DASS: Principled Software Design and Accountability

该研究项目提出了一种新的方法来设计软件，这是对法律负责，被称为有原则的软件设计和问责制（PSDA）。 法律的原则将从立法或普通法中提炼出来，并通过一系列具体问题加以补充，这些问题的答案将指导软件开发人员设计符合法律的软件系统。该研究将吸引不同的利益相关者，包括法律的专家，监管机构，社会学家和软件开发人员，并将探索PSDA集成到软件设计和分析技术。通过开发以责任为目标的技术，设计解决方案将在其法律的背景下建模，以使利益相关者能够分析遵守法律的原则。在未来，PSDA可以在塑造软件工程师的角色和责任方面发挥重要作用，并使新型软件专家的崛起成为可能，他们擅长PSDA软件的开发，应用程序及其性能评估。拟议中的研究规划了这一新的作用以及随之而来的所需教育和培训。此外，该项目将开发和传播工具，以支持负责任的设计，并将提供教学材料，通过一个新的课程，在互动的Principled软件development.The跨学科的性质的工作，并需要从事法律的专家，心理学家和软件工程师创建一个具有挑战性的研究空间，将通过焦点小组，扎根理论和设计研究技术进行探索。交付PSDA需要将一个由深度学习技术支持的整体、多学科解决方案编织在一起，以提供完整的生命周期可追溯性，并创建持久的、防篡改的PSDA流记录，以创建数字报告。PSDA日志将建立在关系维护可审计流程的基础上，代表设计决策及其原理，并能够生成与数字线索绑定的合法合规纸质文档，以提供PSDA决策背后的完整血统和原理。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

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.