The Network Institute would like to invite you to the next Research Lunch, organised to facilitate exchange among researchers at the VU across faculties and disciplines.
- When: Thursday, June 19th 2025 – 12:00-13:30
- Where: NU-4A06, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
- Registration form: https://forms.gle/LHp3UPsCwGiuZT9f7
This month’s focus: Integrating users’ ethical concerns in software development
This presentation provides an overview of our research on the ethical integration of users’ concerns into software development processes. Across this work, we examine how current software practices often prioritize shareholder interests over user well-being, resulting in the systemic neglect of ethical harms, especially for intersectional and marginalized communities.
We start by analyzing large-scale user feedback from Reddit and app store reviews to identify recurrent ethical concerns, such as discrimination, misrepresentation, and safety risks. Building on these findings, we next analyze how demographic factors shape ethical advocacy and intervention amongst developers.
We present survey data revealing that marginalized practitioners report ethical issues more frequently and feel more empowered to act yet remain unsupported in organizational contexts. To address these gaps, we introduce methods to allow developers to change: automated systems for detecting, analyzing and prioritizing ethical issues and a perspective-taking chatbot shown to enhance developers’ intellectual humility and responsiveness to marginalized users’ needs.
Lauren Olson, Tom Humbert and Emitzá Guzmán work in the Computer Science Department and do research on human factors in software, with a focus on ethics in software. They apply data science techniques, interviews, surveys and sociological frameworks to implement a comprehensive, mixed-methods approach to reveal insights into how humas build and use software.
We hope so see many of you there! As usual, a vegetarian lunch will also be included.