INDIVIDUAL Work

Due: March 11, 11pm

Points 55 points

Evaluation Guidelines (see Canvas)

Goal: You are going to apply your understanding of a real-world computer ethics case to help ethically develop a new/entrepreneurial tech concept. This will help you further understand how computing and social responsibility can be effectively demonstrated through :

1. Predicting how social, political and economic institutions' interests can conflict.

2. Development of ideas to prevent these conflicts.

 

 

Assignment:: Using your analysis of a real computer ethics court case to guide you, you will create a report focused on potential ethical issues and safeguarding against them for your group's choosen Entrepreneurial Concept for the Entrepreneurial+Ethics assignment. This is INDIVIDUAL work as stated above. The report will have the following elements:

 

 

Writing Expectations: read the information on citation requirements &writing help

Reports will be graded on  both qualitative and quantitative narrative description/details, the strength of your argumentation, and writing style, spelling, and grammar.

• You must write in complete, grammatical English sentences, organized into well-composed paragraphs. No outlines are allowed.

 

You will create a pdf report with a minimum of 500 words (Original writing, NOT including any references or quoted test/tables) -- THIS must be 100% original writing (by you).

A starting point for many Entrepreneurial Startups in Computing is the creation of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). You are going to describe one key OKR for your company (as chosen in your new/entrepreneurial tech project) and the related ethical impacts and ways to safead as follows. You must organize your paper and keep the section names highlighted in blue.

0: Company Summary: Brief Description of your Startup Company's Service/Product (keep this to 1-2 paragraphs). You should have enough detail to understand the subsequent sections of this paper. Make sure you have in the description mention of different stakeholders in the use of your company's product/service. Make sure that you also discuss where computation and data storage take place.

• Example : iStroke Inc. will create technology to monitor stroke patients at home by utilizing cameras and machine learning to assess facial and gait changes. The system will be designed for mobile devices, operating seamlessly with minimal user intervention to accommodate patients experiencing paralysis. When significant changes are detected, a report will be generated and sent to the patient's doctor. While most data will be stored on the mobile device, certain information and reports will be backed up on our servers for recovery.
  
  
• Note in the above example, there is a mention of different stakeholders (patient, doctor and company). Also, there is discussion where computation takes place, what data is captured and and where it is stored (both locally on device and on servers).

 

1:ONE Objective and Key Result  List ONE key milestones/checkpoints described by a OKR (read here about OKRS w/ Examples) that involves your startup's customers as it relates to the tech product/service your company will offer. Describe it in detail, making sure to discuss all of the stakeholders (interested parties) in this OKR - (who, when, how they are affected). Make sure you discuss your customer base's demographics. Consider factors such as income, race, gender, interests. Also, discuss all organizations or governments that are stakeholders. Explain the relationship between the stakeholders.


• OKR IDEA (not complete--this is a breif summary of what might be discussed here and no demographics of the stakeholders are gvien, or how they are affected): In the example from section 1, a possible OKR would be:
  
  The iStroke mobile system will achieve seamless easy operation of the at-home system through the use of automatic monitoring. The iStroke system must be designed to accommodate the specific needs of stroke patients, who may struggle with using computers, operating equipment, or speech interfaces due to their impairments. Key stakeholders would include the patient, the company providing the system, and the doctor receiving the reports. Additionally, other parties, such as family members living in the same household, may also be impacted.The iStroke mobile system will achieve seamless easy operation of the at-home system through the use of automatic monitoring. The iStroke system must be designed to accommodate the specific needs of stroke patients, who may struggle with using computers, operating equipment, or speech interfaces due to their impairments. Key stakeholders would include the patient, the company providing the system, and the doctor receiving the reports. Additionally, other parties, such as family members living in the same household, may also be impacted and as such are stakeholders.
  

 

2: Metric(s) with Experimentation. For this OKR discuss how to measure the success of the OKRs.You must create in detail experiments you will create to measure the success of your OKR. It is important to have metrics for an OKR as this helps to functionalize and define what you mean by your OKR and can also help you develop your ideas sections 3 and 4 below. Your metrics must be explicit. For example, you can NOT say just "customer acceptance". What does this mean? How will you measure this? A better metric would be "customer acceptance measured as the average score from a customer satisfaction survey (range 0% to 100%). For example, if you have a customer survey you must create the actual survey and show it here and how it will be evaluated.

For each metric you create for your OKR, you must create a detailed experiment to implmeent the measurement of this metric.

The experiments you design should directly relate to the measurable OKRs you’ve set for your company. For example, if one of your OKRs states a user acceptance rate of 90%, an experiment could involve running a usability study. This study might involve 300 users representing your target demographic, with questions such as:

1. On a scale of 1-10 (1 being the worst and 10 the best), how would you rate this product or service overall?
2. Would you recommend this product to others? (Yes/No)
3. Please rate the X feature of the product/service on a scale from 1-10.

You’d then analyze this data to determine the user acceptance rate based on responses.

Another type of experiment could include expert observation of users interacting with the product or service. This could involve:

1. Evaluating whether users can complete tasks successfully and independently.
2. Assessing their performance and emotional state to understand how well the design functions.
3. Measuring user enjoyment during product use.
4. Identifying any issues and assessing their severity.

Referencing resources like https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/usability-testing can provide further insights. For each measurable OKR, conducting online research can also yield ideas for effective experimentation.

For an OKR such as "By the end of year 1, we will have 1,000 users," it’s important to focus on measuring not just new accounts created but also active users, as they represent true engagement. One way to experiment and measure active users could involve tracking monthly active users (MAU) or daily active users (DAU). This experiment might include:

1. Setting up analytics to track user logins and interactions with the platform over time.
2. Creating automated notifications or emails encouraging engagement for users who have been inactive, to help boost re-engagement and reduce churn.
3. Running an A/B test to determine which features or updates encourage users to return more frequently.
4. Defining "active user" thresholds based on meaningful interactions (e.g., completing a core task or engaging with a main feature), not just logins.

Analyzing this data would allow you to refine strategies aimed at both acquisition and retention, helping ensure that new accounts translate to a consistent base of active users rather than just one-time sign-ups.

3: Ethical Impact(s)/Issue(s). For this OKR discuss all the ethical impact/issues that can arise related to this outcome for your entrepreneurial startup. Take the knowledge you gained in your real-world computer ethics case to predict what might be a potential ethical impact. You must quote ONE reference to a real-world case with a similar impact. Consider quoting from this case (or other cases you have read about) to support your claim of this being a potential ethical issue. Make sure you use the IEEE citation format and list every reference in the reference section. For this section, give scenario(s) when this ethical impact/issue can arrise. For this section, you must also create an Expected Ethical Impact Risk table that contains rows one for each stakeholder (identified in section 2) and the 4 columns labeled "financial", "privacy", "conflicting interest", "violation of rights". For each cell in the table you can choose to have either values of none/low/mid/high. You MUST in your writing discuss for each stakeholder why the related risk is none/low/mid or high. See below for an example.

• IDEA: Consider the previous example (EX1) and the potential OKR of "seamless easy operation of the at home system featuring automatic monitoring". An ethical impact could involve potential data privacy issues that automatic monitoring can cause. Discussion of how this is problematic and illustrating scenarios featuring who and how it would impact should be given. This section should feature an Expected Ethical Impact Risk Table for this example and a subsequent discussion for the Customer/Patient row. An example is given below (you would provide similar analysis for each row/stakeholder in your ethical impact/issue). Below is a partial example of the Expected Ethical Impact Risk Table and its discussion.

  Expected Ethical Impact Risk Table

  Stakeholder	Financial Risk	Privacy Risk	Conflicting Interest Risk
  Customer	low	high	mid
  Company	high	low	mid
  Doctor	mid	low	mid

  
  
  

  Analysis of Ethical Impact Risk: (one point for each stakeholder in table)

  • Customer/Patient Stakeholder: The financial risks for stroke patients using monitoring systems are low, as there’s no direct correlation between being filmed and financial loss. However, potential indirect impacts could arise from privacy breaches affecting the reputation of healthcare providers, which may lead to increased costs over time. Regarding privacy risk and the customer (patient), the primary concern is privacy invasion. Patients may not know when they are being recorded, leading to discomfort and a feeling of violation. This lack of transparency can erode trust in the system and hinder effective use, undermining the benefits of the technology. Finally, for the customer (patient),the conflict of interest is moderate. Patients desire a user-friendly system that clearly informs them when monitoring occurs. Providers may prioritize convenience, risking patient autonomy. Balancing ease of use with transparent monitoring practices is essential for maintaining trust.
  • Company Stakeholder: do similar to above/ not completed here
  • Doctor Stakeholder: do similar to above/ not completed here

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  Other Ethical Issue Examples: for your stroke patient system. EX2: Another potential OKR would be to achieve 99% accuracy with the machine learning model. What are the ethical impacts -one would be that the data collected was too narrow or simple to achieve higher accuracy. For instance, the data may be biased and only taken from young subjects. This is unethical as it could mean in use that older subjects will not have the same accuracy as what is reported. EX3:Another OKR could be to have 80% user acceptance based on the average score of a user survey given to 100 customers. This could be interpreted as having the potential ethical issue of not collecting enough customer data or again some kind of bias in the selected customers (say customers with technical backgrounds that are comfortable with using technical systems) which could lead to skewed metric data.

 

4: Ethical Safeguards.  For your chosen OKR and its Ethical Impact(s)/Issue(s) you are to develop safeguards on how to avoid or reduce the ethical impacts. Cite references (minimum 1) that support the use of the proposed ethical safeguard(s). Make sure that you describe the safeguard (can even include pictures) in detail and discuss:

• who would be involved in helping to design this safeguard (will you have ethical experts or context experts and how will you find the).

• how you would implement the safeguard(s)

• can you measure its effectiveness and if so how?

• Some BRIEF ideas (not fully written just concept listed here, you would need to discuss how each idea could be achieved/implemented, who could help design it and how you could measure its effectiveness) EX1: One method of alerting the user to the fact they are being recorded is to have an auditory (announcement at start) and visual (blinking light) indicators that recording is starting/occuring. Maybe a UI and Accessibility designer can be consulted with. EX2: One way to safeguard against inadequate data collection would be to require a minimum number of data samples from every demographic (in this case age, you could set up age brackets of every 10 years and require a minimum of 1000 samples for each age bracket). Who will determine what are appropriate brackets? Can you involve your customers in this determination? EX3:In this example (user acceptance), again a larger number of customers and specifying a distribution of customers based on technical savvy (and other demographics) could be performed to alleviate reporting skewed metrics(you should go into detail about how this distribution is formed). Again who will determine what is not biased?

 

5: References. list your references using IEEE style (see above) and make sure every reference is cited in your writing.

• REPORT: Due March. 11, 11pm
  • Minimum of original 500 words (NOT including any quotes or non-original writing or references)
  • Create PDF with the 5 sections labeled as stipulated above
  • Upload to Canvas->Assignments-> "Entrepreneurial Strategy with Ethical Impacts AND Ethical Safeguards"