments. The research will focus on mobile and wearable application development, an area rife with ethical concerns. These devices collect sensitive data ranging from biometrics to location to contacts, yet the collection of such data is almost entirely unregulated. The team will observe diverse types of mobile and wearable R&D work, including academic and commercial, co-located and virtual, and small and large teams. They will use participant-observation methods (attending conferences, participating in design meetings, and conducting interviews) as well as analysis of trace data (logs, chat, bug trackers, and other recorded means of organizing virtual work), to observe the diverse work practices involved in mobile application development. Collecting data from contrasting projects will illuminate the relationship between diverse R&D practices and ethical computing research, and will enable the PI to discover values levers relevant to multiple computing cultures. The project team will then incorporate the empirical findings into interactive simulations for students in mobile application design courses to evaluate whether values levers from the field can have impacts in the classroom and in online education.