David R. Wright

Research ethics and computer science: an unconsummated marriage

The ethical conduct of research is a cornerstone of modern scientific research. Computer science and the disciplines technological artifacts touch nearly every aspect of modern life, and computer scientists must conduct and report their research in an ethical manner. This paper examines a small selection of potential ethical dilemmas researchers in this discipline face, and discusses how ethical concerns may be addressed in these situations. The paper concludes with an overview of other areas of ethical concern and a look to the future development of a code for ethical computer science research

Developing CS/SE students' communication abilities through a program-wide framework

Communication skills, including reading, writing, speaking, and teaming, are among the most sought after by employers of recent Computer Science/Software Engineering (CS/SE) graduates. We have been conducting a project that has developed a general framework for program-level integration of communication into CS/SE education. Our framework has been developed through workshops and field evaluation of training materials (and other resources) by faculty from a wide variety of institutions under the guidance of experts in writing and communication across the curriculum. This paper discusses the current state of communication teaching in the CS/SE domain, and presents our framework and experiences for program-wide implementation of communication skills.

Constructing next generation academic cloud services

NC State University (NCSU) is embarked on an ambitious vision to change the paradigm for higher education and research by ‘virtualising’ its award-winning Centennial Campus (creating so called vCentennial). Centennial Campus is a small city made up of NCSU research, teaching and outreach facilities, entrepreneurs, academic entities, private firms, and government agencies. NCSU wants the ability to replicate services and functionality of this physical environment and its virtual avatars ‘anywhere, anytime’ in the world using a cloud of clouds computing platform. The initial operating system for this platform is NCSU’s open source Virtual Computing Laboratory (VCL) technology. This paper provides an overview of the vision and discusses several vCentennial pilot projects.

Building bridges: connecting research ethics and computer science

The ethical conduct of research is a cornerstone of modern scientific research. Computer science and the disciplines technological artifacts touch nearly every aspect of modern life, and computer scientists must conduct and report their research in an ethical manner. This workshop will identify four theories that offer guidance for ethical decision making, ad use these theories as a basis for evaluating and discussing a set of ethical dilemmas that researchers in computer science might face.

Capturing organizational wisdom for effective software development

Code reuse has been a fundamental principle of software engineering for decades, with modules and libraries of both general purpose and highly specialized code serving as the disciplines equivalent of bricks and steel. Research and practice have resulted in extensive general-purpose libraries incorporated into production level compilers, as well as a wide variety of special-purpose libraries and programming toolkits. While reusable code has helped make software more reliable and simplified some details of implementation, developing software systems that meet customer expectations on time and within budget remains problematic.