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1. Software fairness

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3236024.3264838  

   Brun, Yuriy; Meliou, Alexandra (January 2018, Proceedings of the New Ideas and Emerging Results Track at the 26th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE))

   A goal of software engineering research is advancing software quality and the success of the software engineering process. However, while recent studies have demonstrated a new kind of defect in software related to its ability to operate in fair and unbiased manner, software engineering has not yet wholeheartedly tackled these new kinds of defects, thus leaving software vulnerable. This paper outlines a vision for how software engineering research can help reduce fairness defects and represents a call to action by the software engineering research community to reify that vision. Modern software is riddled with examples of biased behavior, from automated translation injecting gender stereotypes, to vision systems failing to see faces of certain races, to the US criminal justice system relying on biased computational assessments of crime recidivism. While systems may learn bias from biased data, bias can also emerge from ambiguous or incomplete requirement specification, poor design, implementation bugs, and unintended component interactions. We argue that software fairness is analogous to software quality, and that numerous software engineering challenges in the areas of requirements, specification, design, testing, and verification need to be tackled to solve this problem. 

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2. Interdisciplinary Teamwork Challenges in a Design Competition Team

   Beddoes, Kacey; Nicewonger, Todd E. (December 2019, Australasian Association for Engineering Education Annual Conference)

   Communication and collaboration are key components of engineering work (Trevelyan, 2014), and teamwork, including interdisciplinary teamwork, is increasingly seen as an important component of engineering education programs (Borrego, Karlin, McNair, & Beddoes, 2013; Male, Bush, & Chapman, 2010, 2011; Paretti, Cross, & Matusovich, 2014; Purzer, 2011). Employers and education researchers alike advocate teamwork as a means of developing skills that engineering graduates need (Purzer, 2011), and accreditation bodies consider the ability to both lead and function on teams as an important outcome for engineering graduates (Engineers Australia, 2017). However, “despite the clear emphasis on teamwork in engineering and the increasing use of student team projects, our understanding of how best to cultivate and assess these learning outcomes in engineering students is sorely underdeveloped (McGourty et al., 2002; Shuman, Besterfield-Sacre, & McGourty, 2005)” (Borrego et al., 2013, p. 473). In order to contribute to the current conversation on interdisciplinary teamwork in engineering education, and to advance understandings of how best to cultivate teamwork learning outcomes, this paper discusses the most common teamwork challenges and presents boundary negotiating artifacts as a conceptual framework for addressing them. Drawing on data from long-term ethnographic observations of a design competition project, and the challenges students experienced, we utilise findings from a systematic literature review and the conceptual framework of boundary negotiating artifacts to present a case study of how boundary negotiating artifacts can support important teamwork constructs. 

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3. Themis: Automatically testing software for discrimination

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3236024.3264590  

   Angell, Rico; Johnson, Brittany; Brun, Yuriy; Meliou, Alexandra (January 2018, Proceedings of the Demonstrations Track at the 26th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE))

   Bias in decisions made by modern software is becoming a common and serious problem. We present Themis, an automated test suite generator to measure two types of discrimination, including causal relationships between sensitive inputs and program behavior. We explain how Themis can measure discrimination and aid its debugging, describe a set of optimizations Themis uses to reduce test suite size, and demonstrate Themis' effectiveness on open-source software. Themis is open-source and all our evaluation data are available at http://fairness.cs.umass.edu/. See a video of Themis in action: https://youtu.be/brB8wkaUesY 

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4. Physical Education and English Language Arts Based K-12 Engineering Outreach in Software Defined Networking (Extended Version)

   Ozogul, Gamze; Thyagaturu, Akhilesh S.; Reisslein, Martin; Scaglione, Anna (January 2020, arXiv:2006.05545)

   K-12 engineering outreach has typically focused on elementary electrical and mechanical engineering or robot experiments integrated in science or math classes. In contrast, we propose a novel outreach program focusing on communication network principles that enable the ubiquitous web and smart-phone applications. We design outreach activities that illustrate the communication network principles through activities and team competitions in physical education (PE) as well as story writing and cartooning in English Language Arts (ELA) classes. The PE activities cover the principles of store-and-forward packet switching, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) web page download, connection establishment in cellular wireless networks, as well as packet routing in Software-Defined Networking (SDN). The proposed outreach program has been formatively evaluated by K-12 teachers. A survey for the evaluation of the impact of the outreach program on the student perceptions, specifically, the students' interest, self-efficacy, utility, and negative stereotype perceptions towards communication network engineering, is also presented. 

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5. The unsolvable problem or the unheard answer?: a dataset of 24,669 open-source software conference talks

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3524842.3528488  

   Truong, Kimberly; Miller, Courtney; Vasilescu, Bogdan; Kästner, Christian (May 2022, MSR '22: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories)

   Talks at practitioner-focused open-source software conferences are a valuable source of information for software engineering researchers. They provide a pulse of the community and are valuable source material for grey literature analysis. We curated a dataset of 24,669 talks from 87 open-source conferences between 2010 and 2021. We stored all relevant metadata from these conferences and provide scripts to collect the transcripts. We believe this data is useful for answering many kinds of questions, such as: What are the important/highly discussed topics within practitioner communities? How do practitioners interact? And how do they present themselves to the public? We demonstrate the usefulness of this data by reporting our findings from two small studies: a topic model analysis providing an overview of open-source community dynamics since 2011 and a qualitative analysis of a smaller community-oriented sample within our dataset to gain a better understanding of why contributors leave open-source software. 

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