A goal of software engineering research is advancing software quality and the success of the software engineering process. However, while recent studies have demonstrated a new kind of defect in software related to its ability to operate in fair and unbiased manner, software engineering has not yet wholeheartedly tackled these new kinds of defects, thus leaving software vulnerable. This paper outlines a vision for how software engineering research can help reduce fairness defects and represents a call to action by the software engineering research community to reify that vision. Modern software is riddled with examples of biased behavior, from automated translation injecting gender stereotypes, to vision systems failing to see faces of certain races, to the US criminal justice sytem relying on biased computational assessments of crime recidivism. While systems may learn bias from biased data, bias can also emerge from ambiguous or incomplete requirement specification, poor design, implementation bugs, and unintended component interactions. We argue that software fairness is analogous to software quality, and that numerous software engineering challenges in the areas of requirements, specification, design, testing, and verification need to be tackled to solve this problem.
Wed 7 NovDisplayed time zone: Guadalajara, Mexico City, Monterrey change
13:30 - 15:00 | NIER IINew Ideas and Emerging Results at Horizons 6-9F Chair(s): Gail Kaiser Columbia University, New York | ||
13:30 12mTalk | Beyond Testing Configurable Systems: Applying Variational Execution to Automatic Program Repair and Higher Order Mutation Testing New Ideas and Emerging Results Chu-Pan Wong Carnegie Mellon University, Jens Meinicke Magdeburg University, Christian Kästner Carnegie Mellon University | ||
13:42 12mTalk | Software Fairness New Ideas and Emerging Results Yuriy Brun University of Massachusetts Amherst, Alexandra Meliou University of Massachusetts Amherst Link to publication DOI Pre-print | ||
13:55 12mTalk | Software Engineering Collaboratories (SEClabs) and Collaboratories as a Service (CaaS) New Ideas and Emerging Results | ||
14:08 12mTalk | Towards Counterexample-guided k-Induction for Fast Bug Detection New Ideas and Emerging Results Mikhail R. Gadelha University of Southampton, Felipe R. Monteiro Federal University of Amazonas, Lucas C. Cordeiro University of Manchester, UK, Denis A. Nicole University of Southampton | ||
14:21 12mTalk | Salient-Class Location: Help Developers Understand Code Change in Code Review New Ideas and Emerging Results Yuan Huang School of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China, Nan Jia School of Management Science and Engineering, Hebei GEO University, Shijiazhuang, China, Xiangping Chen , Kai Hong School of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China, Zibin Zheng | ||
14:34 12mTalk | Towards Quantifying the Development Value of Code New Ideas and Emerging Results Jinglei Ren Persper Foundation, Hezheng Yin University of California, Berkeley, Qingda Hu Tsinghua University, Armando Fox UC Berkeley, Wojciech Koszek The FreeBSD Project | ||
14:47 12mTalk | Engineering Human Values in Software: A Research Roadmap New Ideas and Emerging Results Davoud Mougouei Monash University, Harsha Perera Monash University, Waqar Hussain Monash University, Rifat Ara Shams Monash University, Jon Whittle Monash University |