Academic Marginalia

Transdisciplinary Research for Responsible Software Engineering When we think about professions guided by the principle  “First, do no harm,”  medicine usually comes to mind. Although the phrase doesn’t actually appear in the Hippocratic Oath, the spirit of it permeates healthcare: a duty to safeguard the wellbeing of the public by maximising the potential benefit and minimising the risk of harm. Software engineering now finds itself facing a similar responsibility. Digital systems shape our safety, our autonomy, our relationships, and our access to opportunity. As software increasingly blends with the physical and social world, the boundaries between the technical and the human become blurred. This means software engineers must grapple with a fundamental ethical question:  How do we build technology that maximises benefits while minimising the risk of harm? From Clear Boundaries to Complex Realities Traditional software engineering assumed neat, well‑defined system bound...

"Work won't love you back" As the end of 2024 loomed, inspiration for my last blog post of the year (now first blog post of the new year!) was hard to come by, and I asked some colleagues for ideas. One suggestion was:  "Looking back 10 years, how does your current career align with your past vision and goals—have they changed? " As I reflected on this, I recollected one key goal from much earlier in my career - based on the much quoted aphorism that "If you do what you love, you won't work a day in your life" . This is seen as an achievable goal in academia, where we have a lot of flexibility and agency to pursue our research interests and teach subjects related to these interests. However, over the years I have seen (and personally experienced) how this can be a double-edged sword - used wisely a useful tool to motivate us to overcome challenges, but if used unskilfully can be harmful to oneself and others. This latter aspect is the focus of one ...

  I was pleased to be invited to join a panel discussion on 'Safety by Design' at the Refuge Tech Safety Summit (https://refugetechsafetysummit.vfairs.com). The panel included colleagues with experience in improving online safety at various technology companies, including some of the major online social media platforms. The focus of the discussion was to explore some of the types of harm experienced by women and girls, together with things that are being done to mitigate these harms. My contributions focussed on some of the barriers and challenges to achieving safety by design in online platforms and the work that we are embarking on at the OU's Centre for Protecting Women Online .  The complexity of mitigating online harms to women and girls is compounded by the heterogeneity and dynamicity of these harms, together with the challenges of navigating the diverse viewpoints from which harms are understood. These viewpoints include our understanding of online harms from th...

"Unboxing responsible requirements engineering" In December 2023, I attended the ESEC/FSE conference in San Francisco, and in addition to hearing about lots of interesting work relating to human aspects of software engineering, and security, I also enjoyed listening to the keynote talks delivered at the event. I already shared some reflections on one of these keynotes in a previous blog post ( GenAI for Software Engineering ) and in this one I cover my notes on another keynote which was delivered by Professor Margaret Burnett, a University Distinguished Professor from Oregon State.  Her talk was titled " Getting outside the Bug Boxes " and highlighted the importance of distinguishing between the goals (or policies) of software engineering from the mechanisms (or tools and methods) used to engineer software. The central thesis was that, too often, software engineers constrain themselves inside a box that is based on the latter and therefore miss important aspects of ...

Reflections on academic leadership ... In Dec 2017, I had just been appointed Head of the School and asked a wise colleague for guidance on meeting the challenges of the role. Knowing that I am a film buff, she gave me a copy of a movie called "Thirteen Days" (2001) together with a brief note highlighting some key leadership behaviours that she felt were important to learn. At the time, I noted the key points she had written but never actually got around to watching the movie - mainly because it was on a DVD and we no longer had a player in the house!  I completed my tenure in the role, with some successes but also faced several challenging situations.  My colleague's advice was useful when faced with particular challenges, but I also found a need to adapt some aspects of the guidance to fit my personality and style. Six years later, as we approach the end of 2023, I noticed that "Thirteen Days" was available on one of the streaming services we subscribe to and ...

Will AI agents become integral members of software engineering teams? I recently attended the ESEC/FSE conference in San Francisco, where one of the keynote talks was titled " Towards AI-driven software development: challenges and lessons from the field " and delivered by Professor Eran Yahav from Technion. This post summarises my notes on the key messages of the talk. Part of the context for the talk was a recognition that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technologies are seeing increasing usage across all stages of the software development lifecycle. Of course, the extent to which they are used is not uniform across all stages, with the most significant usage being for code and test generation. However, as demonstrated by some of the papers presented in other sessions of the conference, the step change in capability realised by the public release of LLMs over the past year has led to researchers exploring the use of GenAI in deployment and maintenance scenarios, f...

As another year draws to a close, I find myself reflecting on the experience of the 12 months just gone and what could be learned for the year ahead. One of the features of the past year was how my interactions with colleagues, friends, and family transitioned from being mostly online to a ‘hybrid’ mode of engagement. My experience of hybrid varied from alternating between online and in-person interactions with people, to attending gatherings where there were a mixture of online and in-person participants.  The different activities I was involved in over the year highlighted the different ways in which having presence and being present play a more significant role in our interactions that the modality of the engagements themselves. Here I am distinguishing different types of hybrid interaction by considering the dimensions of time and space. Sometimes an interaction is hybrid because it depends on people being together at the same time, but distributed in different places (some co-...