ERCIM News 131
October 2022
Special theme Ethical Software Engineering and Ethically Aligned Design
Guest editors Georgia Kapitsaki (University of Cyprus) and Erwin Schoitsch (Austrian Institute of Technology AIT)
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by Georgia Kapitsaki (University of Cyprus) and Erwin Schoitsch (AIT Austrian Institute of Technology)
Software creation makes our daily lives easier, tackling different aspects of our daily activities (e.g., work, leisure, mobility, communication, smart homes, digital governance of public authorities, etc.). Applications are linked with several ethical issues and require ethically aligned design, with software as key factor, covering a wide range of domains, from healthcare to military systems. In order to fully benefit from any type of application, the alignment of software applications, embedded into systems and systems-of-systems, with ethical values and principles is of tremendous importance. Constructing software and systems in an ethical way is linked with many specific societal values, including individuality, equality, and democracy. Approaches and mechanisms that assist in producing ethics-aware software and systems are vital, in order to protect the main rights of the end-users and all other affected entities.
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by Benoit Rottembourg (Inria)
The algorithms of large digital platforms massively influence our daily lives. Biases and unfair decisions are increasingly numerous and irritating. The evolving regulatory framework will give rise to new means of auditing, such as black box auditing, which calls for new algorithmic challenges such as those we tackle at Regalia.
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by Peter Biegelbauer, Anahid Jalali, Sven Schlarb, and Michela Vignoli (all AIT Austrian Institute of Technology)
Given the numerous opportunities provided by rapidly evolving digital innovations, we need to address and assess the social and political risks that come with naively applying AI algorithms, especially in high-risk sectors. We argue that though the existing guidelines and regulations are a good starting point, we still need to implement effective solutions that can be integrated into the current workflow of developing ethical AI applications. We introduce the idea of AI Ethics Labs as institutionalised “spaces for doubt” providing platforms for a frequent and intensive collaboration between developers and social scientists, thus reducing the potential risks of developed algorithms.
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by Jaana Leikas (VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd) and Patrik Floréen (University of Helsinki, Finnish Centre for Artificial Intelligence)
In addition to many clear benefits, AI technology can also bring risks related to the misuse of technology and for example increased inequalities. There is thus an increased demand to apply the principles of human-centricity and ethics in the development of AI. Members of the Ethics Advisory Board of the Finnish Centre for Artificial Intelligence (FCAI) have developed an Ethics Exercise Tool to help AI researchers consider and discuss the ethical implications of their research and strengthen ethical understanding within their team.
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by Sónia Teixeira, José Rodrigues (Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto and INESC TEC), Bruno Veloso (Portucalense University and INESC TEC) and João Gama (Faculty of Economics of University of Porto and INESC TEC)
This Portuguese project compares the classification of AI risks and vulnerabilities performed by humans and performed by the computing algorithms.
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by Mihály Héder (ELKH SZTAKI and Budapest University of Technology and Economics)
This paper reports on a novel curriculum, the Human-Centered AI Masters Programme (HCAIM). HCAIM is launched this year in four countries. It incorporates humanities, social sciences and law into the education of Artificial Intelligence in an unprecedented amount and depth.
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by Arianna Rossi (SnT, University of Luxembourg)
People know that once they publish something online, such content becomes "publicly available" and can be downloaded and re-used by others, for example, researchers and data scientists. The reality is far more complicated. And for us, finding a way to comply with data protection obligations and to respect the tenets of research ethics became an exploration of a largely uncharted territory.
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by Yves Lafon (W3C)
The Technical Architecture Group (TAG) is a special working group within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Its mission is to document and build consensus around principles of web architecture to help ensure that the web makes sense as a platform and that the overall design is coherent.
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by Sagar Dolas (SURF), Ana Verbanescu (Twente University) and Benjamin Czaja (SURF)
Energy is an emerging topic in the scientific computing ecosystem and is becoming a design point for the future of research. Science relies increasingly on digital research computing as a tool for analysis and experimentation. Exponential increase in demand for computing means that classically designed ICT infrastructure will soon become unsustainable in terms of its energy footprint [1]. We need to experiment with energy-efficient methods, tools, and algorithms and hardware technologies. In the Netherlands, we are working towards zero energy waste for high performance computing (HPC) applications on the national supercomputer “Snellius”. It involves discussing challenges, proposing new research directions, finding opportunities to engage the user community, and taking steps for responsible use of software in research.
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by Adel Noureddine and Olivier Le Goaër (Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour)
Reducing the energy and carbon footprint of software is a major concern for practitioners and researchers today. But what tools does a student in computer science or a professional developer have at their disposal to improve the energy efficiency of their software? At our LIUPPA laboratory, we create and develop tools to help software developers understand and improve the energy efficiency of their software.
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by Reinder Radersma (NWO-I Digital Competence Center)
Green coding – the practice of optimising code for minimal energy consumption – is a direct way for software engineers to reduce the carbon footprint of their work. This article reflects on current trends in energy efficient computing and gives six recommendations for software engineers to implement in their daily practices.
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by Mélanie Gornet (Télécom Paris), Claude Kirchner (CCNE, CNPEN, Inria), and Catherine Tessier (ONERA/DTIS, Université de Toulouse)
How to design a facial authentication system, taking into account both performance and fairness? We consider the choices that a developer makes when coding such a system, such as the training parameters, the architecture of the neural network, or the authentication threshold. We evaluate their impact on the global fairness of the system, showing that fairness is not only affected by the training data but also by the multiple choices that are made when coding the model.
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by Philippe Valoggia (Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology)
Ethical AI/AS are systems that do not infringe human rights. We might fail to develop such systems due to a lack of common understanding of what quality requirements to meet (i.e., the rights and freedoms of users), and because actors involved in the systems’ development do not collaborate in a consistent way. We propose a risk-based engineering approach to overcome these two engineering pitfalls.
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by Bernhard Strobl (Austrian Institute of Technology, AIT) and Margherita Natali (United Nations)
This article will give an insight into some key problems and related solutions concerning the implementations of a privacy-preserving biometric matching system. We propose three by-design possibilities, strictly in compliance with human rights and data protection regulations, to improve the security of authentication systems: contactless fingerprint scanning, use of a distributed ledger system for biometric matching, and homomorphic encryption. These technical solutions would potentially constitute a step forward for governmental use of authentication procedures under the international security agenda while supporting ethically aligned design principles.
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by Alessio Ferrari (CNR-ISTI) and Manlio Bacco (CNR-ISTI)
We present a new paradigm of requirements engineering research for sustainability. This study proposes to go beyond stakeholders’ goals, and introduces the concepts of drivers, barriers and impacts of technology in a certain domain. We collect information about these constructs in an interview study with 30 experts on digitalisation in forestry, agriculture, and rural areas.
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by Karin Rainer (AGES), Viktoria Fischer (AGES), Alois Leidwein (AGES), and Georg Neubauer (AIT)
Digital solutions and support systems in pandemic management are the next step in enhancing current structures and overcoming identified gaps in the current state of the art. Currently, decision support systems are often rudimentary and seldom include the ethical and user-centric needs of the practitioners they are intended for. Thus, the “ROADS to Health” approach can give new insights focusing on requirements and pro-actively addressing and including ethical as well as holistic human aspects for enhanced applicability and user acceptance.