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1. “I Don’t Know If We’re Doing Good. I Don’t Know If We’re Doing Bad”: Investigating How Practitioners Scope, Motivate, and Conduct Privacy Work When Developing AI Products

   Lee, H-P; Gao, L; Yang, S; Forlizzi, J; Das, S (August 2024, USENIX Security)

   How do practitioners who develop consumer AI products scope, motivate, and conduct privacy work? Respecting pri- vacy is a key principle for developing ethical, human-centered AI systems, but we cannot hope to better support practitioners without answers to that question. We interviewed 35 industry AI practitioners to bridge that gap. We found that practitioners viewed privacy as actions taken against pre-defined intrusions that can be exacerbated by the capabilities and requirements of AI, but few were aware of AI-specific privacy intrusions documented in prior literature. We found that their privacy work was rigidly defined and situated, guided by compliance with privacy regulations and policies, and generally demoti- vated beyond meeting minimum requirements. Finally, we found that the methods, tools, and resources they used in their privacy work generally did not help address the unique pri- vacy risks introduced or exacerbated by their use of AI in their products. Collectively, these findings reveal the need and opportunity to create tools, resources, and support structures to improve practitioners’ awareness of AI-specific privacy risks, motivations to do AI privacy work, and ability to ad- dress privacy harms introduced or exacerbated by their use of AI in consumer products. 

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2. Co-designing Ethical Supports for Technology Practitioners

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ETHICS57328.2023.10155098  

   Li, Ziqing; Obi, Ike; Chivukula, Shruthi Sai; Will, Matthew; Johns, Janna; Pivonka, Anne C.; Carlock, Thomas; Menon, Ambika R.; Bharadwaj, Aayushi; Gray, Colin M. (May 2023, 2023 IEEE International Symposium on Ethics in Engineering, Science, and Technology (ETHICS))

   In an era of ubiquitous digital interfaces and systems, technology and design practitioners must address a range of ethical dilemmas surrounding the use of persuasive design techniques and how to balance shareholder and end-user needs [2], [5]. Similarly, the increasing user concerns about unethical products and services [1] is paralleling a rise in regulatory interests in enforcing ethical design and engineering practices among technology practitioners, surfacing a need for further support. Although various scholars have developed frameworks and methods to support practitioners in navigating these challenging contexts [3], [4], often, there is a lack of resonance between these generic methods and the situated ethical complexities facing the practitioner in their everyday work. In this project, we designed and implemented a three-hour cocreation workshop with designers, engineers, and technologists to support them to develop bespoke ethics-focused action plans that are resonant with the ethical challenges they face in their everyday practice. In developing the co-creation session, we sought to answer the following questions to empower practitioners: • How can we support practitioners in developing action plans to address ethical dilemmas in their everyday work? and • How can we empower designers to design more responsibly? Building on these questions as a guide, we employed Miro, a digital whiteboard platform, to develop the co-creation experience. The final c o-creation e xperience w as d esigned w ith the visual metaphor of a “house” with four floors and multiple rooms that allowed participants to complete different tasks per room, all aimed towards the overall goal of developing participants' own personalized action plan in an interactive and collaborative way. We invited participants to share their stories and ethical dilemmas to support their creation and iteration of a personal action plan that they could later use in their everyday work context. Across the six co-creation sessions we conducted, participants (n=26) gained a better understanding of the drivers for ethical action in the context of their everyday work and developed an action plan through the co-creation workshop that enabled them to constructively engage with ethical challenges in their professional context. At the end of the session, participants were provided the action plans they created to allow them to use it in their practice. Furthermore, the co-design workshops were designed such that practitioners could take them away (the house and session guide) and run them independently at their organization or another context to support their objectives. We describe the building and the activities conducted in each floor below and will provide a pictorial representation of the house with the different floors, rooms, and activities on the poster presentation. a) First floor-Welcome, Introduction, Reflection: The first floor of the virtual house was designed to allow participants to introduce themselves and to reflect on and discuss the ethical concerns they wished to resolve during the session. b) Second floor-Shopping for ethics-focused methods: The second floor of the virtual house was designed as a “shopping” space where participants selected from range of ethicsfocused building blocks that they wish to potentially adapt or incorporate into their own action plan. They were also allowed to introduce their own methods or tools. c) Third floor-DIY Workspace: The third floor was designed as a DIY workspace to allow the participants to work in small groups to develop their own bespoke action plan based on building blocks they have gathered from their shopping trip and by using any other components they wish. The goal here was to support participants in developing methods and action plans that were resonant with their situated ethical complexities. d) Fourth floor-Gallery Space: The fourth floor was designed as a gallery to allow participants to share and discuss their action plans with other participants and to identify how their action plans could impact their future practice or educational experiences. Participants were also provided an opportunity at this stage to reflect on their experience participating in the session and provide feedback on opportunities for future improvement. 

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3. Explaining machine learning models with interactive natural language conversations using TalkToModel

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-023-00692-8  

   Slack, Dylan; Krishna, Satyapriya; Lakkaraju, Himabindu; Singh, Sameer (July 2023, Nature Machine Intelligence)

   Abstract Practitioners increasingly use machine learning (ML) models, yet models have become more complex and harder to understand. To understand complex models, researchers have proposed techniques to explain model predictions. However, practitioners struggle to use explainability methods because they do not know which explanation to choose and how to interpret the explanation. Here we address the challenge of using explainability methods by proposing TalkToModel: an interactive dialogue system that explains ML models through natural language conversations. TalkToModel consists of three components: an adaptive dialogue engine that interprets natural language and generates meaningful responses; an execution component that constructs the explanations used in the conversation; and a conversational interface. In real-world evaluations, 73% of healthcare workers agreed they would use TalkToModel over existing systems for understanding a disease prediction model, and 85% of ML professionals agreed TalkToModel was easier to use, demonstrating that TalkToModel is highly effective for model explainability. 

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4. Visualizing Values to Analyze Designers’ Ethical Responsibility

   Gray, Colin M; Chivukula, Shruthi S; Toombs, Austin L; Light, Ann (June 2018, Design Research Society)

   In this workshop, we seek to facilitate a shared understanding regarding the role of ethics and values in design practice and research, using this shared understanding to develop methods to investigate ethical decision-making. While existing study of ethics and values has largely focused on design methods for implementation in practice in an explicit and structured way (e.g., value-sensitive design, values at play), our focus is on the ways in which values might be discovered and generatively explored through qualitative and critical means, both by researchers and practitioners. Through collaborative activities and discussions, workshop participants will be engaged in analyzing existing design artifacts and processes, critiquing them through ethical lenses, and subsequently visualizing their process of value discovery. Outcomes from this workshop are expected to further deepen existing methods for uncovering ethics and values in a design process, highlighting potential opportunities for supporting practitioners’ work and ethical awareness. 

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5. Conceptual Representations in the Workplace and Classroom Settings: A Comparative Ethnography

   Barner, M. S. Brown (June 2019, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   The following is a Theory paper that presents an ethnographic exploration into how concepts are situated in workplace and classroom settings. Situated cognition research demonstrates that different contexts wherein learning occurs and knowledge is applied shape our conceptual understanding. Within engineering education and practice this means that practitioners, students, and instructors demonstrate different ways of representing their conceptual knowledge due to the different contexts wherein they learn and apply engineering concepts. The purpose of this paper is to present themes on how practitioners, students, and instructors represent fundamental structural engineering concepts within the contexts of structural engineering design. By representation of concepts we mean the ways in which practitioners, students, and instructors portray and demonstrate their conceptual understanding of concepts through the social and material contexts of the workplace and classroom environments. Previous research on learning and engineering education has shown the influence that social and material contexts within these environments have on our knowing and understanding. The researchers use ethnographic methods consisting of workplace and classroom observations, interviews with practitioners, students, and instructors, and documentation of workplace and academic artifacts—such as drawings, calculations, and notes—to access practitioners’, students’, and instructors’ conceptual representations. These ethnographic methods are conducted at a private engineering firm and in 300 and 400 level structural engineering courses. Preliminary results indicate that instructors’ conceptual representations in the classroom aim to enhance students’ broader understanding of these concepts; whereas students’ conceptual representations are focused towards utility in solving homework and exam problems. Practitioners’ conceptual representations are more flexible and adapt to project and workplace constraints. These results seem to indicate that even when instructors emphasize broader conceptual knowledge, the academic incentives behind homework and test scores lead to more academically focused conceptual representations by students. Furthermore, practitioners’ conceptual representations indicate the necessity of conceptual fluency in the workplace, which contrasts with the rigidity of conceptual representations that students develop in the classroom. This comparison between workplace and academic conceptual representations enhances our understanding of the extent to which students, instructors, and practitioners share similar or different conceptual representations within the domain of structural engineering. This, in turn, may lead to guided curriculum reform efforts aimed at better preparing structural engineering students for their professional careers. 

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