Ethics in Software Engineering Research and Practice

SEthics 2021


Interdisciplinary Studies (General)



The Software Engineering Code of Ethics asks professionals to ensure software that for example, does not diminish the quality of life, threaten privacy or harm the environment. Software Engineering inevitably raises ethical concerns and questions about the role of human values in both practice and research. It is essential to identify ethical concerns and questions about the role of human values throughout the range of software engineering activities. It is also important to ensure that the involvement of human subjects in software engineering research is ethical.
The objective of SEthics workshop series is to explore the intersection of ethics, human values and software engineering activities. The first edition of the workshop, REthics 2020 , was organised with the requirements engineering community. Now in the second edition, SEthics 2021, we aim to shed light on current practices and research results and also identify emerging trends and research directions in software engineering.
SEthics 2021 will be a one-day discussion-oriented workshop, with theme-based tracks of paper presentations, a panel aimed at stimulating discussions, and working groups of participants. The workshop invites research papers (exploratory, empirical and solution) and industrial papers (experience reports, case studies and current practices and challenges).
We invite you to submit research papers on Ethics in Software Engineering. The topics of interest include but not limited to:
- Elicitation and analysis of ethical concerns for software engineering.
- Ethics laws and regulations in software engineering.
- Ethics in social, behavioural and affective software.
- Ethics in engineering AI systems.
- Ethics in emerging software applications, e.g., IoT, Smart Cities, Games and Virtual Reality.
- Testing and validation for adhering to ethical standard in software products.
- Engineering for core ethical principles in software engineering, such as: Fairness, Honesty, Nonmaleficence, Beneficence.
- Educating ethics in software engineering.
- Ethical considerations in involving humans in software engineering.
- Ethics in documenting and reporting software engineering research.
In all categories it is possible to submit:
- Full papers (up to 8 pages)
- Short/position/vision papers (up to 5 pages)
- Proposal to present journal-first (up to 2 pages)