Allison Ryan Interview

I interviewed Allison Ryan, a geneticist who specifically works on human reproduction, namely preventing and minimizing the risk of genetic diseases in newborns. Her job is divided into two main categories: embryos implanted in mothers, so that the mother can select the best embryos to minimize genetic diseases, and fetus who were conceived naturally. Allison Ryan designed the tests that are used in her company, she also reviews tests results and helps mothers consult on specific issues.

Because Ms. Ryan worked on both the design and the review/consultation side of genetic testing, the ethical dilemmas she faced were two fold. I thus asked her to reflect on ethical challenges during the design stage, and in the review/consultation stage.

The design stage was very enlightening, and surprisingly very general and applies to many other fields of engineering as well. Ms. Ryan describes the difficulty of weighing the reliability of giving an answer versus the reliability of the answer being correct. Putting too much emphasis on one side over the other would cause problems: put too much emphasis on being correct 100% of the time, and one would never reach a decision; however, put too much emphasis on giving an answer, and then one runs the risk on giving more incorrect diagnosis  that is acceptable. Designing the tests then requires one to set up a specification between the probability of getting an answer versus the reliability of the answer being correct, an example from Ms. Ryan herself being a tests that produces results 90% of the time, with the answer having an error 1 in 1000 times.

For consulting, one ethical issue is privacy. Sometimes, famous people appear in genetic clinics, and if certain celebrities are pregnant, one would assume that newspaper tabloids would be very interested in being the first to know this information. However, under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which geneticists must comply to, states that patients must be treated with discretion.

I pressed for more specific examples, and to my joy, Ms. Ryan was able to present me an example that allowed me to see the ethical dilemas of both the design and the consulting stages of her work. She gave me the example of a hormonal test for Down Syndrome, the test she designed, poorly assessed whether a child had down syndrome; in fact, when the test came positive for Down Syndrome, the chance of the child actually having Down Syndrome was sub-fifty percent. However, when the test came negative for Down Syndrome, it was all but certain that the child would have Down Syndrome. Although this test would appear sub-par, it is an acceptable test because it is a low cost preliminary tests. If the test came negative, then the mother would be spared from more expansive tests, and if the test comes in positive, then the mother would take more accurate, albeit costly tests.

This is interesting because it proves that accuracy and best-results are not always the most ethical choice: a paradox at first glance no doubt. As engineers we feel obligated to give the best results and the best care for the people who use our products, but best isn’t always right. I have taken many computer science classes, and one of the things I learned from these classes is that there is no such thing as a free lunch. If one method is unequivocally better than another, there is usually some trade off. This trade-off could be cost, time, adverse side effects, etc. Say if Ms. Ryan did not have this test, and only worked an a test that was as close as 100% accurate as technologically possible. The costs of the tests would rise, as Ms. Ryan herself stated. Because of this many mothers would pay much more to have these tests for genetic defects. This becomes very apparent when we take the fact that most people are not afflicted with Down Syndrome. Thus many mothers would only need the cheap test that was very accurate at negative diagnosis, but if Ms. Ryan only cared about 100% accuracy tests, then all mothers would have to pay for the expensive tests. Then there are the two intentionally unethical paths. Doctors who do not wish to continue testing, and just give a negative diagnosis without a high degree of accuracy–after all, if a genetic disease has a .001% chance of occuring, then the doctor can just say “negative” all the time and be wrong .001% of the time. Then there is the doctor who always suggests the most expensive and accurate tests first, even when cheaper first steps are available. This could be to either collect more money from expensive tests, or to save time so the doctor only needs to test a patient once instead of potentially many times if they come up positive.

Ms. Ryan states that the biggest tool to help them make ethical decisions, is a specific field called Genetic Counseling. These Counsels recommend actions to mothers, and even help Ms. Ryan help reach decisions as well. I was satisfied with this answer, and was honestly surprised that an entire field was devoted to maintaining the ethical relationship between doctor and patient.

I learned many things from Ms. Ryan, the balance of reliability versus accuracy, and that sometimes the balance between reliability and accuracy means many different tests of varying reliability and accuracy, especially since cost and time are variables in making good ethical decisions. I will take Ms. Ryan’s experiences in mind as I continue my studies in engineering.

Interview Reflection

For my interview assignment, I interviewed Robert Borrelli, who received his Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from the University of California Berkeley. Robert Borrelli is also a professor of engineering at Diablo Valley College, where he teaches an introductory course to engineering. Said course is particularly attended by non-engineering students and contains a subsection devoted to ethics pertaining to engineering. His class teaches a learning module for ethics and is much like E125, but scaled down.

Getting started, I asked the professor how he himself became interested in engineering. He told me that he get into engineering because he was good at math and science as a kid. Moreover, he enjoys solving technical problems. This explanation, albeit brief, seemed consistent with the Pawley article we read. Engineers seemed to be labeled as those who were good at math and science, but as opposed to scientists, used this knowledge for application and problem solving purposes. The answer was given possibly because as kids, that’s the very straightforward description of what engineering is, and more subtle or nuanced definitions of engineering that the critical reflection #2 article had addressed. He also didn’t mention his parents at all, unlike some of the kids in class did when in lecture, we were asked why each of us got into engineering. Professor Borrelli also added that he had attended a private engineering college as an undergraduate and thus he had to declare his major early on. This is of course different than our situations, but it shows the confidence he had in wanting to pursue engineering as a career.  But it wasn’t just general engineering. He had selected specifically nuclear engineering going in.

As a follow up, I asked him what his job entails. He said that he was a part of a review board for ARPA-E. ARPA-E stands for the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, which, according to its website, “is an innovative and collaborative government agency that brings together America’s best and brightest scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs.” Professor Borrelli stated that on the board, he reviewed proposals for nuclear energy projects and determined whether ARPA-E could fund them. He added that with funding agencies, this was a common process. While money doesn’t seem to be something that could be related to ethics, but construction isn’t free, or cheap. Many times, money can be a deciding factor in how projects are built, changed, and updated. The suicide bridge example is one such thing. Another is the Ford Pinto example, wherein Ford needed to put an inexpensive car on the market. Thus the Pinto was rushed through without considering all the ethical and hazardous outcomes. People have a tendency to disregard money when it comes to ethics, but it’s probably one of the most important and consistent elements of engineering projects. If money were no problem, engineers could add a lot more safety features. Of course, money is a tangible item, so it’s availability can dramatically affect the outcome and design of a project.

The professor could not discuss specific proposals, as he had signed a non-disclosure agreement, but ARPA-E had a policy wherein if there was a conflict of interest in a review, they had to leave while the review was being recommended. But because the proposals with reviewed within the context of ARPA-E’s mission, reviewing was easy. This was where review processes are made simpler by having defined goals and guidelines. This doesn’t mean that reviews need be followed exactly to the letter, but having such goals, just like a company’s code of ethics, can help with organization.

Interviewing Professor Borrelli had certainly been an informative experience. He had given me some valuable information that I thought I was able to bring back into the context of this class and piece together an important aspect of engineering and the ethics that pertains to it.

Interview Presentations

Wednesday

(1) Ryan, JoungYoun, Lin, Collin

  • international export – ther is no oversight, no regulation
  • conflict of interest – nobody to go to
  • research grant proposals inflate the end goal – EECS
  • suggestion: create mentorship positions, that people apply for; mentors get training; they become the go to person
  • no resources
  • need to find someone for guidance
  • it puts the effort on the employee; which seems counter-intuitive – “you’d thinak that somebody in the limelight would be there asking questions”

(2) Sean, Niranjan, Alan, BinYi

  • conflict of interest hotline
  • easiest to come out as a group
  • did ethics change a lot since the 50s?
  • there is a lot more communication

(3) Eric, Mark, Siddarth, Biyung

  • corporate ethics
  • there are software engineers who don’t understand what open source code is – if you incorporate open source, your code has to become open source. open access linceses: GPL, and LGPL. (see gnu.org)
  • If it’s for-profit, does it benefit everyone, which is the main principle of open-source code?
  • it’s hard to regulate because you’re using open-source inside closed-source code
  • data manipulation for the engineer’s own benefit

(4) Luis, Sam, Ronak, Tim

  • more proactive instead of reactionary
  • employees were ok with managers being the ultimate decision makers and taking on the ethical responsibilities, as long the their opinion is heard
  • typical responses: “what is ethics”  “what do you mean by ethics”
  • it is possible to reflect on ethical dillema only in retrospect, after the resolution of the issue? are people otherwise uncomfortable? why?
  • stealing ideas – untilitarian vs. virtue ethics vs deontologic – what’s right vs. your duty

Friday

(5) ian, huda, neha, lin

Taiwan – and moving to Canada
conflict of interest
anonymous ethics board – because they want to have a good public image
conflict of interest
online ethical seminar – basic ethic guidelines

neha’s father – bay area company – ethical hotline
shifts some of the responsibility from the company to the person, by having
more collaborative, more constructive company culture
yearly check-ups on the employees – seminars that everyone needs to show up to
50 page ethical document – is it really effective? it’s

no homogenized idea of ethics – depends on where you are…

(6) cameron, sang min, deaho, jack, jack
company culture
whistleblower agreement – to protect company image
how do you deal with bugs in software companies
is the company culture against using the ethics hotline?
internet software vs “shipped” software packages

ethics hotline:
addresses internal ethics issues
but global ethics issues aren’t addressed – eg for a customer or anybody else outside of the company

what’s the motivation for working in a company vs. research
money, research, reputation

(7) andrea, doug, kevin, alex, tommy
resources for established large companies: human resources, legal
didn’t have time to deal with it, and it was somebody else’s problem
has an impact in the company’s direction by what he does

fast timescale
“don’t let perfect get in the way of good enough”
tunnel visioned engineers

loyalty to the company
mobility, changing companies
freedom to say something may be affected

 

Interview: Ethical Issues in Apple

Engineering Ethics Interview

I interviewed Dennis Rong who is a first year engineer at Apple. Dennis has graduated from UC Berkeley in 2012 majored in computer science. I started the interview by asking how he became interested in engineering. He think the moment that made him really want to be an engineer was after taking my first CS class (CS61A). Up to that point he had intended to be a Business/Econ major, but the material he was exposed to completely changed the direction of the last four years of his college experience. Computer science to him is just so exhilarating fun and mentally challenging. Rather than spending time memorizing fact after fact, he instead spent time developing a toolset that he could use to attack problems in different ways.

Also, he is a Computer Science student by training. This means that his education is based around the rigorous analysis of theorems, algorithms and data structures rather than traditional computer engineering courses which focus on implementation and systems. A few examples of courses he have taken are Compilers, Algorithms and Data Structures. This past summer he started working at Apple as a software engineering on the Maps team. While he cannot talk too much about what he did, he gave a general overview. Basically, he built a system that allows the data analytics team to query the searches done on Apple maps. This means they can filter through trends, locations and more to analyze how people use Apple Maps. He mainly do backend web development and data science. This means he build out the backend systems and infrastructure that allows websites to serve pages to their users. Data science means he go through data and search for insights and build visualizations.

In addition, the most pressing ethical problem that he faced is the one dealing with user data. His past experiences have given him the opportunity to mine data that contains people’s names, phone numbers and more. This is highly sensitive data and is always treated with the utmost care and security. Also, he think the biggest ethical concern is treating personal information such as names, phone numbers and more. As more and more often web companies hold onto a lot of user information that many would consider private. And at the same time a lot of these web companies do not have a proven way to make money yet. Thus many will often resort to selling the user information they have to 3rd party agencies who then use it to try to sell others stuff. Sometimes this could be taken to the extreme where the buyers actually use the information about you to attempt to commit fraud. This is the biggest ethical problem he could imagine happening to any software engineer in the modern internet world. At Apple at least, there is very rigorous training each employee has to go through in order to work. He could not go into too much detail here because he signed an NDA, but suffice to say each employee spends a few days at the beginning of their employment (and possibly later as well) learning about how Apple treats security, user information, and more.

Overall, I really enjoyed interviewing Dennis and it was very good experience to hear some of the ethical problems that engineers face in daily basis. Although some of the information were very strictly confidential, I have enhance the knowledge in engineering ethics through having conversation with him. I realized that engineers are strictly trained not to keep everything confidential and foster cultures that ethical issues are not brought up to the surface.

Interview: Underutilization of Workplace Ethical Resources

 

I conducted an interview with my uncle, Jamshid Katabein, a Validation Engineer at Morphotrack, a company that builds biometric systems for governments. They contract will all levels of government – local, state, federal, and international – to develop the systems that are used by the TSA, local police, border control, and others to collect and manage biometric information such as finger prints and retina scans. In his role as a Validation Engineer, he works to ensure that the system works correctly 100% of the time. Because the systems Morphotrack builds are safety critical – a glitch in the system that allows a known terrorist through security, for example would have large ramifications – they put a great degree of effort into validating the software’s correctness. His day-to-day responsibilities include taking code from the software engineers and stress testing them with corner cases that are engineered to test for potential flaws. He will then communicate any problems to the software engineers and suggest potential solutions.

Jamshid decided to pursue a career in engineering, not because he was attracted to the field, but because of cultural norms. Coming from Iran to the United States, it was accepted that you would go to college and either become an engineer or a doctor. He essentially became an engineer because he did not want to be a doctor; that said, Jamshid is very satisfied with his career.

When I began asking Jamshid about any ethical challenges he has faced in his career, he was very prepared with an answer. Jamshid began to tell me about several instances when established time constrains on a project hindered him from doing a thorough job with testing and validating the software they were shipping to a client. He made his concerns clear to his manager, but his manager never did anything to address Jamshid’s concerns and Jamshid did not make any further effort to address the problem.

One of the most valuable insights into Jamshid’s comments when probed about ethics in the workplace was how eager he was to speak about it. He spoke as if he had never had an outlet with which to profess his frustrations over ethical issues. Interestingly, however, Morphotrack does have an established ethics hotline and does a decent job of promoting it in the workplace. They have signs posted in the break room and hanging scattered around the office. The interesting question then becomes, why has Jamshid, who knows about these hotlines and clearly has the desire to discuss ethical issues, never actually utilized this resource? When asked specifically why he had never used the hotlines, Jamshid’s response was that nothing would ever come from phoning the hotline. But Jamshid also acknowledged that he had never heard of anyone calling the hotline and having nothing come from it; in fact, he had never heard of anyone calling the hotline at all. So we then must analyze Jamshid’s baseless claim. What is the real reason he has refused to utilize the ethics hotline? Upon additional probing it became clear that it simply was not normative to utilize this resource. This is a cultural problem. The culture of ethics in the workplace is not conducive to utilization of established ethics resources such as the hotline. There is a negative stigma associated with using something like the ethics hotline.

There are two possible solutions to this problem. The first is to begin a campaign in the workplace that will utilize a modified discourse to alter the culture of ethics in the workplace. The second solution is to develop different outlets for ethical discussions that will themselves modify the culture of discourse. One example of an improved outlet would be a once monthly meeting of members on a team to discuss ethical issues openly and proactively. For this to be a success, it is critical that the managers and project leaders be present and participating in the discussion.

For Jamshid, both ethical issues and outlets for these issues are present in the workplace; however, these resources are not being utilized due to negative cultural stigma. This can be solved be either initiating a campaign to directly modify the discourse surrounding ethics in the workplace or by instituting new outlets for ethical issues that would indirectly modify the discourse and increase usage.