Getting to the Source of Ethical Issues

Research with open source software (OSS) raises the same ethical issues as other disciplines in which publicly released materials are the objects of study, and the creators of those materials are still living. These disciplines are literary and artistic criticism and public policy research. As El-Emam (this issue) mentioned there are also similarities to research employing internet newsgroup posts as data.Les recherches effectu\ue9es dans le domaine des logiciels \ue0 code source libre soul\ue8vent les m\ueames probl\ue8mes d'\ue9thique que dans les autres disciplines, o\uf9 des documents diffus\ue9s dans le public font l'objet d'\ue9tudes, alors que leurs auteurs sont toujours vivants. La critique litt\ue9raire, la critique artistique et les recherches sur les politiques gouvernementales constituent de telles disciplines. Comme le mentionne \ue9galement M. El Emam (dans ce num\ue9ro), il existe \ue9galement des similitudes avec les recherches qui font appel \ue0 des documents diffus\ue9s par des groupes de nouvelles sur l'Internet.Peer reviewed: YesNRC publication: Ye

Why and how research ethics matters to you, yes YOU!

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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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Preferred Workflows for Syndromic Surveillance Systems

Workflows are a sequence of information processing operations that people carry out to meet certain in-formational goals [1]. Using various user-centered design (UCD) techniques we uncovered the workflows that epidemiologists wished to follow when using syndromic surveillance (SS) systems

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

Identifying ILI Cases from Chief Complaints: Comparing the Accuracy of Keyword and Support Vector Machine Methods

We compared the accuracy of two methods of identifying ILI cases from chief complaints. We found that a support vector machine method was more accurate than a keyword method

Digital Media Player Controls Supporting Music Education

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