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This article is an extension of a work in progress paper originally presented at the conference FiE 2020, Frontiers in Education by (Schirichian et al., 2020), as a result of Schirichian’s master’s in science dissertation. It studies the relations between academic performance, protection factors, life at university, and personal characteristics to understand how they influence students’ academic success in undergraduate engineering programs in Brazil. In this challenging environment, several students overcome these issues and graduate, which indicates that some protection structures allow students to face challenging situations and be successful in their studies. Current research studied the relationships between academic performance, self-efficacy, causal attributions, personal characteristics, and life at university, with a group of 30 students. Models were studied by combining the different variables and aspects evaluated in the research, and the findings show relationship between academic performance and: 1) self-efficacy, causal attributions, and personal characteristics (such as leisure activities, living with their parents, or college accommodations) and those who attended private schools during basic education; 2 protection factors self-efficacy and causal attributions with advancing in the program and the time of enrolment in the university; and 3) the dimensions initiation and persistence, success/internality and failure/internality, indicating that those who perceive themselves as playing a major role in their academic journey tend to have better outcomes. Further results show the influence of social inequalities, particularly for those students who declared themselves brown and who conducted their basic education in public schools (which are generally of lower quality than private ones in Brazil). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clark Glymour argued in 2004 that "despite a lack of public fanfare, there is mounting evidence that we are in the midst of ... a revolution - premised on the automation of scientific discovery" [1]. This paper highlights some of the philosophical and sociological dimensions that have been found empirically in work conducted with robot scientists - that is, with autonomous robotic systems for scientific discovery. Robot scientists do not supply definite answers to the discussed questions, but rather provide "proofs of concept" for various ideas. For example, it is not that robot scientists solve the realist/antirealist philosophical debate, but that when working with robot scientists one has to make a philosophical choice - in this case, to assume a realist view of science. There are still few systems for autonomous scientific discovery in existence, and it is too early to generalize and propose new theories. However, being "in the midst of ... a revolution" it is important for the research community to re-examine views pertinent to scientific discovery. This paper highlights how experience with robot scientists could inform discussions in other disciplines, from philosophy of science to computer creativity research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ethical decision-making during inevitable crashes, especially when humans involved, has become a big and sensitive roadblock for future mass adoption of autonomous vehicles. Towards addressing this challenge, this paper proposes a predictive control framework for ethical decision-making in autonomous driving using rational ethics. For flexibly implementing of ethical rules, the Lexicographic Optimization-based model predictive controller (LO-MPC) has been designed, in which obstacles and constraints are prioritized. Simulation environment is set up in PreScan, with different edge cases. The results show that the proposed LO-MPC approach has the capability to deal with the ethical decision-making during inevitable crashes by avoiding the obstacles with the assumed priority orders compared with traditional decision-making algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mass availability of self-driving cars is ante portas and independent of their sophistication, unavoidable fatal accidents will occur where the car will have to take life and death decisions. However, there is a knowledge gap, since the impact, that the ethical frameworks (used in the car's decision-making process) have on the overall acceptance of self-driving cars, is not well investigated. This paper addresses the key question: In the scope of unavoidable accidents, what is the effect of different ethical frameworks governing self-driving car decision-making, on their acceptance? This quantitative positivist research investigates the link of selected ethical frameworks, i.e., utilitarianism, deontology, relativism, absolutism (monism), and pluralism, to the acceptance of self-driving cars. It is hypothesized that they have an impact on the acceptance of the self-driving cars, and a model linking them to it is proposed and assessed. All five selected ethical frameworks investigated are found to have an effect on self-driving car acceptance, which implies actions for several involved stakeholders as these may be a deciding factor for the success or failure of the self-driving car market introduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of social robots has been proposed for the delivery of therapy to autistic children. The aim of such projects, of which the DREAM project is an example, is to replace therapists by robots, operating in sensory environments that enable them to detect and respond to feedback from the child. This article considers the ethical concerns of autonomy, community, transparency, identity, value, and empathy to evaluate the ethics of such deployment of robots. In doing so it provides a response to the Richardson et al. article in IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, Mar. 2018 [20]. This article concludes that deployment of robots to control the behavior of autistic children is ethically suspect and should be questioned. The use of robots with children should be evaluated on the basis of the purpose of and process by which such robots are deployed, rather than on the basis of the technology itself. Particularly important is the roboticist's empathy with the user of the robot, and gaining an understanding of the individual child. The paper suggests how an understanding of the autistic child might lead to sensitive deployment of a robot to help the child manage social environments through supporting the child's regulation of emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A system operator asks a group of sensors toexert costly effort to collect accurate measurements of a value of interest over time. At each time, each sensor is asked to report its observation to the operator, and is suitably compensated for the costly effort it exerts. Since both the effort and the observation are private information for the sensor, a naive payment scheme which compensates the sensor based only on its self-reported values of the effort and the measurements will lead to both shirking and falsification of outcomes by the sensor. In this paper, we design an appropriate compensation scheme to incentivize the sensors to both exert costly effort and then reveal the resulting observation truthfully. To this end, we formulate the problem as a repeated game and propose a compensation scheme that employs stochastic verification by the operator coupled with an algorithm to assign a reputation to each sensor. By including the history of the behavior exerted by the sensor in determining present payments, we show that the operator can incentivize higher effort as well as more frequent truthtelling by the sensors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1980s, many software developers and enthusiasts reacted to software's unclear status within the U.S. copyright law by pursuing technical, rather than legislative fixes. This paper applies forensic methods to recover records of conflict between commercial software developers and the enthusiasts who sought to "crack" commercial programs' copy protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: This paper offers a hybrid, place-based ethic drawn from multiple perspectives as a way to reinvigorate ethical thought for technical communicators. Literature review: Aldo Leopold's land ethic asks us to consider actions beyond our immediate surroundings. Martin Buber's dialogic ethics complement a land ethic and interrogate interpersonal communication. Anticipatory technology ethics recommends the integration of ethical discussions and decisions during the design phase of new technologies. Together, these three approaches inform a place-based ethic for technical communicators. Research questions: 1. How might we meaningfully merge the many ways that technical communicators from varying backgrounds approach ethics into a useful ethical model that considers human interaction, technological innovation, and physical place? 2. How might such a merged model, what we call a place-based ethic, affect technical communication design? Methods: We analyze cases including documents from radical environmental defense groups, a restyling of certain federal court rules from legalese into plainer language, the creation of mortgage documents suitable for consumers and industry professionals, and the action-research design phase of a locative mobile application about public art. Results and conclusion: The cases provide concrete examples of the components of a place-based ethic, and we conclude that designing with a place-based ethic includes actively acknowledging the value of the environment, seeking areas for dialogue among involved parties and celebrating dialogue where it occurs, seeking shared spaces, clearly stating anticipated outcomes, and usability testing for potential ethical issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This book comprises a selection of papers presented at the IPET 2008 symposium that took place at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London in November 2008 and at the following workshop at the Colorado School of Mines. It is the second volume in a series that emanated from a workshop on Philosophy in Engineering that took place at the University of Delft in October 2007 and that began a continuing series of workshops named by the acronym IPET followed by the year of the workshop. Prior to that, there had been three significant publications that had illustrated the value of pursuing the relationship between philosophy and engineering, and engineering education. The success of this 2007 University of Delft workshop led to IPET 2008 being held at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London. While the focus of both volumes is on engineering, necessarily many of the papers have implications for engineering education. It would be surprising if the three individuals invited to review this book were able to agree upon a conclusion. They did indeed have different views; this seems to be because their views differed of who was likely to read this book. A reader may infer the editors? intentions from the questions put to Mitcham, but it is harder to infer the intended audience. One of the reviewers takes the view that a collection of papers of the calibre presented will attract a like-minded set of readers, and so responded to the questions put to Mitcham with that group in mind. Another thought the book would be suited to engineering educators more generally, and as a result was effusive in its praise. The fundamental questions that need to be answered are ?What value do these papers have for engineering educators?? and ?What value do they have for their students?? While the editors have not focused on engineering and technological literacy, a number of chapters are of considerable importance to those who promote study in these areas. The chapters on peace engineering and the use of robotics in warfare are examples of this. Of the series of papers on the philosophy of technology adoption over the last two decades, some are summarized in Ch. 23 by Houkes and Pols. This chapter focuses on the designer?user system in terms of what the authors' call Rational Acceptance Technology (RAT), one aspect of which is control. They point out that in designing artefacts, designers hand over a measure of control to the users. RAT requires that the user has partial responsibility for failure. For instance, guarantees and insurance for domestic electrical goods are careful to note improper use as an exclusion from the guarantee. From the reviewers' perspective, the answer to the first of the questions put to Mitcham is that this volume contributes to the establishment of a philosophy of engineering. It now requires an authority to provide a synthesis of the numerous articles that have been published in this area with that in mind. A good starting point would be for the organizers of these and similar workshops to call for some focused review papers, to which the reviewers and readers of this book can look forward to with great anticipation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Chapters 12, "Presentations", is one of the few chapters in this book clearly devoted to scientific spoken communication, the other being Chapter 14. Hanganu-Bresch and Flaherty begin with the most common types: original research papers (Chapter 8) and review articles (Chapter 9). In Chapter 1, "Cultivating good writing habits", Hanganu-Bresch and Flaherty recommend a list of practical writing habits (e.g., find and use writing models, incorporate writing in every stage of writing). [Extracted from the article]

Secret sharing schemes allow a dealer to distribute a secret piece of information among several parties such that only qualified subsets of parties can reconstruct the secret. The collection of qualified subsets is called an access structure. The best known example is the k -threshold access structure, where the qualified subsets are those of size at least k . When k=2 and there are n parties, there are schemes for sharing an \ell bits, and this is tight even for secrets of 1 b. In these schemes, the number of parties n must be given in advance to the dealer. In this paper, we consider the case where the set of parties is not known in advance and could potentially be infinite. Our goal is to give the {t} {^{\mathrm{ th}}} party arriving the smallest possible share as a function of t$ . Our main result is such a scheme for the k$ -threshold access structure and 1-bit secrets where the share size of party t$ is . For k=2$ we observe an equivalence to prefix codes and present matching upper and lower bounds of the form \log t + \log \log t + \log \log \log t + O(1)$ . Finally, we show that for any access structure there exists such a secret sharing scheme with shares of size . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We address the problem of merging probabilistic knowledge in a centralized (nonflat) multiple participant system. Each participant independently reports a known distribution of a common quantity of interest to an extra participant, called the deliberator. The deliberator’s task is the optimal design of a compromise distribution, which seeks to minimize the expected loss imposed on each of the participants. We formulate this task as one of Bayesian decision-making, and solve it using fully probabilistic design. Solutions are currently available for discrete distributions only. In this paper, we provide two novel contributions. First, the deliberator’s unknown distribution is parametric on a continuous support. Second, the scheme adopts a hierarchical model for the deliberator, optimizing the deliberator’s parameter prior. This allows quantification of the deliberator’s uncertainty in their model choice. We formulate conditions under which a conjugate design is achieved, and provide an example where the design is analytically tractable. Extensive simulation-based evidence is reported, pointing to the significantly enhanced performance of our framework over logarithmic pools. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Hybrid zero dynamics (HZD) has emerged as a popular framework for dynamic walking but has significant implementation difficulties when applied to the high degrees of freedom humanoids. The primary impediment is the process of gait design—it is difficult for optimizers to converge on a viable set of virtual constraints defining a gait. This paper presents a methodology that allows for fast and reliable generation of dynamic robotic walking gaits through the HZD framework, even in the presence of underactuation. Specifically, we describe an optimization formulation that builds upon the novel combination of HZD and direct collocation methods. Furthermore, achieving a scalable implementation required developing a defect-variable substitution formulation to simplify expressions, which ultimately allows us to generate compact analytic Jacobians of the constraints. We experimentally validate our methodology on an underactuated humanoid, DURUS, a spring-legged machine designed to facilitate energy-economical walking. We show that the optimization approach, in concert with the HZD framework, yields dynamic and stable walking gaits in hardware with a total electrical cost of transport of 1.33. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The development of social robots for children with autism has been a growth field for the past 15 years. This article reviews studies in robots and autism as a neurodevelopmental disorder that impacts socialcommunication development, and the ways social robots could help children with autism develop social skills. Drawing on ethics research from the EU-funded Development of Robot-Enhanced Therapy for Children with Autism (DREAM) project (framework 7), this paper explores how ethics evolves and developed in this European project. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper introduces semantic-aware real-time (SeART), an extension to conventional operating systems, which deals with complex real-time robotics applications. SeART addresses the problem of selecting a subset of tasks to be scheduled depending on the current operating context: mission objectives, other tasks currently executed, the availability or unavailability of sensors and other resources, as well as temporal constraints. Toward this end, SeART is able to represent the semantics of tasks to be scheduled, i.e., what tasks are meant for, and to use this information in the scheduling process. This paper describes in detail the SeART architecture by focusing on representations and reasoning procedures, and presenting a case-study which is related to mobile robotics for autonomous objects transportation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the greatest compliments I've ever received came from a gentleman who approached me after I had delivered a paper in Vancouver, British Columbia. He said: "You're from the future, aren't you?" He was responding to the manner in which I had considered logical entailments of how future episodes may play out. Although I was trained as a philosopher of science, the majority of my work for the last two decades has been interdisciplinary and collaborative with other fields in the social and physical sciences. As a pioneer in my field - sometimes referred to as experimental philosophy - I often employ the use of thought experiments or "what if?" scenarios to imagine possible future worlds. Thought experiments have been around for thousands of years; from Plato's allegory of the cave (Figure 1), to Rene Descartes' malin genie (Figure 2), to Hilary Putnam's brains in vats (Figure 3). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a new cross-curricular design for an engineering communication course based on four themes: (1) ethics, accountability, and professionalism; (2) intellectual property; (3) design, creativity, and invention; and (4) globalization. It is believed that the thematic structure creates both dynamic and contemporary contexts for writing and research along with enough freedom to pursue individual student interests. The result is a higher degree of intrinsic motivation for the assignments. The course is a collaborative effort between an English department and a school of engineering designed to both imp rove curriculum and provide more, assessment data for engineering accreditation. Among the criteria from the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) is the "ability to communicate effectively." Along with satisfying this criterion, the course discussed in this paper details how to capture data in support of an additional four of ABET's criteria known as "a-k." 'After highlighting these ABET criteria and giving an overview of the structure of the course, the paper details each theme, including their respective readings and assignments. This new course was taught for the first time in the 2006-2007 academic year, and the paper closes by weighing the outcomes and implications of adopting a similar format. The current version of the syllabus and reading list for this course are included in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge contribution in virtual communities is an important issue in the field of knowledge management. Based on Ames's theoretical framework on motivation, we propose a model for knowledge contribution in problem-solving virtual communities (PSVCs). The model includes two second-order individual motivations, with four major mechanisms in PSVCs that are associated with these motivations. Results confirm that only egoistic motives affect members' knowledge contribution in PSVCs. Further, knowledge repository and social identity are found to be important mechanisms for promoting knowledge contribution through egoistic motives. This paper concludes with theoretical and practical implications and provides insights for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An individual's reluctance to report the actual status of a troubled project has recently received research attention as an important contributor to project failure. While there are a variety of factors influencing the reluctance to report, prior information systems research has focused on only situational factors such as risk, information asymmetry, and time pressure involved in the given situation. In this paper, we examine the effects of both situational and personal factors on an individual's reporting behavior within the rubric of the basic whistle-blowing model adapted from Dozier and Miceli [1]. Specifically, we identify perceived impact of information technology (IT) failure as a situational factor and personal morality and willingness to communicate as personal factors, and investigate their effects on the assessments and decisions that individuals make about reporting the IT project's status. Based on the results of a controlled laboratory experiment, we found that perceived impact of IT failure directly affects an individual's assessment of whether a troubled project's status ought to be re- ported, exerting an indirect influence on willingness to report bad news, and that personal morality directly affects all three steps in the basic whistle-blowing model, as hypothesized. Willingness to communicate, however, was found not to affect an individual's willingness to report bad news. The implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of recent scandals involving information technology (IT) professionals, the ethics of this profession deserve more attention. This paper reports on the first phase of an initiative to research the ethics of IT professionals. The ethical values of the IT profession in Hong Kong were investigated using an instrument designed to reflect the stages of moral reasoning present in Kohlberg's theory of Cognitive Moral Development. The vast majority of respondents espoused ethical values consistent with both a high level of reasoning and the prevailing societal culture. At the same time, many respondents exhibited considerable uncertainty in their ethical reasoning, indicating a dynamic tension between high and low moral principles. The implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering is a serving profession. During the least century, engineering curricula have become technology and process focused to the detriment of the "soft skills" so necessary for a professional. This paper proposes that engineering curricula undergo major revisions to return to the original service mission of the profession. The key elements for a renaissance within engineering education are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents calls for papers on software engineering ethics and multimedia management, and a calendar of conferences from December 3, 2008 to August 2009.

This article discusses the role played by computer software programming in the development of the 2008 financial crisis. The history of financial products such as paper currency, foreign exchange options, and credit-default swaps is described. The tendency of financial institutions to manipulate investment instruments based on inadequate risk assessment is noted. The author believes that computer engineers bear responsibility for the financial crisis insofar as they understood the underlying financial instruments that their programs were being used to design.

Describes the above-named upcoming conference event. May include topics to be covered or calls for papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes the above-named upcoming conference event. May include topics to be covered or calls for papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The book is one of a longstanding series of humanities anthologies issued by Wadsworth that I fi rst encountered a decade ago in Louis Pojman?s compilation of classic philosophy texts, The Quest for Truth. But in contrast to Plato and Aristotle, the fi elds of ethics and science and technology studies simply won?t stand still, so publishers are justifi ed in bringing out new editions in this area every few years. The mix of papers and essays in this collection strikes a good balance between relatively timeless and historical material on the one hand, and up-to-date topical discussions of current topics such as globalization, genetic engineering, and climate change on the other. This anthology began with a course the authors developed in 1993 at the College of New Jersey, assisted by NSF support for the fi eld of science and technology studies. The book is divided into two parts: Perspectives on Technology, which carries works on the history, politics, and ethics of technology in general; and Contemporary Technology and the Future, focused on five topical areas. The typography and layout of the book follow the pleasing well-established Wadsworth style. I detected a few signs of haste in copyediting: a typo here and there, and, most seriously, a place where apparently an entire page of references was left out. Considering that the office of proofreader was abolished by most publishers somewhere around 1995, this book is still better than average in its freedom from errors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]