DASS: Principled Software Design and Accountability

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This research project sets out a new approach to designing software that is accountable to law, referred to as Principled Software Design and Accountability (PSDA). Legal principles will be distilled from legislation or the common law and augmented by a series of concrete questions whose answers will guide software developers through the process of designing legally compliant software systems. The research will engage diverse stakeholders including legal experts, regulators, sociologists, and software developers, and will explore the integration of PSDA into software design and analysis techniques. By developing techniques aimed at accountability, design solutions will be modeled within their legal context to enable stakeholders to analyze compliance to legal principles. In the future, PSDA could play a major part in shaping the role and responsibilities of software engineers and enabling the rise of a new type of software specialist, skilled in the development of PSDA software, its applications, and its performance assessment. The proposed research maps out this new role and the ensuing education and training required. In addition, the project will develop and disseminate tools to support accountable design, and will deliver pedagogical materials through a new course in interactive Principled Software development.The interdisciplinary nature of the work, and the need to engage legal experts, psychologists, and software engineers creates a challenging research space which will be explored through focus groups, grounded theory, and design research techniques. Delivering PSDA requires weaving together a holistic, multi-disciplinary solution supported by deep-learning technologies to provide full life-cycle traceability and the creation of persistent, tamperproof records of PSDA flows for creating digital reports. PSDA logs will be built upon relationship-preserving auditable flows, representing design decisions and their rationales, and capable of generating legally compliant paper documents that bind to the digital thread to provide full lineage and rationale behind PSDA decisions.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.