Marc Langheinrich
Albrecht Schmidt
Nigel Davies
Rui José
ABSTRACT
Research involving public displays often faces the need to study the effects of a deployment in the wild. While many organizations have institutionalized processes for ensuring ethical compliance of such human subject experiments, these may fail to stimulate sufficient awareness for ethical issues among all project members. Some organizations even require such assessments only for medical research, leaving computer scientists without any incentive to consider and reflect on their study design and data collection practices. Faced with similar problems in the context of the EU-funded PD-Net project, we have implemented a step-by-step ethics process that aims at providing structured yet lightweight guidance to all project members both stimulating the design of ethical user studies, as well as providing continuous documentation. This paper describes our process and reports on 3 years of experience using it. All materials are publicly available and we hope that other projects in the area of public displays, and beyond, will adopt them to suit their particular needs.
- Ojala, T., and Kostakos, V. 2012. UBI challenge: research competition on real-world urban computing. In Proc. of the 10th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (Beijing, China, December 07 - 09, 2011). MUM'11. ACM, New York, NY, 205--208. DOI= dx.doi.org/10.1145/2107596.2107622 Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Chalmers, M., McMillan, D., Morrison, A., Cramer, H., Rost, M., and Mackay, W. 2011. Ethics, logs and videotape: ethics in large scale user trials and user generated content. In CHI '11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Vancouver, BC, Canada, May 07 - 12, 2011). CHI EA'11. ACM, New York, NY, 2421--2424. DOI= dx.doi.org/10.1145/1979742.1979574 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Morrison, A., Brown, O., McMillan, D., and Chalmers, M. 2011. Informed consent and users' attitudes to logging in large scale trials. In CHI '11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Vancouver, BC, Canada, May 07 - 12, 2011). CHI EA'11. ACM, New York, NY, 2421--2424. DOI= dx.doi.org/10.1145/1979742.1979798 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wald, D. S. 2004. Bureaucracy of ethics applications. British Medical Journal, 329, 7460 (July 2004), 282--284. DOI= dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.329.7460.282Google ScholarCross Ref
- Davies, N., Langheinrich, M. José, R., and Schmidt, A. 2012. Open Display Networks: A Communications Medium for the 21st Century. IEEE Computer, 45, 5 (May 2012), 58--64. DOI= dx.doi.org/10.1109/MC.2012.114 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Alt, F., Müller, J., Schneegaß, S., Schmidt, A., and Memarovic, N. 2012. How to evaluate public displays. In: Proceedings of the 2012 International Symposium on Pervasive Displays (Porto, Portugal, June 4--5, 2012). PerDis'2012. ACM, New York, NY, 17-. DOI= dx.doi.org/10.1145/2307798.2307815 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gaskell, G., Einsiedel, E. Hallman, W., Hornig Priest, S., Jackson, J., and Olsthoorn, J. 2005. Social Values and the Governance of Science. Science, 310, 5756 (Dec. 2005). 1908--1909. DOI= dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1119444Google ScholarCross Ref
- Brey, P. A. E. 2012. Anticipating ethical issues in emerging IT. Ethics and Information Technology. 14, 4 (Dec.2012), 305--317. DOI= dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10676-012-9293-y Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gans-Combe, C. 2009: Data Protection and Privacy Ethical Guidelines (Version 5). European Commission, Sept.18, 2009. See ftp://ftp.cordis.europa.eu/pub/fp7/docs/privacy.docGoogle Scholar
- Henderson, T., Hutton, L., and McNeilly, S. 2012. Ethics and online social network research - developing best practices. In Proceedings of Proceedings of the 26th BCS Conference on Human Computer Interaction (Birmingham, UK, 12 - 14 September 2012). BCSHCI'12. BCS, Swindon, UK.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Pauwels, E. 2007. Ethics for Researchers. Facilitating Research Excellence in FP7. See ftp://ftp.cordis.europa.eu/pub/fp7/docs/ethics-for-researchers.pdfGoogle Scholar
- ISTAG. 2012. Towards Horizon 2020 -- Recommendations of ISTAG on FP7 ICT Work Program 2013. March 2012.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- A practical framework for ethics: the PD-net approach to supporting ethics compliance in public display studies
Recommendations
Moral luck and computer ethics: Gauguin in cyberspace
I argue that the problem of `moral luck' is an unjustly neglected topic within Computer Ethics. This is unfortunate given that the very nature of computer technology, its `logical malleability', leads to ever greater levels of complexity, unreliability ...
From ethics washing to ethics bashing: a view on tech ethics from within moral philosophy
FAT* '20: Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and TransparencyThe word 'ethics' is under siege in technology policy circles. Weaponized in support of deregulation, self-regulation or handsoff governance, "ethics" is increasingly identified with technology companies' self-regulatory efforts and with shallow ...
An introductory learning module on ethics and academic integrity for freshman engineering students
FIE'09: Proceedings of the 39th IEEE international conference on Frontiers in education conferenceAcademic Integrity is a fundamental condition for the mission of any University. Ethical problems undermine Academic Integrity and thus the mission of the University. The College of Engineering at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez (UPRM) has ...
Reviews
Barrett Hazeltine
Langheinrich et al. present a formal process for ensuring ethical compliance in the implementation of the EU-funded PD-Net project. (PD refers to "public display." The project involves "large scale networks of pervasive public displays and associated sensors.") The process is especially useful in countries that do not have well-established human factors protocols. The formal aspect of the process enhances research that is multi-disciplinary and multi-site. The process has four components: an ethics advisory board, base documentation, study process templates, and worksheets. The process itself has three phases: 1) preparatory, during which the ethics advisory board is established; 2) research, during which the worksheets are developed and the research is matched to existing study process templates (if no existing templates match, then new ones are prepared); and 3) closing, during which collected personal data is deleted and the report is submitted to the board. The advisory board approves new templates. In the research phase, informed consent documents are prepared. Other documents, for the use of all researchers, are also prepared, including an "ethics primer" and guides for interviews, surveys, public trials, and volunteer studies. Templates for each of these documents are available at http://pd-net.org/ethics/, and sample pages are included in the paper. Using the study process templates makes the process modular and thus scalable. Basing the process on written documents reviewed by the entire research team improves the quality of the overall research and forces each aspect to be examined. The library of templates should be useful to anyone doing related research. The process seems reasonable. Online Computing Reviews Service
Access critical reviews of Computing literature here
Become a reviewer for Computing Reviews.
Comments