Professional Ethics and Social Responsibility: Military Work and Peacebuilding

The paper considers a number of important questions related to the involvement of engineers in peacebuilding and military work, including the preference of many countries for high tech weapons based security over peacebuilding, whether and in what circumstances, if any, it is justified for engineers to be involved in military work; and how engineers can persuade their colleagues to apply their skills to support peacebuilding. It is introduced by an overview of what is meant by the term military work and the extent and consequences of the use of military technology worldwide. This is followed by the applications of different approaches and theories of ethics to discuss the questions presented in the introduction. The approaches and theories applied include considerations of micro-and macro-ethics, codes of ethics, virtue ethics, considerations of gender and paradigms and the ethical imperative. Initial insights include the importance of considering the associated context and the need to avoid othering, which can make different treatment of minority groups, including the use of high tech weapons against them, seem acceptable

Overcoming barriers and increasing independence: service robots for elderly and disabled people

This paper discusses the potential for service robots to overcome barriers and increase independence of elderly and disabled people. It includes a brief overview of the existing uses of service robots by disabled and elderly people and advances in technology which will make new uses possible and provides suggestions for some of these new applications. The paper also considers the design and other conditions to be met for user acceptance. It also discusses the complementarity of assistive service robots and personal assistance and considers the types of applications and users for which service robots are and are not suitable

Ethical Engineering and Respect for The ‘Other’

Engineers have a very important role and responsibility in shaping modern society. Diversity amongst engineers is important in fulfilling this responsibility and ensuring that the creativity and needs of the whole population are taken account of. However, only a small percentage of engineers are female and very few of them are disabled. The paper discusses the experiences of women and disabled engineers in the context of othering and considers the way in which the existence of binary divides facilitates marginalisation and exclusion. It also discusses the need to involve end-users in design and development and education to encourage this, with a particular focus on disabled end-users

Mobile recommender apps with privacy management for accessible and usable technologies

The paper presents the preliminary results of an ongoing survey of the use of computers and mobile devices, interest in recommender apps and knowledge and concerns about privacy issues amongst English and Italian speaking disabled people. Participants were found to be regular users of computers and mobile devices for a range of applications. They were interested in recommender apps for household items, computer software and apps that met their accessibility and other requirements. They showed greater concerns about controlling access to personal data of different types than this data being retained by the computer or mobile device. They were also willing to make tradeoffs to improve device performance

Case study evaluating accessibility and use of a laboratory by a student who uses a wheelchair and a blind member of staff

This case study describes the findings of two disabled people who visited an engineering laboratory. It highlights aspects of building design, room layout and equipment use that are often overlooked and which often can be rectified quite simply and inexpensively. The points raised may be used to audit any building and lab

Mental maps and the use of sensory information by blind and partially sighted people

This article aims to fill an important gap in the literature by reporting on blind and partially sighted people's use of spatial representations (mental maps) from their perspective and when travelling on real routes. The results presented here were obtained from semi-structured interviews with 100 blind and partially sighted people in five different countries. They are intended to answer three questions about the representation of space by blind and partially sighted people, how these representations are used to support travel, and the implications for the design of travel aids and orientation and mobility training. They show that blind and partially sighted people do have spatial representations and that a number of them explicitly use the term mental map. This article discusses the variety of approaches to spatial representations, including the sensory modalities used, the use of global or local representations, and the applications to support travel. The conclusions summarize the answers to the three questions and include a two-level preliminary classification of the spatial representations of blind and partially sighted people

Route learning by blind and partially sighted people

The paper aims to fill an important gap in the literature by reporting on blind and partially sighted people's route-learning experiences and strategies from their perspective. The existing literature has largely reported the results of experiments in indoor and outdoor, often artificially created, environments rather than real experiences of travel and route learning. The results presented here were obtained from semi-structured interviews with 100 blind and partially sighted people in five different countries. They show that they prefer to keep to known routes where possible, in line with the literature, but do not wish to be restricted to them. The paper discusses the conditions in which they consider it worth learning new routes and the strategies they use to do this. The paper is interpreted in a theoretical framework of independence, autonomy, and self-determination, understood, in line with the disability literature, as making choices and decisions and having control rather than necessarily doing everything oneself. A further contribution is a confirmation of the role of the (greater) memory of blind people in travel and a suggestion that the ability to develop memory may affect differences in travel skills. The paper concludes with several recommendations, including for further research

Heresy and orthodoxy: challenging established paradigms and disciplines

A brief survey of the literature on interdisciplinary work and a discussion of issues relating to orthodoxy and heresy are presented to introduce a questionnaire on current interdisciplinary practice and the effects of engaging in research of this kind. Preliminary results of the survey are presented and it is suggested that women may have a greater tendency than men to engage in interdisciplinary research. They may also encounter more obstacles in their research than men. A number of hypotheses, including the relationship of interdisciplinary work and heresy, are proposed and a plan of further work to investigate them put forward

The accessible electronics laboratory

The Disability Discrimination Act requires schools, universities and colleges not to discriminate against disabled students and to make reasonable adjustments. Laboratories are an integral part of all engineering courses. Therefore they have to be accessible to all students and reasonable adjustments should include making laboratories accessible and not excusing disabled students from them. Adjustments to make laboratories more accessible to disabled students generally benefit all students and staff. Making laboratories accessible increases the pool of talent that can be attracted into the engineering profession. Many disabled people have had to exercise a lot of ingenuity to cope with an inaccessible world. The engineering profession could benefit from this ingenuity

Ethics and mono-disciplinarity: positivism, informed consent and informed participation

There are a number of pressures on researchers in academia and industry to behave unethically or compromise their ethical standards, for instance in order to obtain funding or publish frequently. In this paper a case study of Deaf telephony is used to discuss the pressures to unethical behaviour in terms of withholding information or misleading participants that can result from mono-disciplinary orthodoxies. The Deaf telephony system attempts to automate multiple aspects of relayed communication between Deaf and hearing users. The study is analysed in terms of consequentialist and deontological ethics, as well as multi-loop action learning. Discussion of a number of examples of bad practice is used to indicate both the compatibility of ethical behaviour and good scientific method and that ethical behaviour is a pre-requisite for obtaining meaningful results.Telkom, Cisco, Siemens, THRI