Fairness Testing: Testing Software for Discrimination

This paper defines software fairness and discrimination and develops a testing-based method for measuring if and how much software discriminates, focusing on causality in discriminatory behavior. Evidence of software discrimination has been found in modern software systems that recommend criminal sentences, grant access to financial products, and determine who is allowed to participate in promotions. Our approach, Themis, generates efficient test suites to measure discrimination. Given a schema describing valid system inputs, Themis generates discrimination tests automatically and does not require an oracle. We evaluate Themis on 20 software systems, 12 of which come from prior work with explicit focus on avoiding discrimination. We find that (1) Themis is effective at discovering software discrimination, (2) state-of-the-art techniques for removing discrimination from algorithms fail in many situations, at times discriminating against as much as 98% of an input subdomain, (3) Themis optimizations are effective at producing efficient test suites for measuring discrimination, and (4) Themis is more efficient on systems that exhibit more discrimination. We thus demonstrate that fairness testing is a critical aspect of the software development cycle in domains with possible discrimination and provide initial tools for measuring software discrimination.Comment: Sainyam Galhotra, Yuriy Brun, and Alexandra Meliou. 2017. Fairness Testing: Testing Software for Discrimination. In Proceedings of 2017 11th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), Paderborn, Germany, September 4-8, 2017 (ESEC/FSE'17). https://doi.org/10.1145/3106237.3106277, ESEC/FSE, 201

Teacher Leadership to Enhance Day Treatment Services

Day treatment classrooms offer alternative educational programming for students who cannot attend regular classrooms due to their need for mental health care and treatment. The unique design of day treatment classrooms combines individualized educational programming provided by publicly funded teachers and mental health treatment provided by workers from a children’s mental health agency. The Problem of Practice (PoP) aims to increase the leadership capacity for an elementary teaching team providing day treatment services within a children’s mental health organization. The special education teacher and the academic programming of the student receives limited attention within the wider multidisciplinary team as the mental health treatment goals are prioritized, unintentionally overriding the educational goals. Too little is known about the current conditions under which this elementary teaching team in day treatment classrooms provide effective special education programming to its students. Emergent and authentic leadership approaches are examined within the existing distributed and team leadership style of the organization and critically analyzed through Nadler-Tushman’s Congruence Model. This Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP) utilizes Appreciative Inquiry (AI) as its guiding organizational change framework to communicate the need for change and implement the change plan to enhance networking, collaboration, and communication with both school-based and non-school based stakeholders

Cyber-Physical Systems of Systems: Foundations – A Conceptual Model and Some Derivations: The AMADEOS Legacy

Computer Systems Organization and Communication Networks; Software Engineering; Complex Systems; Information Systems Applications (incl. Internet); Computer Application

Structure of organizational trust in military-type and civilian organizations: Validation of the Organizational Trust Questionnaire

Contemporary research on organizational trust views it as either rational or relational phenomenon that is a result of interpersonal bonds or cooperative relationships between the trusting parties. Resent studies agree that a certain degree of trust must be embedded in and enacted through organizational interactions and structures, taking trust from a purely interpersonal phenomenon to a more complex organizational phenomenon that has multiple antecedents;This study hypothesizes that that an organizational member\u27s intention to trust others in the organization is affected by six factors: (1) the individual\u27s propensity to trust, (2) co-workers\u27 character and behaviors, (3) bosses\u27 character and behavior, (4) organizational structures, (5) interactions outside of the organization, and (6) the individual\u27s propensity to distrust. The study also suggests that individual intention to trust others in organizations varies depending on the degree of organizational formalization and centralization;To confirm the existence of the proposed factors and explore the potential influence of structural dimensions on individual intention to trust, the Organizational Trust Questionnaire (the OTQ) was constructed and distributed to the employees of a law enforcement agency and a university. The data was analyzed using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses and the Structural Equations Modeling technique;The findings validate the OTQ and establish its usability in both civilian and military-type organizations. The results demonstrate that faculty members and professional and scientific employees of the university have higher levels of intention to trust than sworn officers of a law enforcement agency and merit employees of the university. These differences are attributed to the differences in levels of centralization and formalization in the two organizations

Exploring the Impact of Collective Bargaining Agreements on Employee Performance Management

As of 2014, union density in the United States had dropped compared to union density during the 1950s. Collective bargaining agreements are the foundational agreement for all issues related to salary, benefits, and working conditions. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore how collective bargaining agreements hindered or enabled managers from creating and sustaining high performance work practices. The conceptual framework included Walton and McKersie\u27s work on behavioral theories for labor negotiations, human capital, and collective bargaining, and Huselid\u27s work on high performance work practices. Fifteen respondents across 5 labor unions in Washington DC were selected through a randomized purposive sampling strategy for face-to-face and telephone semi-structured interviews. Additional sources of data included current and archived collective bargaining agreements, a reflective journal, and personal memos that were analyzed using Yin\u27s 5-step analysis process. The following 5 themes were identified: performance management and accountability, organizational and union culture, intrinsic motivation and performance recognition, management practices, and the future sustainability of unions. These findings may help unionized organizations in the Washington DC metro area consider changing negative hiring and retention practices. Collective bargaining agreements, without a partnership framework linked to organizational sustainability, can hinder the creation and sustenance of high performance work practices in labor unions

Synergy realization in the cross-border post-acquisition integration of humans and tasks

Emerging new trends have made it clear that companies need to react and adjust to ongoing changes in their industry while simultaneously sustaining their competitive advantage. As the race for strategic assets in today’s dynamic environments intensifies, mergers and acquisitions as corporate growth elements are rapidly gaining popularity. However, corporate transactions typically predispose to many challenges in the complex practical integration phase which may ultimately lead to value destruction of the given deal as discovered in the previous literature. Hence, this study examines how synergies are realized during international acquisition integration and aims to come up with an understanding what are the key elements behind it, taking into consideration the integration of both humans and tasks. The literature review of this study consists of fundamental definition of merger and acquisition (M&A) integration by putting special focus on integration of people and tasks. The given phenomenon is being analyzed by assessing factors that either enable synergy realization or leakage. The empirical data is collected from a Finnish manufacturing company by using a qualitative semi-structured interview method. Both acquiring and target company’s experts are interviewed to increase the versatility of the research phenomenon. The study findings indicate that synergies in human and task integration are most likely realized when the following determinants are acknowledged and implemented: strategy formulation together with professionals, transparent and consistent communication, collaborative course of action with the target company and integral departments, system and process training, choosing an integration leader, careful monitoring during and after integration and overall commitment to achievement of common goals. The key is to understand that effective task integration requires successful integration of people and vice versa

The Learning Organisation and National Systems of Competence Building and Innovation

This paper is based on a hypothesis that we have entered a specific phase of economic development, which we refer to as the 'learning economy', where knowledge and learning have become more important than in any earlier historical period. In this new context the learning capability of firms located in the domestic economy becomes a major concern for national governments and, at the same time, the national infrastructure supporting knowledge creation, diffusion and use becomes a concern for management and employees. To get the two to match and support each other becomes a prerequisite for economic success for firms as well as for the national economy. One of the main objectives of this paper is to demonstrate that societal institutions, which may exist at the national or regional levels, shape the types of organisational learning predominating at the level of the firm. The paper develops the concept of a 'national system of competence building and innovation' by linking national specificities in the formation of skills and labour market dynamics to the micro-level processes of knowledge creation and learning within and between firms. It uses the examples of Japan, Denmark and the high-technology clusters in the US and UK to illustrate the logic of institutionalised variation in patterns of learning and innovation. The paper argues that tacit knowledge, which is difficult to create and transfer in the absence of social interaction and labour mobility, constitutes a most important source of learning and sustainable competitive advantage. Learning builds on trust and social capital. Institutions that are able to imbue these elements into firms and markets encourage interactive learning and are more likely to produce strong innovative capabilities.learning organisations; learning economy; knowledge creation; national innovation systems; institutions; tacit knowledge, competence building