Technology has brought sweeping changes into our lives and enabled many advances across society. Yet too often, breakthroughs in computer science have unintended social consequences that are not easily undone. What if universities trained students to consider social outcomes from the outset? Embedded Ethics initiatives at Stanford and other institutions seek to do just that, by integrating principles of ethical analysis throughout their undergraduate computing courses.

Earlier this month, the McCoy Family Center for Ethics and Society, the Computer Science Department, and Stanford HAI hosted a one-day Embedded Ethics Conference on the topic of teaching responsible computer science. Attendees came from schools across the U.S. and several other countries to exchange ideas about how to design, support, and implement new programs. The conference agenda featured a welcome by Jennifer Widom, dean of the School of Engineering at Stanford, keynotes from several leading scholars in the field, as well as lively panel discussions ranging from getting administrative buy-in to specific implementation strategies. A series of lightning talks included demos of a few programs that are in place at schools today. By all accounts, the conference was an inspiring event that brought thoughtful researchers together and surfaced a few promising new ideas.

Ethics cannot be just a class on the side. It should be inescapable for students who are studying computer science, said Mehran Sahami, the James and Ellenor Chesebrough Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford and a co-organizer of the event. We need to give students meaningful ways to grapple with these issues, so they become mindful of the impact of the work they do.

During and after the conference, attendees expressed appreciation for the opportunity to meet so many like-minded scholars, and they suggested the event served as a catalyst for taking action at their own schools.

Barbara Grosz, Higgins Research Professor of Natural Sciences in Harvards John A. Paulson School of Engineering and a Stanford HAI Distinguished Fellow, kicked off the day with a presentation on the origins, evolutions, and lessons of the Embedded EthiCS program that she co-founded at Harvard. Siri and Watson drove me to develop an AI course that integrated ethics throughout its syllabus, she recalled. I saw that our students were taught to write efficient code, but they were not taught to think about ethics. At the time, I was focused on teaching a new seminar course, not a larger change.

Grosz had some 60 students apply for 20 spots the first time she taught the course Intelligent Systems: Design and Ethical Challenges, and more than 140 applied the second year. At the end of the semester, students said they wanted CS to offer more courses that integrated ethics.

So she and Alison Simmons, the Samuel H. Wolcott Professor of Philosophy at Harvard, launched the Embedded EthiCS program in early 2017 with four courses and one graduate fellow. By spring 2023, it had evolved to reach 9,500 students through 47 courses with both graduate students and postdocs contributing and philosophers and computer scientists meeting in a weekly teaching lab to coordinate the development of new modules.

Grosz explained, the benefits to the graduate student and postdoc fellows in the teaching lab for Harvards Embedded EthiCS program have ranged from students adapting their research or shaping entirely new research projects to fellows finding different kinds of job opportunities when they enter the workforce. And its a win for faculty, who gain confidence in their understanding and ability to discuss ethics in their teaching of computing. It was heartwarming to see so many kindred spirits together at the conference. No one school can develop a subprogram on its own. We need to help each other, Grosz said.

Mariano-Florentino Cullar, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, delivered a thought-provoking talk about the evolution of debates about ethics and technology over the last 20 years, from privacy and security issues in the early days of the internet to disagreements about facial recognition to questions about todays generative AI models. Cullar is also a former justice of the Supreme Court of California, a visiting scholar at Stanford Law School, and a member of the Stanford HAI Advisory Council. He has had a long-standing interest in the intersection of ethics, policy, computing, and data.

In the beginning, I was focused on getting people to care a lot. We were seeing the staggering change in human welfare due to technology, but theres also been a darker side to the progress, he said. When the conversation shifted a few years later to deep learning, big data, and what the technology meant for surveillance and privacy, Cullar saw dilemmas coming in the legal system around who would be liable for AI systems and their performance. Now were in the era of generative AI, and were all part of an A/B testing cycle. The technology is evolving in real time, and we are all subjects. Its hard to step back and ask what is working well and how would we want this to be done in an ideal world.

Cullar challenged the audience to put aside the writing of principles and focus on specific scenarios, such as how to handle medical records, resolve diplomatic disputes involving technology, or identify pathways to catastrophic risk. He urged the audience to be honest about recognizing the trade-offs that must come with every decision and to avoid intellectual shortcuts. We have an enormous moment of opportunity with the progress of technology and the current spike of interest among young people, he said.

One of the most pivotal talks of the day put the spotlight on the need for incorporating cultural competence into embedded ethics initiatives. Issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion have long been overlooked in computing disciplines; yet they significantly affect the cultures of university departments and tech organizations, as well as the retention of minoritized students, faculty, and staff. To shed light on this topic, Nicki Washington, Professor of the Practice of Computer Science and Gender, Sexuality, & Feminist Studies at Duke University, spoke about her research and experience teaching identity and cultural competence in computing.

Universities need to take a yes, and approach of embedding ethics and cultural competence, instead of saying, yes, but not now, not here, or not me, Washington said. In 2020, she created the Race, Gender, Class, & Computing course as a space for students to have conversations about identity, including how it impacts and is impacted by computing, and to develop an understanding of why these issues matter. The course begins with an exploration of identity (i.e., race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and ability), forms of oppression against these identities, social justice movements to eliminate these oppressions, and policies enacted to exclude/include identities. After students have spent time reflecting on identity, the class starts looking at specific technologies facial recognition, surveillance, fintech, voice recognition, health care algorithms including who is considered the default user and their impact on people from different minoritized groups.

The elective course started with 20 students in fall 2020, and a wait list began almost immediately. Washington said she has taught the course six times to date and increased the class size to 100 to accommodate overwhelming student interest. No two semesters have looked the same, she explained. Each student and each class builds on whats happening in the world at the time.

To scale these efforts beyond the campus at Duke, Washington leads the Alliance for Identity Inclusive Computing Education, which is focused on broadening participation in computing across K-16. She also launched the Cultural Competence in Computing (3C) Fellows Program, a two-year professional development program now accepting applications for its fourth cohort. People in CS are finally starting to listen to social scientists and understand the impact their work has on society. Technology is not neutral, she said.

Speakers and panelists agreed on several guidelines for launching successful embedded ethics and social responsibility programs:

Stanford, Harvard, and other schools have set up repositories of information for others to access and deploy. Stanfords Embedded Ethics team recently launched a new website, Embedding Ethics in Computer Science, with curricular resources for undergraduate CS courses. In addition, the Responsible Computing Challenge offers a playbook with teaching advice, and the Association for Computing Machinery has established the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct, with case studies available on its website.

Its early days for most embedded ethics programs, but those who attended this gathering said they were encouraged to hear from others in the field and to share their visions for this work. Beyond the one day of meetings, I think weve created a community of practice, Sahami said. Its not only about the ideas and best practices, but the invaluable connections to other people.

Miss the conference? Watch the recording and see a list of resources to assist in designing and implementing embedded ethics programs.

Stanford HAIs mission is to advance AI research, education, policy and practice to improve the human condition.Learn more.

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Teaching Responsible Computer Science - Stanford HAI

Employing a technique called microarchitectural checkpointing to redesign computer processors for cloud-based serverless computing a new paradigm favored by cloud developers Jonathan Balkind is developing a new application for cloud computing. An assistant professor of computer science at UC Santa Barbara, he is doing so with funding from the National Science Foundation, by way of a five-year, $630,000 NSF Early CAREER Award.

Its really an honor to receive the CAREER award, Balkind said. This is my first funded NSF proposal and was the first time I made a submission for the CAREER. Ive had to pinch myself at least once to believe that it really happened. Im looking forward to driving this project over the next five years.

The long and short of application run times

While applications created for servers run for up to weeks at a time, the new serverless apps run for as little as a hundredth of a millisecond meaning many existing processor technologies cannot keep up.

We have spent several decades optimizing processors for long-lived applications, so that the processor could learn their behavior over time in order to predict future behavior and, thus, operate more efficiently, Balkind explained. With todays very short-running applications, like those in serverless, there simply isnt enough time for our processors to learn the behavior. This makes it inefficient to run serverless applications on existing servers.

But with microarchitectural checkpointing, he continued, you save what you learn each time the application runs, and then when you run it again later, you retrieve what you saved and then save at the end of that step, and so on. The result is that the processor learns only what it needs to, across instances of the application over time. The checkpointed information from each application is siloed, so you avoid polluting the information from one application with that of another. We will use microarchitectural checkpointing to improve the efficiency of serverless apps.

Open-sourcing a customized serverless processor

Key to Balkinds CAREER award research is the OpenPiton platform, which he will use to enable prototyping for his open-source framework for building processors. We have a design for a processor, he said, and people can make modifications to it, either to add a feature they want or to test things as they change the parameters of that processor, such as the number of cores or the amount of cache.

The system has evolved from work that began in 2013, when Balkind and fellow Princeton University Ph.D. students designed it to serve as a research platform that would enable users to add their own components to validate particular research ideas. We give out just about every component that's needed to design a new processor, and as a result, we've seen users be very productive more than 60 research projects have used the platform, he said. Additionally, a number of companies have adopted OpenPiton, including Intel, which used the platform to develop an 8-core processor chip to demonstrate the effectiveness of its new fabrication facilities.

Balkind is a significant contributor to the open-source hardware space, where, he said, Were providing these designs and trying to build a community and make better products in the future. He received an Open Source Hardware Association Trailblazer Fellowship for his work in that field.

Making and customizing processors for specific applications is an important part of the evolution of computing. In industry, companies routinely customize their processors for new applications as they emerge, Balkind said. His proposal for microarchitectural checkpointing will be demonstrated as a customization of OpenPiton, which can benefit serverless applications. By open-sourcing this processor design and providing a concrete implementation of the idea, he and his team hope that it will see easier adoption into other industrial processors.

On-demand cloud computing

If youre a developer, there are lots of ways for you to write an app, Balkind noted. But if your app suddenly gets discovered, and you have, almost instantaneously, a million users a week, you need to have the flexibility to go from one server to 10,000 servers handling your requests. Serverless computing is specifically designed to do this for you.

Around 2016, Amazon and other companies discovered that they were using only about 65% of their data-center capacity, leaving about one-third of the resource unused. Amazon responded by inventing a paradigm that would be easy to program and make it possible to scale up and down at a moments notice. So, the NFL moved a bunch of their web serving to this paradigm, because they have two or three days a week when everyone uses the website, and the rest of the time its much quieter, Balkind said. Its the same with banks. At the end of the month, customers scan their paycheck to deposit with their phone, causing a huge spike in demand that lasts three days a month. Spikes also occur that cant be predicted.

The hope is that not too many demand spikes occur at once, so that there is an even distribution of usage over time.

The system makes sense, but theres a catch: the additional, previously unused 35% of capacity that Amazon and other cloud providers had available isnt as reliable as the heavily used 65%.

They cant guarantee youll get good performance when your app runs, Balkind said. To make up for that, they sell a plan that allows you to pay for only the time when your application is running, whereas, normally, you pay even when its idle. If youre a small-scale start-up developer and you have no demand, its OK; you pay nothing. As people start to use your service, you pay in a way exactly commensurate with your usage.

Amazon was the first to do this, with its Lambda platform. Once they did it, everyone else followed, Balkind said. The problem, however, is that for each individual request, it turns out theyre not getting great service one command might run instantaneously, and the next might take 30 seconds. Thats what were trying to improve.

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Speeding Up the Cloud - The UCSB Current

The Computer Science Teachers Association of Wyoming (CSTA WY), the University of Wyoming School of Computing, and the Wyoming Department of Education (WDE) are working together to host the second-annual Wyoming Computer Science Education Conference.

The Wyoming Computer Science Conference seeks engaging session proposals from educators in kindergarten through postsecondary education.

This conference will be held in-person.

The Conference Planning Committee seeks educators from all backgrounds and disciplines to share ideas, experiences, and demos to inspire and connect educators to bring the best teaching practices and lessons learned to computer science education.

Conference Goals are to help Wyoming Computer Science teachers stay up-to-date and get them certified, share their expertise, access additional support and resources and help build their network.

The conference will be August 3rd and 4th, at Sheridan College.

Registration is open and continues through July 31st.

Click here for more information

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Sheridan College To Host WY Computer Science Education ... - Sheridan Media

The Smart Cities MIAMI 2023 Conference, co-hosted by the University of Miami School of Architecture and the Institute for Data Science and Computing, partnered with the Climate Resilience Academy and Double C to discuss the impacts of climate change and its related stressors on South Florida.

Scientists, architects, and engineers, as well as leaders from government and business, came together last week at the University of Miami to discuss how they will use the influx of data coming from technology tools to better prepare local cities and towns for the impacts of climate change.

They were on the Coral Gables Campus for the sixth annual Smart Cities conference hosted by the University of Miamis School of Architecture and Institute for Data Science and Computing (IDSC). This year, Smart Cities also partnered with the Universitys Climate Resilience Academy, which launched last spring to foster new solutions to climate change.

The two-day conference featured lectures and panel discussions with experts in academia, government, and private industry who focus on climate resilience, primarily in the fields of architecture, engineering, and climate science. Most discussions explored how technology can help cities and counties improve their efficiency in the face of climate impacts, including a keynote address from Ben Kirtman, a climate scientist and professor of atmospheric science at the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science. In a panel about resilient ideas in technology, Yelena Yesha, a computer science professor, Knight chair in data science and artificial intelligence, and IDSCs innovation officer, spoke about the critical information that can be gleaned from data gathered in existing smart cities. Later Thursday, other panels highlighted climate innovations happening at Florida Power & Light, as well as in the City of Coral Gables, in Miami-Dade Countys transportation department, and in the Village of Key Biscayne.

We need real time information to prepare for all types of catastrophic events, said Yesha, who created the National Science Foundation Center for Accelerated Real-Time Analytics six years ago. Every crisis is an opportunity, and its our opportunity at the University of Miami to adapt to this environment and take it to the next level of computing.

Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava echoed Yesha. Levine Cava said that she is trying to seize upon the opportunities to improve South Floridas resilience, and to sustain its appeal to tourists by working to keep Biscayne Bay clean, supporting climate-focused innovation, and keeping an eye on equity, so that all residents can adapt to the warming temperatures and rising seas as safely as possible.

Particularly in Miami-Dade, the environment is our economy, she said. People are coming for the weather, the food, and our dynamism, but they are also coming for our national parks, for Biscayne Bay and our pristine environmentand thats why it is so critical that we continue to invest, address, maintain, and protect that.

In addition to a recent rapid population increase, Levine Cava and others mentioned the local technology boom. To harness the intellectual power of those flocking here, Levine Cava said, the county recently created a nonprofit called the Miami-Dade Innovation Authority to offer seed funding to businesses and academic institutions to scale up their ideas to improve the local environment.

We hope this nonprofit will work alongside government to solve these pressing problems with technological solutions, she said. Through this mechanism, we are looking for more places where we can partner with smart people, doing smart things to create smart solutions for our environment.

On Friday, Andrew Kudless, the Bill Kendall Memorial Endowed Professor at the University of Houston and the director of the construction robotics and fabrication technologies lab, delivered the closing keynote speech. His address, titled Five Points of Architecture and AI, focused on the early design phase and how technology is affecting that.

The five points Kudless discussed were: the challenging of bias; the cultivation of sensibility; the crisis of labor; the redefinition of authorship; and the freedom of incoherence. He explained how his personal approach to his design process has evolved as more and more artificial intelligent technologies become widely available.

As a designer, one of the things I learned from a series of projects is to give up control to these other forces, said Kudless, who works under the moniker, Matsys Design. I can create things that are beyond my inability. I find it more productive to think that I am the co-author with my tools.

Caterina Cafferata, a Miami native and second-year architecture graduate student, said Kudless keynote was eye-opening to her.

I feel like AI is something thats being introduced more and more in architecture and other areas of study, and I thought it was really interesting to hear from someone who has their own firm and is implementing it in their own work, said Cafferata.

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Experts discuss cutting-edge technology and research at annual ... - University of Miami: News@theU

Inspired by the human finger, MIT researchers have developed a robotic hand that uses high-resolution touch sensing to accurately identify an object after grasping it just one time.

Many robotic hands pack all their powerful sensors into the fingertips, so an object must be in full contact with those fingertips to be identified, which can take multiple grasps. Other designs use lower-resolution sensors spread along the entire finger, but these don't capture as much detail, so multiple regrasps are often required.

Instead, the MIT team built a robotic finger with a rigid skeleton encased in a soft outer layer that has multiple high-resolution sensors incorporated under its transparent "skin." The sensors, which use a camera and LEDs to gather visual information about an object's shape, provide continuous sensing along the finger's entire length. Each finger captures rich data on many parts of an object simultaneously.

Using this design, the researchers built a three-fingered robotic hand that could identify objects after only one grasp, with about 85 percent accuracy. The rigid skeleton makes the fingers strong enough to pick up a heavy item, such as a drill, while the soft skin enables them to securely grasp a pliable item, like an empty plastic water bottle, without crushing it.

These soft-rigid fingers could be especially useful in an at-home-care robot designed to interact with an elderly individual. The robot could lift a heavy item off a shelf with the same hand it uses to help the individual take a bath.

"Having both soft and rigid elements is very important in any hand, but so is being able to perform great sensing over a really large area, especially if we want to consider doing very complicated manipulation tasks like what our own hands can do. Our goal with this work was to combine all the things that make our human hands so good into a robotic finger that can do tasks other robotic fingers can't currently do," says mechanical engineering graduate student Sandra Liu, co-lead author of a research paper on the robotic finger.

Liu wrote the paper with co-lead author and mechanical engineering undergraduate student Leonardo Zamora Yaez and her advisor, Edward Adelson, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Vision Science in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). The research will be presented at the RoboSoft Conference.

A human-inspired finger

The robotic finger is comprised of a rigid, 3D-printed endoskeleton that is placed in a mold and encased in a transparent silicone "skin." Making the finger in a mold removes the need for fasteners or adhesives to hold the silicone in place.

The researchers designed the mold with a curved shape so the robotic fingers are slightly curved when at rest, just like human fingers.

"Silicone will wrinkle when it bends, so we thought that if we have the finger molded in this curved position, when you curve it more to grasp an object, you won't induce as many wrinkles. Wrinkles are good in some ways -- they can help the finger slide along surfaces very smoothly and easily -- but we didn't want wrinkles that we couldn't control," Liu says.

The endoskeleton of each finger contains a pair of detailed touch sensors, known as GelSight sensors, embedded into the top and middle sections, underneath the transparent skin. The sensors are placed so the range of the cameras overlaps slightly, giving the finger continuous sensing along its entire length.

The GelSight sensor, based on technology pioneered in the Adelson group, is composed of a camera and three colored LEDs. When the finger grasps an object, the camera captures images as the colored LEDs illuminate the skin from the inside.

Using the illuminated contours that appear in the soft skin, an algorithm performs backward calculations to map the contours on the grasped object's surface. The researchers trained a machine-learning model to identify objects using raw camera image data.

As they fine-tuned the finger fabrication process, the researchers ran into several obstacles.

First, silicone has a tendency to peel off surfaces over time. Liu and her collaborators found they could limit this peeling by adding small curves along the hinges between the joints in the endoskeleton.

When the finger bends, the bending of the silicone is distributed along the tiny curves, which reduces stress and prevents peeling. They also added creases to the joints so the silicone is not squashed as much when the finger bends.

While troubleshooting their design, the researchers realized wrinkles in the silicone prevent the skin from ripping.

"The usefulness of the wrinkles was an accidental discovery on our part. When we synthesized them on the surface, we found that they actually made the finger more durable than we expected," she says.

Getting a good grasp

Once they had perfected the design, the researchers built a robotic hand using two fingers arranged in a Y pattern with a third finger as an opposing thumb. The hand captures six images when it grasps an object (two from each finger) and sends those images to a machine-learning algorithm which uses them as inputs to identify the object.

Because the hand has tactile sensing covering all of its fingers, it can gather rich tactile data from a single grasp.

"Although we have a lot of sensing in the fingers, maybe adding a palm with sensing would help it make tactile distinctions even better," Liu says.

In the future, the researchers also want to improve the hardware to reduce the amount of wear and tear in the silicone over time and add more actuation to the thumb so it can perform a wider variety of tasks.

This work was supported, in part, by the Toyota Research Institute, the Office of Naval Research, and the SINTEF BIFROST project.

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Robotic hand can identify objects with just one grasp: The three ... - Science Daily