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Professional Issues 2016/17

• The course is taught by Michael Fourman and Philip Wadler.

• Course Descriptor.

• Informatics Portal.

• This course is compulsory for all students taking a single or combined Honours degree involving Computer Science or Software Engineering.

• The Professional Issues course is an essential component of our BCS accreditation. This accreditation is recognised beyond the UK through various international accords.

  Passing this course is a requirement for BCS acreditation of your degree. Relevant topics are defined by the BCS. Most of you will find this material dry in contrast with the engaging technical content of our other courses, but it is important that you understand the context – ethical, social, legal, financial and organisational – in which you will probably be working after you graduate.

  The Seoul Accord recognises the substantial academic equivalence of accredited engineering education programmes. BCS was one of the founding signatories of the Accord. This means that programmes granted full CITP accreditation by BCS since 2008 will be recognised by other Accord signatories. This recognition is important for individuals entering the engineering profession in international territories covered by Seoul Accord signatories. It demonstrates an equivalence of their achievements and allows potential employers and professional institutions to benchmark standards.

  Since the BCS is a Nominated Body with the Engineering Council, engineering-related programmes accredited by BCS are also recognised under the Washington and Sydney Accords. The Washington Accord is an international agreement among bodies responsible for accrediting engineering degree programs. It mutually recognises engineering education accreditation processes at Chartered Engineer level. The Sydney Accord provides a mechanism for recognising engineering education accreditation processes at Incorporated Engineer level.

  For further information about academic accreditation, please visit the BCS website.

• Classes will meet on Mondays and Thursdays 16:10–18:00 in Lecture Theatre B, David Hume Tower.

Special Lectures

As part of your assessment, you must write a one-page written report summarising one of the guest lectures. Reports will be marked for both presentation and content. The linked slides summarise feedback on earlier draft submissions.

You should write your report as though you were working for an IT company, and reporting on a topic of relevance to that company.

You should submit your report, as a PDF, identified only by your student number, using the DICE submit system, with the command
submit pi 2 yourfilename.pdf
deadline 16:10 Monday 28th November.

29 September

Alistair Hann, Technical Fellow, Skyscanner
Raising money and keeping it legal – investment and IP from an engineer’s perspective.
Alistair joined Skyscanner after Zoombu, a travel search engine he co-founded, was acquired by Skyscanner in 2010. Until recently he was CTO at Skyscanner, with overall responsibility for the technical strategy of Skyscanner and ensuring it meets the business' needs. His remit ranged from ensuring that systems scale to handle continued exponential growth in search volume, to defining the architectures of new products and incubating the new technologies that will fuel future growth. He is an active member of Edinburgh's start-up community.
At home, when he isn’t playing around with tech, he learns history and languages, cooks and sails dinghies. Alistair never travels without “Some knowledge of the language, it can help to keep me out of trouble and the locals really appreciate it”!

27 October

Nicola Osborne, EDINA,
Pitching, personality and (ethical) promotion.
Nicola will be looking at various aspects of promoting what you do - how you might promote yourself, your work, and what legal and ethical aspects to keep in mind whilst you do that whether you are using email lists, social media, or mainstream press.

3 November

Karen Gregory, Lecturer in Digital Sociology, School of Social and Political Science, UoE
Discrimination
Karen is a digital sociologist and ethnographer with an interest in the relationship between work, technology, and emerging forms of labour.

10 November

Ben Spigel, UoE Business School, and David Richardson, Director of Partnerships, School of Informatics,
Entrepreneurship and Innovation

17 November

Burkhard Schaefer,Professor of Computational Legal Theory, UoE
The ethics and law of data –driven research: tools and methods
A plethora of tools has been developed over the last years to help developers and users of data -driven ICT solutions to comply not only with the law, but also to identify, analyse and plan for ethical, political and wider social risks. Increasingly, using these tools becomes mandatory part of large software projects, in academia, private and public sector projects. The session introduces some of the most important methodologies, from Privacy Impact Assessment to PESTLE based on some real life examples of (more or less) controversial use of data science.
Burkhard is Director of the SCRIPT Centre for IT and IP law, working mainly on issues such as privacy compliant software architecture and more generally the scope and limits of representing legal concepts directly in the internet infrastructure.

24 November

Allan Lindsay, Digital Academy Manager, Young Scot, on 5Rights: Digital Rights for Children and Young People
Young Scot are the lead strategic partner in Scotland for 5Rights, the UK-wide coalition which aims to make the internet and surrounding digital world a better and more empowering place for all children and young people.
5Rights is a framework of five clear and simple principles to enable children and young people to access the internet creatively, knowledgeably and fearlessly. Recognising that digital technology is a fundamental part of young peoples’ lives, the 5Rights coalition believes that these technologies must be designed and delivered with young peoples’ rights specifically in mind.
This session will discuss the five rights, the work of the 5Rights Youth Commission (supported by The Scottish Government) who are taking part in a year-long investigation into how Scotland can better recognise the rights of children and young people in the digital world, and look at some of the challenges and opportunities that exist in this area.

Course Material

The course textbook is

• Professional Issues in Information Technology, Frank Bott, BCS Learning & Development Limited, 2014.

  Library Electronic Copy.

  Hard copies are available on reserve.

You may find the slides from Aberystwyth (home of Frank Bott, author of The Book) useful. Particularly the material on finince and accounting, which is not covered in detail in the book.

Copies of material used in class will be available in PDF format on the course webpage. The website also contains a list of other relevant documents.

• The Startup Manifesto
• Lecture Log
• Lecture Notes 2012-13
• Lecture Notes 2013-14
• Book List

Please buy (and read!!) the course textbook. Amazon offer a Kindle edition at £17 or so if you want an electronic copy.

Communications skills.

• Philip Wadler, lectures on communication skills (video).
• William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White, The Elements of Style, Longman, 1999 (Fourth edition), (£6.58 from Blackwell's.)
• Free Online Edition of William Strunk, Jr.'s 1918 original.
• Geoffrey Pullum, 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice. I stand by my claim that the modest monetary and time cost to read Strunk and White is the best investment you can make in your career, but do take into account Pullum's critique. (My thanks to those who alerted me to Pullum's article.)
• Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style, Penguin Books, 2015. (£9.99 from Blackwell's.)
• Donald Knuth, Technical writing. Section 1 is particularly valuable.
• George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, from Inside the Whale and Other Essays, Penguin, 1969.
• Max Atkins, Lend Me Your Ears: All you need to know about making speeches and presentations, Vemilion, 2004.
• Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Graphics Press, 2001 (second edition).
• Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information, Graphics Press, 1990. (Challenger is discussed on pages 38–52.)
• Edward Tufte, Visual Explanations, Graphics Press, 1997.
• Edward Tufte, Beautiful Evidence, Graphics Press, 2006. (Powerpoint is discussed on pages 156-185.)
• Additional sources.

Coursework

Coursework is worth 15% of marks for the course, and the final exam is worth 85%.

• Written report. A one-page written report summarising one of the guest lectures. Report marked for both presentation and content. Worth: 5%. Due: 4pm Thu 26 Nov.
• Presentation. A 150-second video presentation on any topic relevant to the ethical, social, legal, financial or organisational context within which informatics is applied. Videos must be published on your informatics homepages follow this link for details. Presentations will be marked for relevance, presentation and content. Presentations will be assessed online, by us and by your fellow students, in weeks 9 and 10. You can see last year's videos online.
  Worth: 5%. Due: Placeholder video by 16:00 on 7th November; final video submission by 16:00 on November 14th.
• Tutorials. The second half of each lecture is a tutorial. There is an exercise attached to each class worth 0.25%, marked all or nothing. For normal lectures this will be a tutorial question. For guest lectures, the tutorial submission is replaced by a brief feedback report. For the video presentation sessions, credit is given for your contribution to the assessment. Total worth, maximum 5%. Due: immediately after each class.

Class notes and lecture log

• Mon 19 Sep No class
• Thu 22 Sep Michael Fourman. Setting the Agenda 1-up, 2-up
• Mon 26 Sep Philip Wadler. Communication Skills—Writing.
  • Slides,
  • Notes,
  • Tutorial.

    A few favourite solutions

    • The ambitious, witch-foretold, wife-incitedly, King-Duncan-killing Macbeth became Scotland's king.
    • As witches foretold, Macbeth uxoriously and ambitiously killed Duncan and succeeded him as king of Scotland.
    • Witches predicted, wife encouraged, ambitious regicide Macbeth took Duncan's Scottish throne.
    • if (macbeth.isAmbitious() && witches.havePredicted()) {
  ladyMacbeth.encourageRegicide();
  macbeth.usurp(duncan);
}
assert(scotland.getKing().equals(macbeth));
    • Macbeth's ambitions
      His wife's encouragement
      The witches' predictions
      Duncan's fall
      Scotland's throne usurped
    • Crown-clutching Macbeth, wife-enticed,
      Severed Duncan from throne and life;
      Witches' predictions guided his knife.
    • (Haiku)
      Wife plotted murder
      Foretold by witch and desired
      Macbeth becomes king
    • 
• Thu 29 Sep Guest Speaker, Alistair Hann.
• Mon 3 Oct Michael Fourman.
• Thu 6 Oct Philip Wadler. Communication Skills—Writing, cont'd: Slides, Notes.

  For the tutorial on Thu 6 Oct: Please bring a quote from a document (cite the source) of a piece of text you like, and a brief paragraph describing why you like it. We will break into groups to discuss.

  For examples, see Chapter 1 of Stephen Pinker, The Sense of Style, Penguin Books, 2014.

• Mon 10 Oct Philip Wadler. Communication Skills—Writing, cont'd.
  • Slides,
  • Notes,
  • Tutorial.
    A solution
    [Note that parts of the original are obscure. What does "a high degree of client ubiquity" mean? Strictly speaking, the phrase would mean users of the application are everywhere, but that's probably not what the author meant. Perhaps what he meant was that users could access the application from everywhere.]
    (a) Web applications are one of the most promising areas of computing research, because they offer clients ubiquitous, distributed, and concurrent access in a variety of environments, they permit administrators to maintain them without distributing software on a large number of machines, and they enhance usability through platform independence and familiarity with the browser.
    c(b) Jill prefers Google Docs to Open Office because it works the same on her desktop, laptop, tablet, and phone; because she doesn't need Bill in IT to update her software; and because Firefox provides a familiar look and feel everywhere.
• Thu 13 Oct Michael Fourman
  • Find an example of an idea claimed as property (one way is to search for patents owned by Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.)
  • How do the points raised in this article apply to this idea?
  Interesting relevant links:
  • It’s time to take action against patent trolls and patent privateering
  • Google Patent Purchase Promotion
  • Google Offers To Give Away Patents To Startups In Its Push Against Patent Trolls
  • Microsoft Beats Google as Patent Royalty Case May Aid Consumers
  • Google Wants to Help Companies Knock Out Lousy Patents for Free
• Mon 17 Oct Philip Wadler. Communication Skills—Powerpoint.
  • Edward Tufte: The Cognitive Stype of PowerPoint
  • Columbia
  • Peter Norvig: The Gettyburg Address (ppt, html)
  • Tutorial
• Thu 20 Oct Michael Fourman. Profit and Loss; Cash Flow; Balance Sheets
  Slides from Aberystwyth
  Tutorial: Find online the accounts for a company in ICT, provide a link and a brief comment on the health or otherwise of the company, as evidenced by the public accounts. Email the link, with your comments to pi-submissions@inf.ed.ac.uk
• Mon 24 Oct Philip Wadler. Information graphics.
  • Bret Victor Magic Ink (pdf)
  • More from Bret Victor:
    • worrydream.com
    • What can a technologist do about climate change?
    • Inventing on Principle
  • Tutorial
  • See notes for tutorial on Mon 31 Oct.
• Thu 28 Oct Nicola Osborne. Pitching, personality, and Ethical Promotion
  Podcast on pitching
• Mon 31 Oct Philip Wadler. Communication skills—speaking.
  • Slides
  • Examples:
    • Lawrence Lessig, We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim
    • Danielle Fong, A Time for Urgency
    • John Hughes, Unaccustomed as I am to Public Speaking
    • Bret Victor, Inventing on Principle
    • Philip Wadler, Propositions as Types
    • Pat Kelly, "Thought Leader" gives talk that will inspire your thoughts
  • A predictive text rewrite of The Elements of Style
  • Tutorial:

    Read Chapter 1 of Stephen Pinker, The Sense of Style, Penguin Books, 2014. For the tutorial on Mon 31 Oct: Please bring a quote from a document (cite the source) of a piece of text you like, and a brief paragraph describing why you like it. As in Pinker, your appreciation should focus on the way the text is written, not its content.

    You should write your tutorial in advance, and bring a printout with your quote and your description of why it is well written. We will break into groups to discuss. Make sure your name is on the printout, as you will turn it in at the end of the tutorial.

  Thu 3 Nov Karen Gregory, Discrimination Informatics Please prepare for this class by consulting the following readings:
  • Healy, K. and Fourcade, M. 2012. Classification situations: Life-chances in the neoliberal era. Accounting, Organizations and Society. 38: 559-572.
  • Bohnet, I. 2016. Iris Bohnet on Discrimination and Design. Social Science Bites.
  • Noble, S. 2013. Google Search: Hyper-visibility as a Means of Rendering Black Women and Girls Invisible. InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture.
  • Bivens, R. and Haimson, O. 2016. Baking Gender Into Social Media Design: How Platforms Shape Categories for Users and Advertisers. Social Media + Society. October-December: 1–12.
  • O’Neil, C. 2016. Weapons of Math Destruction. New York: Crown Publishing. (chapter PDF to be provided.)
  • Boyd, D. and Crawford, K. 2012. Critical Questions for Big Data. Information, Communication & Society. 15:5, 662-679.
  • Angwin, J, Larson, J, Mattu, S. and Kirchner, L. 2016. Machine Bias. ProPublica: Journalism in the Public Interest.
  • Taylor, A. and McNeil, J. 2014. The Dads of Tech. The Baffler.
  • Angwin, J. and Parris, T. 2016. Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race: Facebook’s system allows advertisers to exclude black, Hispanic, and other “ethnic affinities” from seeing ads. ProPublica: Journalism in the Public Interest.
  • Singh, S. and Maughan, T. 2014. The Future of Ed Tech is Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed.
  • Mattern, S. 2016. Cloud and Field. Places.
  • Read through Solving for XX series at CNET: https://www.cnet.com/women-in-tech/
• Mon 7 Nov Philip Wadler. Data protection.
  • Slides
  • Data protection in a post-brexit world
  • How Donald Trump’s campaign is using Facebook ‘dark posts’ to target black voters
  • Les Earnest, Can computers cope with human races?
  • Write to them
  • They work for you
  • Tutorial
• Thu 10 Nov Ben Spigel, UoE Business School, and David Richardson, Director of Partnerships, School of Informatics, on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
• Mon 14 Nov Philip Wadler. Discrimination.
  • Humanity or GTFO by Lindsey Kuper
  • Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage
  • When Women Stopped Coding
  • Tutorial.
• Mon 21 Nov Philip Wadler. Current affairs.
  • 'Extreme surveillance' becomes UK law without a whimper (Guardian)
  • The NSA Files (Guardian)
  • Snowden Archive (Intercept)
  • Citizen Four
  • How a crypto 'backdoor' pitted the tech world against the NSA (Wired)
  • Protecting Your Digital Life in 7 Easy Steps (NY Times)
  • Facebook is said to question its influence in election (NY Times)
  • Renegade Facebook Employees Form Task Force to Battle Fake News (Buzzfeed)
  • How Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News on Facebook (Buzzfeed)
  • Facebook fake-news writer: ‘I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me’ (Washington Post)
  • Facebook, I'm begging you, please make yourself better (Intercept)
  • The Devil in the Polling Data (Quanta)
  • ORG: the Open Rights Group
  • Write to them
  • They work for you
  • Prism
  • Tutorial

Class videos

• Videos of PI lectures from 2014

Exam Papers

This year, the exam will be on 15th December 2016., in the Playfair Library, from 14:30-16:30

The examination (that contributes 85% of the asssessment of the course) will involve a compulsory multi-part short-answer question (Q1) and an essay-style question (choose one from two Q2/Q3). You will be expected to be familiar with the material covered in the course text and to have an appreciation of relevant current affairs such as may be obtained by regular reading of a serious newspaper (e.g. Common Space, The National, or The Guardian) or news magazine (e.g. The Economist), or keeping abreast of relevant organisations (e.g. Open Rights Group). Your answers should, where relevant, draw on the content of lectures given by visitors, and on your fellow-students' video presentations, as well as on course notes and texts.

Past papers.

• Past papers.
• A past exam with solutions (April 2016)
• You may also find it helpful to study the BCS past papers