Ethical Issues in Empirical Studies of Software Engineering

The popularity of empirical methods in software engineering research is on the rise. Surveys, experiments, metrics, case studies, and field studies are examples of empirical methods used to investigate both software engineering processes and products. The increased application of empirical methods has also brought about an increase in discussions about adapting these methods to the peculiarities of software engineering. In contrast, the ethical issues raised by empirical methods have received little, if any, attention in the software engineering literature. This article is intended to introduce the ethical issues raised by empirical research to the software engineering research community, and to stimulate discussion of how best to deal with these ethical issues. Through a review of the ethical codes of several fields that commonly employ humans and artifacts as research subjects, we have identified major ethical issues relevant to empirical studies of software engineering. These issues are illustrated with real empirical studies of software engineering

Consent Issues Raised by Observational Research in Organisations

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GOTCHA Password Hackers!

We introduce GOTCHAs (Generating panOptic Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) as a way of preventing automated offline dictionary attacks against user selected passwords. A GOTCHA is a randomized puzzle generation protocol, which involves interaction between a computer and a human. Informally, a GOTCHA should satisfy two key properties: (1) The puzzles are easy for the human to solve. (2) The puzzles are hard for a computer to solve even if it has the random bits used by the computer to generate the final puzzle --- unlike a CAPTCHA. Our main theorem demonstrates that GOTCHAs can be used to mitigate the threat of offline dictionary attacks against passwords by ensuring that a password cracker must receive constant feedback from a human being while mounting an attack. Finally, we provide a candidate construction of GOTCHAs based on Inkblot images. Our construction relies on the usability assumption that users can recognize the phrases that they originally used to describe each Inkblot image --- a much weaker usability assumption than previous password systems based on Inkblots which required users to recall their phrase exactly. We conduct a user study to evaluate the usability of our GOTCHA construction. We also generate a GOTCHA challenge where we encourage artificial intelligence and security researchers to try to crack several passwords protected with our scheme.Comment: 2013 ACM Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security (AISec

Supporting the Everyday Work of Scientists: Automating Scientific Workflows

This paper describes an action research project that we undertook with National Research Council Canada (NRC) scientists. Based on discussions about their \ud difficulties in using software to collect data and manage processes, we identified three requirements for increasing research productivity: ease of use for end- \ud users; managing scientific workflows; and facilitating software interoperability. Based on these requirements, we developed a software framework, Sweet, to \ud assist in the automation of scientific workflows. \ud \ud Throughout the iterative development process, and through a series of structured interviews, we evaluated how the framework was used in practice, and identified \ud increases in productivity and effectiveness and their causes. While the framework provides resources for writing application wrappers, it was easier to code the applications’ functionality directly into the framework using OSS components. Ease of use for the end-user and flexible and fully parameterized workflow representations were key elements of the framework’s success. \u

Asymmetry in the decay Ω−→Ξ−γ\Omega^-\to\Xi^-\gamma

We consider the asymmetry in the decay $\Omega^-\rightarrow\Xi^-\gamma$ assuming that a Vector Meson Dominance approach for the $s\rightarrow d\gamma$ transition gives the dominant contribution. Since in this long-distance approximation the decay is due to a single quark transition $s\rightarrow d\gamma$, the angular distribution asymmetry is given by the single positive asymmetry parameter $\alpha_h = \frac{M^2_s-M^2_d}{M^2_s+M^2_d} = 0.4\pm0.1$. We also discuss the asymmetry in $\Xi \rightarrow \Sigma^-\gamma$, which is expected to be between -0.2 and 0.3.Comment: 16 pages,no figures,Late

Solving Pure Yang Mills in 2+1 Dimensions

We analytically compute the spectrum of the spin zero glueballs in the planar limit of pure Yang-Mills theory in 2+1 dimensions. The new ingredient is provided by our computation of a new non-trivial form of the ground state wave-functional. The mass spectrum of the theory is determined by the zeroes of Bessel functions, and the agreement with large N lattice data is excellent.Comment: 4 page letter; version to appear in Physical Review Letter

Digital Media Player Controls Supporting Music Education

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