CS 4873C Spring'21
Computing, Society, & Professionalism
Here you will find a schedule for the semester, and below that a detailed list of readings.
NOTE: Topics to be covered and the corresponding readings are subject to change. Please always check the online schedule and the list of class readings.
Schedule
| Week | Topic | Assignments | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Two-day week Jan 14/15 |
no classes | |||
| Week 1: Jan 18 |
(M) MLK Holiday (W) Intro & Overview Slides (Purusall pdf) Video (Perusall) Discussion Guide (file) |
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| Week 2: Jan 25 |
(M) Case Study: Therac-25 Slides (Perusall, pdf) Video (Perusall) (W) Rhetoric & Writing Arguments Slides (Perusall pdf) Video (Perusall) Discussion Guide (file) |
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| Week 3: Feb 1 |
(M) Do Artifacts Have Politics? Slides (Perusall pdf) Video (Perusall) (W) Utilitarianism Slides (Perusall pdf) Video (Perusall) Discussion Guide (file) |
HW: Therac and the 737-MAX | ||
| Week 4: Feb 8 |
(M) Deontology Slides (Perusall pdf) Video (Perusall) (W) Social Contract Theory Slides (Perusall pdf) Video (Perusall) Discussion Guide (file) |
HW: Reflection on the politics of a technologic artifact | ||
| Week 5: Feb 15 |
(M) Stakeholder Analysis Slides (Perusall pdf) Video (Perusall) (W) Virtue Ethics Slides (Perusall pdf) Video (Perusall) Discussion Guide (file) |
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| Week 6: Feb 22 |
(M) Freedom of Speech and Networked Communications Slides (Perusall pdf) Video (Perusall) (W) Regulating Online Speech Slides (Perusall pdf) Video (Perusall) Discussion Guide (file) |
HW: Applying Ethical Frameworks to a Dilemma | ||
| Week 7: Mar 1 |
(M) Intellectual Property Slides [Perusall pdf) Video (Perusall) (also M) Software as IP Video (Stream) Discussion Guide (file) |
Term Paper Proposal | ||
| Week 8: Mar 8 |
(M) Privacy Slides (Perursall pdf) Video (Perusall) (W) Privacy and the Government Slides (Perursall pdf) Video (Perusall) Discussion Guide (file) |
HW: Fair Use | ||
| Week 9: Mar 15 |
(M) Surveillance / USA Patriot Act Slides (Perusall pdf) Video (Perusall) Discussion Guide (file) (W) Tuesday is break day, so we’ll do only one lecture this week to reduce the workload. There will still be a discussion section. |
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| Mar 17: withdrawal deadline | ||||
| Week 10: Mar 22 |
(M) Professional Ethics Slides (Perusall pdf) Video (Perusall) (W) Wednesday is a break day, hits class and some discussion sections, so no Discussion Session this week |
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| Week 11: Mar 29 |
(M) no class (W) Network Neutrality Slides (Perusall pdf) Video (Perusall) Discussion Guide (file) |
Term Paper Outline | ||
| Week 12: Apr 5 |
(M) Work and Wealth Slides (Perusall pdf) Video (Perusall) (W) Technology and Pandemics Slides (Perusall pdf) Video (Perusall) Discussion Guide (file) |
HW: New ACM Code | ||
| Week 13: Apr 12 |
(M) AI, Algorithms, and Bias Slides (Perusall pdf) Video (Perusall) (W) Fake News and Deep Fakes Slides (Perusall pdf) Video (Perusall) Discussion Guide (file) |
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| Week 14: Apr 19 |
(M) Race in Computing Slides (Perusall pdf) Video (Perusall)(W) use the time to prepare your paper presentation No discussion guide |
Term Paper Presentation in Session | ||
| Last Week: Apr 26 |
no topic. Drop by and chat about the course | Term Paper Due |
Here you will find the readings for each day. Optional readings are in italics.
Readings
Week 2
Monday: Case Study: Therac-25
- Quinn Chapter 8.5
- Leveson, N. (1995). Medical devices: The therac-25. Appendix of: Safeware: System Safety and Computers. [pdf] [Perusall]
Optional:
- Radiation Offers New Cures, and Ways to Do Harm, The New York Times [link]
- Ganesh, T. (2014). Incident reporting and learning in radiation oncology: Need of the hour. Journal of Medical Physics/Association of Medical Physicists of India, 39(4), 203. [pdf] [Perusall]
Wednesday: Rhetoric & Writing Arguments
- Boylan, Browning, Burton, DeVries, Kurtz. Let’s Get Writing. Chapter 2: Rhetorical Analysis.
- Purdue OWL (Online Writing Lab), Historical Perspectives on Argumentation. Read the three sections: Classical, Toulmin, Rogerian.
Week 3
Monday: Do Artifacts Have Politics?
- Winner, L. (1980). Do artifacts have politics?. Daedalus, 121-136. [pdf] [in Perusal on Canvas]
- Gillespie, T. (2014). The relevance of algorithms. Media technologies: Essays on communication, materiality, and society, 167, 167. [pdf] [in Perusal on Canvas]
Optional:
- Planet Money episode 924: Stuck in China’s Panopticon (time: 26:36) [link]
Wednesday: Utilitarianism
- Quinn Chapter 2.1-2.3, 2.7-2.8
Week 4
Monday: Deontology
- Quinn Chapter 2.6
- Rachels, J (2011). The Elements of Moral Philosophy (7th Ed), Chapter 9: “Are there absolute moral rules?” [pdf] [in Perusal on Canvas]
Wednesday: Social Contract Theory
- Quinn Chapter 2.9
- Doody, R (2015). Criticisms of Rawls’ Principles of Justice. [on Perursal in Canvas]
Week 5
Monday: Stakeholder Analysis
- Quinn 2.12
- Gilligan, C. (1993). In a different voice. Harvard University Press, pp. 24-39 [on Perusal in Canvas]
Optional
- Goodpaster, K. E. Business Ethics and Stakeholder Analysis. Bus Ethics Q 1, 53–73 (1991). Perusall link]
- Kramer and Pfitzer, The Ecosystem of Shared Value. link (discussion of Shared Value Framework and more recent activity)
Wednesday: Virtue Ethics
- Quinn Chapter 2.10-2.11
- Hursthouse, Rosalind and Pettigrove, Glen, “Virtue Ethics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) [link]
Week 6
Monday: Freedom of Speech and Networked Communications
- Quinn Chapter (7th: 3.2, 3.5-3.8; 8th: 3.2, 3.6-3.9) skim the rest of the chapter
- Warf, B. (2011). Geographies of global Internet censorship. GeoJournal, 76(1), 1-23. [pdf] [Perusall]
Optional Readings
- Jillian York (2021), Users, not tech executives, should decide what constitutes free speech online. MIT Tech Review
Wednesday: Regulating Online Speech
- Banks, J. (2010). Regulating hate speech online. International Review of Law, Computers & Technology, 24(3), 233-239. [pdf] [Perusall]
- Nott, L (2019) Does the First Amendment Protect Speech Made By Artificial Intelligence? Freedom Forum Institute [link]
- Reddit bans ‘Fat People Hate’ and other subreddits under new harassment rules, The Verge [link] [Perusall]
Week 7
Before Monday: Intellectual Property
- Quinn Chapter 4.1-4.6 (for the recorded lecture)
Monday: Software as IP
- Quinn Chapter 4.7-4.10
- Summary of Oracle v. Google case at the Supreme Court – the most important software IP case in probably 10 years. Relates to fair use and API’s. [ScotusBlog]
- Why the Affero GPL? This modern take on the GPL open source license closed a big loophole and is used by modern commercial open source software applications. [link]
- Announcement by ElasticSearch that they are moving to a copyleft open source license and would like the SSPL to become the new modern commercial open source license. Don’t worry about the specifics of the licenses as much as noting Elastic’s commercial goals and the confusion caused in the market by the change. [link]
- Ben Klemens, Here we go again: Software patents poised to make a comeback under new patent office rules. 1/10/2019 [ArsTechnica Link]
No class Wednesday
Week 8
Monday: Privacy
- Quinn Chapter 5
- Gilad Edelman (2021), A Case Against the Peeping Tom Theory of Privacy. [wired]
- Solove, Daniel J., ‘I’ve Got Nothing to Hide’ and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy. San Diego Law Review, Vol. 44, p. 745, 2007, GWU Law School Public Law Research Paper No. 289, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=998565 [Perusall]
- “Anonymized” data really isn’t and here’s why not, Ars Technica [link] [Perusall]
Optional Readings (these have been used by other faculty in the past, some you might find interesting)
- Acquisti, A., Brandimarte, L., & Loewenstein, G. (2015). Privacy and human behavior in the age of information. Science, 347(6221), 509–514. [link] [Perusall]
- Ohm, P. (2009). Broken promises of privacy: Responding to the surprising failure of anonymization. UCLA l. Rev., 57, 1701. [pdf][Perusall]
- O’Hara, K. (2013). Are we getting privacy the wrong way round?. IEEE Internet Computing, 17(4), 89-92. [pdf] [Perusall]
- Zuckerberg: I know that people don’t want privacy, CNet [link] [Perusall]
- The Solace of Oblivion: In Europe, the right to be forgotten trumps the Internet, The New Yorker [link] [Perusall]
- Google wins landmark right to be forgotten case, BBC [link]
Wednesday: Privacy and the Government
- Quinn Chapter 6 (except 6.6)
- Botsman, R. (2017). Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens. Wired UK, 21. [wired pdf] [Perusall]
- The NSA’s Secret Role in the US Assassination Program, The Intercept [link] [Perusall]
Optional readings
- Understanding the General Data Protection Regulation: A primer for global publishers. [link]
Week 9
Surveillance / USA Patriot Act
- Quinn Chapter 6.6
- Wikipedia articles to read: “Brandon Mayfield” [link], “Summary of important points about the USA Patriot Act” [link]
- “Wikipedia and other articles to skim: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)” [link], “FISA Amendments Act” [link], “The USA Patriot Act” [link], “National Security Letters” [link]
- Don’t Renew Section 215 Indefinitely, by EFF [link]
Optional readings:
- United States of Secrets ([movie], 3 hours)
- EFF’s NSA Spying Timeline [link]
- Asinari, M. V. P., & Poullet, Y. (2004). The airline passenger data disclosure case and the EU-US debate. Computer Law & Security Review, 20(2), 98-116. [pdf] [Perusall]
- Engineering the public: Big data, surveillance and computational politics. [link]
(Cancelled) Wednesday: Privacy and Biological Data
(All are optional. I’m eliminating one of this lecture since this week has one of the “Break days” in lieu of Spring Break, and I’d like to give you all a bit of a break.
- The Golden State Killer Is Tracked Through a Thicket of DNA [link]
- Your DNA Profile is Private? A Florida Judge Just Said Otherwise [link]
- Facial recognition: is the technology taking away your identity? [link]
Optional readings:
- Viewpoint: ‘Have You Thought About . . .’: Talking About Ethical Implications of Research, by Amy Bruckman. [link]
Week 10
Monday: Professional Ethics
- Quinn Chapter 9
- ACM Code of Conduct [link]
- Anderson, R. E., Johnson, D. G., Gotterbarn, D., & Perrolle, J. (1993). Using the new ACM code of ethics in decision making. Communications of the ACM, 36(2), 98-107. [pdf] [Perusall]
Week 11
Wednesday: Network Neutrality
- Point/Counterpoint: Network Neutrality Nuances [link]
- What Everyone Gets Wrong in the Debate Over Net Neutrality [link ]
- Net Neutrality: How Recent Developments Could Affect Content Companies and Other IP-Intensive Businesses by Benjamin Hodges and Melodie Virtue [link]
Optional readings:
- It’s digital colonialism’: how Facebook’s free internet service has failed its users by Olivia Solon [link]
- Archive of articles on net neutrality by Ars Technica [link]
- Archive of articles on net neutrality by The Verge [link]
Week 12
Monday: Work and Wealth
- Quinn Chapter 10
- Five ways work will change in the future. The Guardian. 2015. (link)
Optional
- Rotman, D. (2013). How technology is destroying jobs. Technology Review, 16(4), 28-35. [pdf]
- Planet Monday T-shirt Project. (link)
- Imagine Discovering That Your Teaching Assistant Really Is a Robot, The Wall Street Journal [link]
- Goldhahn, J., Rampton, V., & Spinas, G. A. (2018). Could artificial intelligence make doctors obsolete?. Bmj, 363, k4563. [pdf]
- AI Will Change Radiology, but It Won’t Replace Radiologists, Harvard Business Review [link]
- The Watch Is Smart, but It Can’t Replace Your Doctor, New York Times [link]
Wednesday: Technology and Pandemics
- Guariglia, M., and Schwartz, A. Protecting Civil Liberties During a Public Health Crisis, Electronic Frontier Foundation. [link]
- Servick, K. Cellphone tracking could help stem the spread of coronavirus. Is privacy the price? Science Magazine. [link]
- More Than Just Privacy: Using Contextual Integrity to Evaluate the Long-Term Risks from COVID-19 Surveillance Technologies, by Jessica Vitak and Michael Zimmer [link]
Optional readings:
- How Surveillance Could Save Lives Amid a Public Health Crisis, Wired [link]
- Brewster, T. Two Million Guinea Pigs And Counting: The Remarkable Rise Of Self-Monitoring In The Time Of Coronavirus, Forbes. [link]
- Raskar, R., Schunemann, I., Barbar, R., Vilcans, K., Gray, J., Vepakomma, P., Kapa, S. et al. “Apps Gone Rogue: Maintaining Personal Privacy in an Epidemic.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.08567 (2020). [pdf]
Week 13
Monday: Algorithmic Bias and Fairness
- The Ugly Truth About Ourselves and Our Robot Creations: The Problem of Bias and Social Inequity (link)
- Researchers use facial recognition tools to predict sexual orientation. LGBT groups aren’t happy, Washington Post [link]. Skim the article (it’s long), also read the author’s rebuttal to critiques (link) and a recent article discussing a similar ML system that includes references to this paper (Wired, “An Algorithm That ‘Predicts’ Criminality Based on a Face Sparks a Furor” link)
- Fairness: Types of Bias (link)
Optional
- Edelman, B., Luca, M., & Svirsky, D. (2017). Racial discrimination in the sharing economy: Evidence from a field experiment. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 9(2), 1-22. [pdf]
- Kay, M., Matuszek, C., & Munson, S. A. (2015, April). Unequal representation and gender stereotypes in image search results for occupations. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 3819-3828). [pdf]
- When It Comes to Gorillas, Google Photos Remains Blind, Wired [link]
- Supposedly ‘Fair’ Algorithms Can Perpetuate Discrimination, Wired (link)
- Wang, Y., & Kosinski, M. (2018). Deep neural networks are more accurate than humans at detecting sexual orientation from facial images. Journal of personality and social psychology, 114(2), 246. [pdf]
Wednesday: Fake News and Deep Fakes
- The Agency. NY Times Magazine, 2015. (link)
- Starbird, K. (2017). Examining the Alternative Media Ecosystem Through the Production of Alternative Narratives of Mass Shooting Events on Twitter. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 11(1). Retrieved from https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/14878 [pdf]
Week 14
Was Monday: Electronic Voting, Democracy and Computing
Optional
- Social bots distort the 2016 US Presidential election online discussion (link)
Monday: Race in Computing
- What’s the difference between race and ethnicity? by Emma Bryce, Live Science [link]
- Does Technology Have Race? by David Hankerson et. al. [link]
- “Crypto for the people” Keynote talk by Seny Kamara at Crypto 2020 [most of talk (2:04 - 49:43)]
- Nextdoor has a racism problem, and here’s how it’s trying to fix it, by AJ Dellinger [link]
Optional:
- New York Times infographic: Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys [link]