Keynote 

“First, do no harm” – realising the potential of transdisciplinary research for Responsible Software Engineering

Professor Arosha K. Bandara, The Open University, UK

Often incorrectly ascribed to the Hippocratic oath, the phrase “First, do no harm”, captures the idea that medical professionals should ensure that their treatments should benefit their patients and not lead to detrimental consequences. The phrase doesn’t appear in the oath, but the idea still forms a core part of medical and other professional codes of conduct. For example, the ACM/IEEE Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice states that software engineers have a “… commitment to the health, safety, and welfare of the public …”. However, delivering on this commitment in practice is challenging due to the range of factors that need to be considered by software engineers to understand what they are responsible for and who they are responsible to. Combining software engineering expertise with that of other disciplines like philosophy, ethics, and law have led to the creation of frameworks and guidelines that support software engineers with some of these challenges. However, to “first, do not harm”, further work is needed to help software engineers understand and characterise the harms that may be applicable to the software products they are developing and how to effectively mitigate these harms.

These challenges cannot be addressed by traditional interdisciplinary research approaches where the questions about responsible software engineering are determined by the researchers. Instead, we need to work towards transdisciplinary approaches that include software practitioners and end-users as integral members of the research activity to develop a richer understanding of the problem domain. In this talk, I explore how this can be achieved in the context of responsible software engineering by focusing on specific problem contexts – sometimes described as “trans-disciplinarity ‘in the small’”. I draw on examples from the Centre for Protecting Women Online, established at The Open University in the UK (https://university.open.ac.uk/centres/protecting-women-online/), to illustrate how transdisciplinary research can be used to develop new approaches to responsible software engineering that can help make online spaces safer for vulnerable groups like women and girls.

Contact Information: 

We look forward to seeing you at @ResponsibleSE 2025. For further information, please contact irum@chalmers.se 

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