Nitin Sadras, Hyun Sung Jung, Jambu Jambulingam , Brett Rapponotti

From taking Engineering 125, we have learned a lot about the ethical dilemmas that engineers face in every day life. Whether it is in the classroom or in the workplace, engineering is a discipline that drives forward innovation, but it is important to take a step back and understand at what cost these advancements come. A key community that faces this dilemma is engineers conducting research on university campuses worldwide. Researchers are challenged to push concepts and thoughts into reality, and test whether certain hypothesis are feasible for real-world applications. Undergraduate students are an important population that contributes to the research efforts of a university, and our group would like to understand what ethical dilemmas undergraduates should be aware of when working in a research lab on a university campus.

Undergraduates are hungry to learn and explore their disciplines, and research is often their first experience doing relevant work in a field they enjoy. A lot of the times, they leap for opportunities that come their way, just to get some experience under their belt and hope to find even better positions in the future. However, it would be very beneficial to be cognizant of the ethical challenges one might face when starting research work. We would like to provide a set of guidelines, proposed by fellow undergraduates involved with research, to help new undergraduates understand the issues at hand. We hope to achieve this by interviewing undergraduate researchers and asking them a set of questions having to do with their first experiences with ethical challenges. Once we conduct the interviews, it is our responsibility to condense and accurately depict the views of the interviewees, in the hope to present this information in a concise manner. By producing a video collage of all of these responses, we hope that students world-wide can learn from current undergraduate researchers before they embark on this journey.

The goal of each interview is to understand the ethical issues that undergraduates encounter while doing research.  To that end, we will question our interviewees about the nature of their research, and from there, inquire about aspects of their work that are ethically questionable.  These need not be directly related to the subject matter of their research; for example, some students may have Principal Investigators that give them unreasonable amounts of work, or make them work longer hours than were initially agreed upon.  Since research positions are highly valuable to undergraduate students, they may not be inclined to question the decisions of their PI’s in order to keep their positions and move upward.  Just like in any job position where you are in someone else’s power, this can lead to an unhealthy working environment.  Another important concern for researchers is attribution of work – undergraduates often do work that is critical to research products, but may not be properly credited for their contributions.  Both of the aforementioned problems are well-known issues in academia, and we would like to know if undergraduate researchers at Cal have to deal with them, and if so, what resources are available to them to resolve them.

Some of the challenges our project requires us to solve are, firstly, finding the right interviewees whose opinions and experiences can be understood by a wide audience. We are only focusing on research in engineering, but the vast amount of research topics in engineering can lead to a very narrow scope unless we choose our interviewees appropriately. The next challenge we face is to combine all of the interviews into a concise video that flows in unison, while maintaining all of the relevant information each individual interview provided. There are no costs associated with this project, but we must pick up the pace to be able to have an effective video by the due-date.

For finding our interviewees, we were fortunate enough that we knew people who were involved in research. It’s a reflection on Berkeley that we have these connections with friends in research. One fact that was brought up when we proposed our project idea in discussion was that we had managed to interview people in varying fields of research. Although we had tried to do this, it wasn’t the main goal: different fields require different approaches to research and ethics as well. The main purpose was simply to try to gather how and what undergraduates felt about research and how and where ethics plays a role, if any, in their field or research as well as what their overseers discuss with them in terms of ethics.

We decided that a video would be the appropriate format for our civic engagement portion, since we had gathered four interview clips. Combining it together and uploading it to a popular video hosting site like YouTube would help garner some exposure. Of course, marketing the video through other social media sites and word of mouth will also help. The dialogue generated from the video, we hope, will show others how undergraduates at Berkeley go about their particular research. Hopefully, the dialogue will be able to extend to graduate students as well, and to those in charge of research who see what those working under them feel about ethics and the ethical implications of their research.

We would like to provoke some thoughts of other undergraduate researchers regarding the topics dealt in the interview such as security and fair representation of credit. We hope them to reflect these thoughts at their work place or at their future jobs facing ethical concerns. We would like to keep track of the feedback of the viewers, however this plan is realistically impossible beyond the level of checking the replies on the video hosting websites or SNS.

Note: We incorporated Courtney’s and our peer reviewer’s feedback and added three paragraphs to the end of our original proposal to address all the points that were made.

Our interviews with various professionals in the science industries suggested that certain industries (e.g. biological research, bioengineering, etc.) tend to face ethical dilemmas more often than others. As a result, some industries have many resources for ethical counseling where others do not or rarely incorporate ethics resources in their training. Case in point, our interview with Ling Wang at Boeing highlighted the shortfalls of ethical training in large corporations where production involves largely uncontroversial goods in today’s society. When asked about what she could do if a perceived ethical problem was uncovered, she said it would be basically up to her superiors how to proceed. The sheer size of Boeing has been an advantage in this aspect because it is highly unlikely an unethical proposal will make it extremely far up the approval stages. When asked about the resources that were available, she said that there was ethics “training” which involved a single session that all new employees had to participate in where they learned more about company policies and etiquette (photography, etc.) rather than ethics in the sense of what we are discussing in class.

Our interview with Ling was eye opening and a bit troubling to us because we believe that any company should have a strong emphasis on employee ethics regardless of what is being produced. Airplanes may not be as hotly contested as genetic manipulation, but the impact of an unethical act that makes its way to production can be just as devastating. We think that an ethics resource that fosters ethical thought and resolves ethical debates will be beneficial to Boeing and other companies because it would ideally lead to a more unified and thorough knowledge base spread among its employees, thus leading to engineering that would more naturally consider the greater good of consumers and customers alike.

As a result of how we interpreted the problem, we determined that the solution was to be twofold. First, it’s imperative that there is a space which can be devoted exclusively to the discourse of ethics. Hence, we would propose a meeting consisting of a single representative from each department for a few hours on a monthly basis. This would be an arena where the ethical issues from each respective department would be considered and open to discussion or debate to the rest of those in attendance. In the event that a specific issue was considered controversial enough, the passage of the corresponding company action would be put to a vote, where each person at the meeting would receive an equal say regardless of their normal standing within the company. Consequently, the vote on this action would not be privy to overrule by higher-ups. Moreover, to ensure an all-encompassing discussion, any employee of the company would be free to submit topics or issues for consideration at the meeting. To allow for impartiality, the ‘representative’ from each department who attends the meeting would change every month, such that each meeting is composed of an entirely different set of people.

Second, we would require that every project proposal contain a short section on ethics outlining the debate on both sides of every conceivable ethical issue. This could be appended to the entire proposal, or included in each section that poses a potential ethical issue – i.e. cost, materials, scope, risks, etc. This would then be reviewed by an independent third-party public relations contractor that would then decide whether the ethical issues constituted enough to submit to the aforementioned ethics monthly meeting. This contractor, since not directly involved with the company, would not have the authority to give a verdict on whether the proposal would be approved, but would simply have the power to recommend that further discourse take place regarding said proposal.

In addition, if groups find that there is little to discuss for one reason or another, members can choose to bring in controversial technology topics from general news sources to discuss, much like we have done with Ethics in the News in discussion section. What we have found as a team is that regardless of the topic at hand that was brought up, we each learned to consider a different viewpoint on a topic that was once pretty clearly laid out in our minds. Just this act in itself develops a greater sense of understanding of the ideas that exist in the world. We believe that even though projects at Boeing may not directly be impacted by discussing unrelated news, the engineers will be able to expand their thought horizon and benefit the company and progress indirectly by participating in an Ethics in the News of their own.

Finally, during Jonathan Ma’s interview with Allison Ryan, he learned that genetics have a specialized counselor that consulted both the geneticists and the patients on ethical dilemmas that they may face. We believe that this addition role could be beneficial to other fields as well. Any employee with ethical dilemmas can now talk to a person who is trained in resolving these dilemmas. We believe that many employees do not talk about ethics because they do not know where to go, or perhaps just do not think about ethical problems because their co-workers do not bring up the topic. By introducing an employee specialized in solutions to ethical problems, not only will employee have that place to go, but the presence of this specialist may cause employee to take the first step in working out any ethical dilemmas they may face; realizing that said dilemmas exist and are important to talk about.

We expect the implementation of this new practice to cause multiple positive effects on the employees at Boeing, and maybe even spread to other companies. The first and most likely outcome we foresee is the creation of a more inclusive community. Opening these topics of conversation among all employees regardless of their position in the company will allow workers that are lower in the corporate hierarchy to voice out their ethical concerns related to the company’s products. This practice can help Boeing integrate its employees and unify them in goals and expectations, therefore establishing a more transparent working environment clear of uncertainties regarding the ethical implications inherent in their products.

A second effect we expect is an active practice and examination of ethical issues existing within Boeing. In engineering, ethics is unfortunately a topic that is often brushed under the carpet. The interview with Ling showed us how even in large companies ethical resources are sparse. We hope that by keeping these meetings available Boeing will integrate the ethical view of its workers creating more ethically conscious culture. Even though the products that the company works with does not provoke many ethical issues, we think that if the engineering teams execute more ethically conscious decision in their projects they will gain more trust from their customers since it shows the customers the level of caring of the company.

Lastly, depending on the effectiveness of this practice at Boeing we hope that it will be adopted by other companies increasing the overall consciousness of ethics in industry. Eventually, the ideal outcome is that this practice becomes part of the standard in companies like Boeing when interacting with their employees and customers.

We think that at first there may not be too many topics to be submitted for consideration at the meeting, not necessarily because there aren’t ethical issues that exist, but because the concept would still be new and many might be uncomfortable with the idea. However, as the topic becomes more of a staple of company business, we hope that such an installment would successfully create a safe space where ethics can be discussed, since — according to our interview findings — there isn’t exactly one currently in place.

We very much like and appreciate how well you thought out your proposal for monthly meetings. It seems like such inter-departmental ethical discussions, with rotating members for equal representation, would be a very effective way for employees to resolve issues without worrying about pressure from higher-ups. Your emphasis on an equal voice for all employees regardless of their standing in the company is crucial in making sure that nobody feels pressured to keep quiet about any issues they may face. However, we believe that a group vote may not be the most effective way to decide on the course of action – in the end, the decision should be up the person facing the issue, and the group would serve as an advisory entity, rather than one that would make executive decisions. This in itself would be immensely helpful – it is far easier to make an objective, level-headed decision after discussing it with peers who may have faced similar situations in the past.

Seeing as Ethics in the News was definitely the most interesting and thought-provoking aspect of E125, a similar system at Boeing would be a very effective tool to stimulate ethical thinking and conversations, and if the topics brought up are engineering-related, they will almost certainly help employees make decisions regarding when issues do inevitably come up. This would probably be most effective if different teams looked into ethical issues in the news that are relevant to their line of work. However, this may not be practical due to how specific some technical jobs are – it would be sufficient to discuss both the ethical and technical aspects of issues in the same general field of engineering.

The issues that you saw in Boeing definitely apply to many other companies as well, and it would be a big step forward if this system was implemented in other large corporations. This well thought-out project plan deserves an A.

Overall I think group your group was the most impressive out of those that made an app for ethical issues. Your presentation was well explained and your proposal, in my opinion, has the right amount of detail.

I like the fact that this app is open to everyone and not just engineers. Also I feel you guys could publicize the app in more ways as part of your civic engagement process. Maybe a good place to start could be on campus. Proposing the idea to a recognized professor so he could get his colleagues to download and start using it might be positive. Or maybe promote it on social media like pages on facebook. I feel the civic engagement aspect deserves more importance in your proposal.

The way the app works I feel is great but a comment bar under a question would be more favorable. This has its downside as people can begin to abuse the app, however, it opens room for discussion. If the comment bar is supervised by an admin who ensures no disrespectful behavior is displayed, this idea could be beneficial for your project. The reason I feel ethical issues should be discussed as not all problems have a yes or no answer. Hearing other people’s opinions can change someone’s mind for the better.

The reasons for starting your project and the benefits of your app in your proposal are highlighted well. As a group, we agree that your group deserves an ‘A’.

Our group is proposing a project that takes a current issue on campus and attempts apply the basic ethical principles and ideas that have been presented in this class towards an equitable solution and a model of unethical conduct to be avoided in the future while dealing with opposition.

Recently the trees behind Soda hall were cut down to make way for the Jacob’s building for design. These trees are endangered and their cutting down was met with strong opposition from the group Ridge Redwood. The approach of Ridge Redwood to the UC Campus and the reaction of the UC Campus in our opinion were inappropriate. No decision was reached and the trees were cut down without any discussion. We as a group decided to make this a model for future engineers to avoid ethical issues in dealing with opposition.

We are attempting to unite the students and the governing body of the campus through our solution. The group Ridge Redwoods that has been protesting the removal of Redwood trees that the Jacobs institute proposal to remove in their donation 20 Million dollars to construct a building for Berkeley engineering students. Ridge Redwoods began their protest close to the start of this semester and has continued after the trees have been removed. Our groups also wants to shine light on the ethical issues associated with this case and treat it as a model for the future to create awareness of the topic in the greater academic community both on and off campus.

By coming up with a solution our group can make a difference on campus and last to show other students how we can use the Chancellor and Deans of our university as colleagues instead of opposition. In doing this we believe that this will connect with other people who are equally motivated to pursue an ideal; one which will develop a more forward thinking, and innovative process in our time at Cal. Both sides may have crossed ethical boundaries in the handling of the situation but in an attempt to come up with a quick analysis and discussion of the situation, we hope to show how this could have been avoided. In brief summary the Ridge Redwoods group is making a valid point, why are these trees being cut down? The UC campus is also justified in building what ever they please on their land. However the cold shoulder the campus gave the opposition as well as the reaction of the Ridge Redwood group on social media was unjustified. This ended up in a lose-lose situation where the Redwoods were cut down and the UC campus received bad publicity. What can be done now is to discuss and determine the unethical nature of both group’s approach and how a more ethical manner could have improved the outcome of the situation.

Our motivation for this project was to shine light on an issue we feel displayed ethical misconduct while dealing with opposition and want to spread awareness by treating this situation as a model and taking large scale surveys from students on campus. This issue is very relevant due to the fact that the UC campus is going to make several changes from now to the year 2020 which are part of its Long-term development plan. This includes replacing Evans with two smaller building and clearing many trees to make more open spaces and glades. Many students are unaware of these changes and more protesting groups will oppose the campus’s actions. Due to the future circumstances relating directly to what went on with the cutting down of the trees behind Soda Hall, we hope to make everyone aware, including the campus, of the importance of dealing with opposition in an ethical manner to work out a solution.

Our aim is to spread awareness of the issue to both engineers and non-engineers on campus about this issue. We hope to do this through our civic engagement process, which includes a short survey and a discussion on two subjects; who was at fault, and how can this be avoided in the future? Once we are able to carry out this survey among a large student body we hope to reach out to the Dean/Administration and express the views of the students in need for more of an ethical approach by the campus in further dealings with opposition. This way a friendlier environment for students on the campus will be created as well as the fact that the UC Berkeley as well can serve as an example for its ethical dealings. This approach will not only solve issues in a more amicable and practical manner but also encourage people to consider ethics and instill ethics as a major factor in all their fields of work in the future.

The logistics of our proposal includes mainly the time that will go into surveying such a large group of students, which could take up to 50 hours if we survey 20 people an hour. The costs (economically speaking) would be us forgoing work we need to get done which would be missed out. Therefore, we aim to finish a small portion of our civic engagement this semester and continue where we left off in the fall semester and interview people in the library as opposed to Sproul where it is almost impossible to stop and talk to someone.

Introducing Ethics into Startup Workplaces

by Jing Chen, Kevin Lau, Vashisht Madhavan, Jenny Pullman

Original Proposal 

Note: We kept the essence of our original project proposal the same, but revised certain aspects. We added a more thorough description of our motivations, and added more information about the results we collected and feedback from Skydeck and its constituent companies. We also included some future plans we talked about during our presentation, and some improvements we came up with and that were suggested by peers and our GSI.

Our project proposal was largely fueled by our group’s individual interviews with employees of small companies around the Bay Area. Each member of the group conducted a short interview on ethics with an engineering professional in fields ranging from computer science to pharmaceutics, and we each asked our interviewees about their experiences regarding ethics in the workplace. Though some of them had ethics issues present in the back of their minds, they largely did not consider ethical issues as an essential part of their career or daily tasks. They struggled to think of examples of ethical problems that could arise in their lives, and found difficulty identifying resources within their company and combat possible ethical issues. When we regrouped and discussed this common aspect among our interviews, we realized that many companies do not take ethics into consideration when launching or even sustaining their businesses. This is problematic for several reasons, particularly because if an issue does crop up, the employee and company will not have an immediate solution. Also, tech companies have a huge amount of power over our everyday products, and if they do not recognize their responsibility and moral values, they could easily negatively impact society. As a result, we feel it is important to bring awareness to companies, particularly startups, and highlight that ethics is an important issue for which they should be providing resources and encouraging discussion among employees.

To make our project more specific, we decided to narrow down our audience to startups, since we would be more likely to have a significant impact on these small companies. In addition, as was discussed in Bernt Wahl’s guest lecture, entrepreneurs often face ethical issues that could make or break their company, and they have the hefty responsibility of establishing the culture and values of their startup, which could vary dramatically depending on the direction that the company’s leader chooses to go. We decided that focusing on startups would be most beneficial for us in learning about ethical issues in the workplace, since they tend to be more responsive, as well as for the companies that we could positively influence. Since resources may be limited, especially for a small company, we decided to implement our project by initiating a discussion on ethics in the form of an interactive letter to companies via Skydeck, the Berkeley startup incubator. Skydeck is easy to access and contact, and since the companies in Skydeck are local, they are more receptive to Cal students.

Our letter via Skydeck doubled as the civic engagement portion of our assignment. We converted the letter to a google form and distributed it among the Skydeck companies. The letter is attached below in the comments (civic engagement completion), but in summary, we introduced ourselves as students in an ethics class concerned with the lack ethics discussion in the engineering workplace. We conducted a general survey on how aware the employees were on ethics in general, and then posed some hypothetical situations as an extra group activity that the employees could choose to partake in. We hope that with this information and their feedback, we will be able to follow up with these companies and possibly reach out to more startups with improved methods of emphasizing the importance of ethics, and inspire the entrepreneurs to consistently take these values into consideration on an everyday basis.

The time to draft the letter and send it out took only a few days, but because the company can decide whether or not to act upon the letter, a response could take any amount of time. Actually answering the questions in the letter and participating in the activity should take no more than an hour, so the entire process does not require a large amount of time. We streamlined the process by making the letter a google form where employees can easily submit their responses. Our aim is really to put the idea of ethics in the table for these startups, since our interviews revealed that many engineering employees rarely think about ethics in relation to their jobs at all. As for cost, there was none.

We recently sent out the form, so we have not yet finished collecting responses. However, we have seen positive results as a whole. Many employees we spoke to showed support for our ethics worksheet/letter, and employees of Skydeck were considering having an ethics screening for potential constituent startups to require some ethics consideration prior to joining the incubator. Although many companies have not thought about ethics before, they seem to be open to suggestions for further resources. We learned as a group that it can be very difficult to bring awareness to companies that have more pressing concerns on their plate, but if we make the problem evident to them and initiate resources for them, they usually will respond positively. Some other improvements we could add to future letters are perhaps more specific questions catered to the company that we are addressing, such as direct ethical problems that could arise for their particular product or industry. Our current letter is general and applies to any startup, since we were simply trying to collect as many opinions as possible.

Our ethics letter is only a stepping stone to possible future plans that could have an even bigger impact on bringing ethical awareness to startups. Depending on the type of feedback we receive, we’d like to provide a more interactive resource for engaging companies, current and future, in our ethics discussion. Perhaps we could provide a mandatory ethics worksheet for companies that would like to join Skydeck, and if we are successful, we could influence bigger companies as well. In terms of Skydeck itself, we could propose starting an ethics committee to screen potential companies and ensure that they have ethics on their horizon. Also, since Skydeck already has weekly presentations on various technologies, we could possibly encourage them to incorporate ethics into the conversation. Alternatively, we could replace one of these technological presentations per month with an ethics-themed presentation, maybe integrating elements from E125’s Ethics in the News assignments.

We feel it is important that tech companies are aware that they have an ethical duty in society for the products they create and the ideas they generate in the engineering and science community. The point of our project is simply to motivate companies to think about ethics. Without this letter, ethical concerns may not even be on the company’s radar, which we realized through our individual interviews. We hope that with our current and future efforts in bringing awareness to startups, we can have a positive impact on the ethical direction of these companies.

Rafi Lurie, Bill Cao, Amy Chiang, Cheyanne Galinato

Engineers are tasked with designing and building, from the smallest nanochips to the largest airplanes and ships. As a result, the way the world is built around us and the materials that make them up are almost completely reliant on the engineer’s design. A large amount of the world’s scare resources are being used up in the construction and building of all of the world’s products that are designed by engineers. We believe that we can design a three-pronged approach to educate engineers on the ethical concern of saving resources and using their power as designers to help to contribute to making a greener planet. We believe that engineers have the duty to improve the world, and doing that in a way that harms the environment is counterproductive. We have come up with a three step program consisting of office buy-in, educational seminars, hands on activity that will give engineers holistic exposure to these issues and hopefully make the environment a consideration when they are creating a product.

The first component of our three step program is to institute a comprehensive recycling program in an engineers office. This will show engineers that the environment is a priority for the company and that their company has “bought in” to being environmentally conscious. Employees craft their products in line with their company’s values, and by implementing a recycling program at work, the company will tangibly make the environment a company priority and explicitly show that to its employees. This could be done by putting MAXR bins around the office, which is a four bin set for landfill, mixed paper, cans and bottles, and compost. Each bin also has pictures of what goes in each bin. In this way, the company will dispose of its waste in a more responsible manner, and because engineers will participate in this program, they will start to consider the environment more, as they will be active participants in helping to preserve it.

The second component of the program will be instituting quarterly environment education seminars for all employees, including engineers. These seminars will show the employees the impact that the company is having on the environment including a project by project breakdown and will also show how many resources the company is saving with its waste management program. For example, companies could show their electricity, paper, water, or product materials usage statistics over time. Additionally, the seminar will provide a comprehensive overview of a different big environmental issue every seminar. These seminars will consistently help keep engineers updated about the state of the world and keep them conscious about the world around them.

The third component of the program will be a semi annual hands on service project that employees at the office will have to participate it. This can be done as a group or alone, but will need to consist of two hours of doing a project like helping to plant a garden or cleaning the beach. The project will get employees into the world and help them see the problems first hand. Once they experience it, engineers will feel that they have a personal attachment to the environmental problems and are more likely to buy-in after having personally contributed work to help the problems.

This comprehensive program addressing engineers in the daily work environment, in an educational way, and in an active way will allows them to get a holistic understanding of environmental issues and will hopefully get them thinking about ways that they can consider the environment when designing products in their work. At first, we will pioneer this program at a small company as a first run. Once the kinks have been ironed out and we are satisfied, we will begin to roll out this program to companies who are interested in the helping the environment as part of company culture and then, hopefully, to a wide range of companies. Companies will have the option of implementing one, two, or all three modules so that we can customize the experience to each companies respective needs.