Project 3

After going through the challenges I noticed that there are many things that happen behind what we are able to see in technology. After seeing the amount of information your phone can have about you, and realizing identities are easily accessible from the internet and app’s we use, I realized I needed to know more. I think it is important in these situations to be fair and not necessarily pick a side to support. Personal privacy is most definitely something people deserve especially when terms are agreed upon. I believe the main issue is that people don’t understand that they are agreeing to terms that allow these companies and resources to access your information. Companies believe that they deserve the data from the users since they are already providing them with such a useful purpose.

At this rate, the more technology innovated and devices connected to the internet will cause more problems then there already are. In order to prevent these kinds of attacks that we have seen we must take action. Essentially, technology in the future may cause different kinds of attacks that we haven’t seen. This means more devices the more disclosure of information.

To prevent future attacks from happening in any case we must act for new standards in the field of technology. Most people simply aren’t aware of what is happening in their phones, take for example, all smart phones have tracking devices. The goal for people should be to keep privacy of their location, personal information in case of hacking or pure business schemes, and even your identity when your visible on the network. To prevent this, companies have to incorporate the privacy and security assurance for users when their product is released.

I think privacy is definitely important and shouldn’t be neglected because its what makes something quality and worth having. For example, I think my bank is the best bank because it provides the best security at the bank or even on the bank website or phone application. We want to be able to use things like google, facebook etc. without having to worry whether our information is leaking through in a way that we can’t tell. In this sense, the important thing to take away is that in a system of connected devices each device has a unique path and packet of information. That path and packet of information can simply lead to us and steal our information as if they were stealing our wallet or purse. The only way we can make a change is if we enforce encryption, verify protocol requests, check the hardware and assure yourself of all proper components, most importantly work with vendors you trust and are assured the security you deserve.

Project 2

 

The job interview process guide offers information on how students should prepare for their career as they study at Notre Dame. To find what we want to do professionally in our future we must aim to intern/work at a few or more companies during our undergraduate experience. Being an intern gives you advantage at knowing the in and out of how a company operates and how you could potentially very well be part of the company and lead an important role. Many jobs are given huge titles with very big responsibility, this responsibility is given to you since you are experienced in that expertise. Same as those jobs, once you graduate you are expected to have some experience and knowledge about how things really work in the field you are currently in, this case Computer Science.

I wish that as a student at Assumption College I had searched more for job opportunities on my own, but in reality i cant really blame myself because I couldn’t find the resources. When I transferred to Notre Dame in Fall of 2016 I really began to see the amount of importance people put on becoming part of the outside world. Everyone around you was there to help you become successful. I will never forget, i was walking on south quad one day my first month here and this man walks by me and says hello. After talking for a minute or two he told me his job here on campus is to help students achieve all their goals and remain on task. He told me it would be a difficult but a great experience. He was right, it has been really hard but every time I’ve addressed my issues to my classmates and professors they have never let me down.

The best advice i can give other students is to take advantage of all the great resources we have here on the Notre Dame campus. The career center offers various different types of resources and they have their own web page. On the webpage you can find links to almost anything you can imagine that will help you find your career path. The career center can help you search for a career if you do not know what you want. If you do know what career you want to pursue then the offer resume workshops or networking events and even mock interviews if your ready to apply for an interview or job!

It is really important that universities/colleges adjust their curriculum so that students are preparing for their career simultaneously. Becoming part of the Notre Dame community means to be academically involved but also commitment to extracurricular activities shows reliability of a certain individual. Personally I was part of the Mathematics and Computer Science club at Assumption College. I enjoyed being part of the group because i grew as an individual i developed some new hobbies that i was not aware of. The point is that creating relationships with your peers is what shapes your path into your career. Whether its getting advice, giving advice, or working in a group all your experiences will be real after four years of studying at Notre Dame.

One thing I would suggest Notre Dame to work on is to hire professionals that will eventually meet with every Notre Dame student at least 4-8 times in their 4 year experience as an undergraduate. I believe that one on one work is really important because it will improve the pace at which you follow your curriculum. Essentially, these people could get to know students and who they are to a personal level so that they could help them with class registration, career search, class issues and many more things. I believe professors should not be advisors at the same time as they are teaching. The reason being that teachers are already expected a heavy work load and expected to be able to balance that and advising and research is not fair.

EthicsProject2

Project 1

Being a Notre Dame student is truly valuable because we are treated like growing adults and are expected to act the same way. Notre Dame standards have brought together ideas that we refer to as ethical responsibilities. These ethical responsibilities are really important for the future of all students. We go out into the real world not knowing what should be expected and how to act when we were confronted with things we might not like. As a community we value each other work and respect the privacy and ownership. We are here to not only learn but share what we have learned with others so that we grow as one. In the real world there are many things we have no experience in, therefore, we must join together and practice.

Our Code of Ethics for Computer Science and Engineering, like any other, provides a guideline of what is expected of you or anyone around you at Notre Dame. At Notre Dame we all know community is our main foundation, whether its within the classroom or outside the classroom. Our goal was to divide our code of ethics so that it would discuss the following points: General Guidelines to guide our daily lives, Professional and Group ethics and ethical questions in the CSE/CPEG fields.

As students and beings at Notre Dame we should treat each other with respect and care. Our neighbors are our brothers and sisters so we should value their advice and hospitality. Notre Dame students are expected to follow this tradition when they are on campus but most importantly take it with them for the rest of their lives. We hope that all Notre Dame students can share their experience at Notre Dame as a safe, progressive, and valuable experience.

As I already mentioned, Notre Dame is founded on community. Within our community we are expected to act in a professional manner with our peers. This is especially important when we look at working on a group project or discussing anything with our group member/teammate/teacher. We must maintain the respect for other students work to allow the cultivation of a more academically thriving environment where all are successful. We must communicate and elaborate our ideas with diligence.

In the CSE/CPEG fields this topic is really important and much more specific. Since this market is growing really fast we see a lot of vulnerable areas where ego and self preservation can cause destruction. Most applications people use obtain personal data of each user but rarely provides the user with the security and/or encryption of their data. If we obtain other peoples data and preform with it without consent of the user, we are not acting ethical and essentially not acting as a part of the Notre Dame community.

The important thing to understand is that this field introduces new cases all the time. Since everything is not as clear as we would like it to be we must act in a logical way and remember how we can apply ourselves as a person who values their ethical responsibilities. Sometimes there are grey areas where you never expect an issue but it arises and you have to decide how to deal with it.

This Code of Ethics is useful because it gives us the fundamental understanding of what a Notre Dame community resembles. It is our resource to decide how we can make our decisions in the future. Each section is split to show you that ethical responsibilities don’t come in one simple form. Ethical responsibility must be part of our character and guide our futures.

EthicsProject1

Reading 13

Coding is a new literacy not the new literacy. I believe many high schools lack the recognition of computer science education in general. Many people overlook the differences between computer science and programming. Computer science courses are heavily based on mathematical computation rather than programming. Computer science courses like algorithms and data structures rely on a good background in mathematics. In many cases you will find students who are computer science majors and focus more on the mathematical methods they study and rather than programming. Programming essentially represents nothing more than a coding language that applies human logic to preform a task. In most cases you do not need to include extensive mathematics in programs which is what makes it different from Computer Science. That is why I think it is important that all students should be exposed to coding in some form or another.

 

In Obama’s final State of Union, he addressed us to help students learn to write computer code. I believe his message is a lot different than what it just seems. I think Obama intended on leaving the impression that he believes mathematics and computer science are important for our future so we should create the awareness of this field to students at a young age. I agree with Obama, other countries are progressing much faster because students are introduced to computer science and programming from the beginning. The reason why the United States remains behind is because they do not have the programs to support teaching computer science, according to one of the articles one tenth of high schools in the U.S. offer computer science courses.

 

I think the challenges schools might face for this is the price of providing such resources to learn how to code. Due to prices of computers and other technology it is likely that school will face the problem of funding such programs. Another issue is finding computer science teachers since most computer scientists are heavily involved in their work. A programming course should be fit into a typical curriculum like any other course. It is hard to say that it would be required but definitely for some majors other than computer science and absolutely offer it as an elective. Computer science courses should be counted for more credits than any other normal elective would. The biggest problem arises when deciding what content would be covered in these courses. The truth is that you can never expect a philosophy major or any other major for that matter to understand concepts such as variable, functions, lists and more. I believe these programming courses would be best off if they based their content on computational thinking and logic. A course like this would provides students with the most basic knowledge and understanding of how technology works in our world today.

 

It is hard to believe but my high school offered a programming class that was based on designing. As you can see programming can be used for many different things, not just computing mathematical methods like recursion. I think programming fundamentally is based on just being able to convert your logic to machine readable code. All the programs I’ve written I first began by writing a plan. Like an English major would write a outline for their paper I wrote plans for my programs. The plan was in English not code and demonstrated how I would write a program to logically solve my problem. The plan did require understanding the coding language first but the rest was purely my own logic. I think is important for all students to learn how to use logic and be able to apply it to our real world problems. I think that students should at least be introduced to the subject of programming and maybe schools can require it at a half year course but offer it at a full year course. I believe being able to program could be very useful to many people and also interest students into getting a degree in the field.

Reading 12

A patent is simply being grated exclusive rights for creating an invention or creating a new way of doing something that offers something new to a potential user. Patents in my opinion are extremely important because patents allow us to really prove the origin of existence of any kind of product. Patents recognize the hard work someone put in designing it by giving them the right to owning the design and what they can do with it. Because a human like thing to do is compete many competitors will try to take your ideas to bring you down and improve their own business. Things like patents encourage innovation which is important to our future.

In my opinion I think it is really important that patents are granted because they give you exclusive ownership. This can relate to how the keys to your home are grated to you because you own the home. Patents are designed to protect you from other competitors or people making, using, or selling your product without your consent. This allows patent owners to give permission to parties to use their invention on specific terms. I think this is how any kind of technological transaction should be approached. Because technology and inventions can be so powerful and make changes to the world people will always fight to ownership. If an invention is patented from the beginning, there is no question of wondering who the real owner of the invention is or worrying that someone will steal your invention and take credit for it. It seems as if the existence of patents promotes innovation because it gives people the recognition for their work. Most people don’t really recognize or care much about the time and effort a person or people put into designing the device or application of whatever they are using.

I do agree with patent laws, in a sense that inventions must be of practical use in order to be patents. Most patents will happen when people invent on top of a pre existing invention. I think this a really cool and important thing to do now-a-days since technology is evolving so fast and being used for a variety of purposes. According to patent laws, many countries do not allow things such as theories, methods and different discoveries to be patented. To me this seems like the worst part about patents. Patents should be able to protect any type of work or invention you have created no matter if it is available to use in a practical sense at the time being. This also motivates researchers and inventors to continue producing better and more efficient products. As you can see patents give us the confidence to buy certain products. If no patents existed we would have to hope that things like does it work, has it been tested, is it legal, and more would just be true.

Because creativity can come in many different shapes and forms I think patents should be assigned to both software and physical or tangible artifacts. As of now theories, business methods, mathematical methods or programs are not patentable. I think each of those counts as an invention because inventions should really only prove one true ability which is creativity. Humans do not only invent objects but they invent new ways of life, or discover things that no one has ever imagined before. If patents are designed to promote the progress of science and art, then I think they are also designed to promote the progress of computer programmers. Some people think of programming as an art and others think of it as a science but both categories fall into something that would be considered inventive. Just because a computer program is not physically usable does not mean that it doesn’t serve a purpose or solve a problem.

Reading 11

The motivation behind developing and building self-driving cars in my opinion is to improve car safety and efficiency. I think that self driving cars can be helpful in many different ways depending on how you look at it. From a social perspective, self driving cars can free some people up to three hours of driving back and forth every day. From a safety perspective, self driving cars would help reduce the amount of traffic accidents that happen daily. Lastly from an environmental perspective, self driving cars can reduce the amount of fuel being burnt and therefore preventing more carbon dioxide emissions from entering the atmosphere. All of these things are reasonable reasons behind the motivation of building self driving cars.

 

I believe it is very well possible that self driving electric cars will be on the road some day in the near future. I cannot say exactly when that can be possible because like anything and everything self driving cars surely will come with pros and cons that we will have to deal with. Reducing the amount of accidents cannot be assured because there is no technology without flaws. I think it is very very important that when the time comes that self driving cars are released they are produced with no idea in mind that something could possibly go wrong. People agree and disagree on whether the cars should be programmed to minimize casualties even if it causes the death of the rider.

 

I think that programmers should address this situation in an ethical way. One example is that self driving cars with a passenger should avoid crashing into a populated area and instead maneuver the way out risking to crash elsewhere. I think that a self driving car when designed will have the ability to decide the best possible solution to any situation. Whether or not that will save the life of the person in the car is questionable and a reason to why many people don’t agree with self driving cars. My solution and response to this is that every day people continue to put their life at risk when they are on the road and don’t notice it. It is impossible to completely eliminate the chances of casualties when it is already at an all time high.

 

I think that self driving cars will impact society, economics, and the government in a positive way.  Self driving cars will allow us to eliminate the time we take out of our days to drive. If you truly think about it, driving is the only way we are able to do some of the things we do now-a-days. Take for example the fact that my internship is two hours away from my home. Suppose I had a self driving car, that would mean I had 4 extra hours every day to do my work or rest. Also driving for two hours can be extremely tiring and therefore increases the risk of crashing. Remember when Uber first came out and everyone was amazed by prices and time it took to get places. Well you can think of self driving cars the same way, except there is no driver!

 

Of course the government will get priority to using and building self driving cars which is important if we want the protection we ask for in these vehicles. Also I believe the government will be up for a long run in regulating and designing the operational scale of the self driving cars on the streets. When self driving cars become an option and people have already experimented and proven that the self driving cars are safe and usable on the road I will definitely consider having one. This does not mean that I will abandon my car, because to someone like me driving cars is almost just as good as owning cars. Either way this wouldn’t be a one-day decision, and I think I would really think and research about it before I was to purchase and use one.

Reading 10

Artificial intelligence is the theory that machines can be programmed to preform specific tasks that can relate to humans. The goal of AI is to enable machines to preform things that are normally done by humans but particularly, things that are tied into showing true intelligence. According to the definition I think many things can be considered AI in the software development field but that doesn’t have to say the products have the pure intelligence as a human would but instead none at all and still able to act. Many people say the goal is to build machines that think as humans would. I think it is hard to say that I agree with this because I see many other problems that come in advance that would not allow people to design such technology to test these machines. Saying that I agree that AI will be able to preform specific tasks that they are designed to preform. It’s possible that people can expand with this and be able to add imitations of more human like actions. Also I believe robots can be designed to move and act smoothly like humans. The point where I become skeptic is in thinking that machine robots can actually think intelligently on their own without the help of some program or human instruction.

AlphaGo, Deep Blue, and Watson are ways that people have come together to explore the possible ability of artificial intelligence in work and practice. I truly believe that these are proof of the viability of artificial intelligence because they are they the most we have to show for artificial intelligence which has come a long way in a short time. I think that people expect something sci-fi when they thing of AI and it shouldn’t be that way because its impossible without exploring each step of the way. With technology and software development I think it is important to make sure that you design something at a low scale initially and then work your way up making sure each step you test your production and ensure quality debugging. Besides, thinking that a robot can be designed to think exactly like an intelligent human is assuming that we have already discovered where our thoughts and motives come from.

 

I think that the Turing Test has become a measure of seeing if a robot can pass for a human. One example is Ex Machina which was designed based on the Turing Test. The Turing Test was intended to decide whether a machine can think in a way differently from a human. I believe that the Turing Test is valid in this situation because it isn’t proving that an AI is a human but rather seeing if the the AI can think like a human and differently than what is expected. As we see in Ex Machina Ava proved that she could think for her own and not what Nathen whom designed her himself had designed her to think. Ava passed the test because she was able to work her way through everything using the power of what would be considered her mind if he was actually human. The problem is when it gets technical because humans have interactions that are not so easily analyzed and for that reason what I am saying is one hundred percent true.

 

Biological humans have lived for thousands of years on this world tracing history and coming up with philosophies of how humans think and where human reasoning comes from yet still don’t have the full understanding of it. Because this topic is controversial and people look at it from many different ways you can argue that humans will never have the ability to include such features into a robot. If something like this can ever be achieved I think there will be many problems regarding people’s motives behind designing robots to do malicious things. I think a computing system can be considered a mind but what divides it from a human mind is that it doesn’t have conscious to create the decisions. There is no way a human is biological computer because no such thing exists or at least has been discovered to exist. Realistically after seeing the things that can happen in the world we live in by people, we can only imagine how much less controllable such disasters would be if robots were to be responsible.

Reading 9

Net neutrality is a principle put in play to give users, no matter what internet provider they use, the access to applications on an equal basis without setting other providers back. New regulations have been passed to protect the flow of content on the internet. This means streaming video, music, and other things will be available for streaming at the same speed as all other ISP’s (Internet service providers). The important things that will change for people in the future are not as easy to see. One way for example is that providers will be prohibited from blocking streaming companies disregarding the fact that they are competitors. The important thing to realize is that if you are purchasing for 60 mbps for example you will get the full speed for all the sites you visit and not only for the sites that the provider approves of and less speed or none for the sites that the provider decides to block for personal purposes. To be specific this is a battle between ISP’s (or internet service providers) and content providers such as Netflix and we (users) are in between the mess. This is of huge interest to me because I rely on both my internet service provider and content providers so it would bother me if my ISP blocked something that works in my interest.

 

I agree that the internet should be treated like a public utility because it provides a variety of useful resources to the population. To take resources away from particular people acts as discrimination. Users pay for the resource to access what they need to, same as when using your telephone service, you can call anywhere in the world for the price. The service should be provided with quality experience. It is hard to tell the future with net neutrality but is important for those who pay the expensive price to access the internet to fight for what they are promised in their contract. Since I am in favor of Net Neutrality if I had the ability to invest the time and money into creating some kind of application that would provide users of various ISP’s to test the speeds at which their ISP is broadcasting their content. Also as I investigate more I will look into finding out whether my content providers such as Netflix and HBO are providing my internet provider with the speed to back up their content loading. Because the situation relies on both parties I believe till they find the solutions no users of any ISP will be able to argue that they are not receiving the speeds and access to different content based on interest and the promised speeds. I strongly agree that people should be able to access any content on the web that isn’t prohibited by the government regardless what internet service provider they have.

Reading 8

The idea of corporate personhood is the idea that corporates should be referred and recognized by constitutional law as an individual person that has rights given to protect them. Having said that this doesn’t include that corporates are not given all of the rights that are given to people. I believe for anyone and everyone this is where the problem arises to ask us where are the boundaries for a situation like this. Before discussing any further I want to discuss where I believe the biggest problems will occur from this relationship. I think that people, regardless their motive and goals, will try their best to benefit from the companies they work for and hope that they will be protected from the company. This situation shows how corporates can be taken advantage of and for that reason are not given all the same rights and humans and cannot protect humans but rather will aim to protect the corporation itself. This could easily happen the other way around too.

The legal ramifications for corporate personhood have been a problem since the 1800s. It is important to remember that the constitution was written before corporates were actually established and ran for things other than public services. The first time we saw the state protect corporations was when chief Justice John Marshall defended Dartmouth college as a “private corporation”. Soon corporates were given the ability to sue in federal courts. Corporates were individuals in a sense that they could sue and be sued and have contracts but obviously couldn’t do things like vote. The argument of whether or not corporate personhood is a real thing goes till this day. American corporations seem to become more and more politically involved and this worries a lot of people because they don’t always have a democratic approach. According to justice John Paul Stevens:

Stevens argued that corporate political speech did not merit protection because “the structure of a business corporation … draws a line between the corporation’s economic interests and the political preferences of the individuals associated with the corporation; the corporation must engage the electoral process with the aim to enhance the profitability of the company, no matter how persuasive the arguments for a broader … set of priorities.”

 

I believe that IBM was not ethical in doing business with Nazi Germany because the provided them with the help to achieve the destruction of Jewish People. A horrible genocide like that one should not be supported by any ethical person. IBM was able to build machines that could track information of all Jewish people living in the eastern world. Unfortunately, it is true that a good chunk of the technology Nazi Germany used came from the American company IBM. It is clear that IBM demonstrated an unethical decision in aiding the genocide of the Jewish people in Europe. I believe that a company like IBM should be responsible for the death of those innocent people because they knew what the technology was being used for before it was even used. IBM, or any company, should refrain from doing business with immoral or unethical organizations because it is purely the right thing to do.

 

If corporations are given the same rights as persons, they should definitely be expected to have the same ethical and moral obligations. If corporations want to have the rights of persons in the first place they have to understand that person rights also come with ethical and moral obligation. You see in a case study like IBM and Nazi Germany we can see immediately that these obligations are not met. IBM could deserve its rights, if it had met the same ethical and moral obligations of people. IBM provided assistance to murdering each and every one of the Jews.

 

Reading 5

The Therac-25 devices were built with lasers that could kill cancerous tissue deep inside the body. Because of the power intensity it would be likely that it would cause damage to healthy tissue as well. So chemotherapy is used to heal the patient and allow the body to heal properly. Unfortunately, there were 6 patients that were exposed to overdose of radiation leaving 4 deceased. According to the investigation the software that ran the hardware had bugs and the machine’s safety relied on the computer. In other words, the hardware had no type of detecting sensors that could determine if the software was bugged or not. Therac-25 accidents are known to be the worst software bugs in history. I believe that we should be discover the abilities of the devices we use a lot more so that we can prevent horrible things such as these to happen to people who are already suffering as it is.

 

Regarding the therac-6 and 20 (which came before the therac-25 hardware), interlocks prevented the operator from doing something dangerous. Once the technician entered a prescription the computer would do the rest of the work. When therac-25 was designed, manual controls and hardware were removed, and the interlocks made it so that the computer could keep track of the detection of errors.

 

We can see that we are quickly moving into a society where computers are embedded into most of the things around us. Because of this, people can be both physically damaged and have their personal information compromised. Many systems that we don’t take to be system-critical systems are, in fact, system-critical, and they are beginning to work together. It is also important to realize and take into account some limitations of software engineering because it may involve many different technical fields. A safety-critical system is responsible for the effect on one or more people, so for it to fail is imaginable.

 

Some challenges facing software developers include, for example, the need for increased testing of programmer code. There could be hidden bugs that programmers and testers are unaware of—in order to prevent this, we need to implement strong testing procedures and encourage programmers to be more aware and careful when working in a safety-critical system. Another challenge facing software developers working safety-critical systems besides safety which is extremely important is security. I believe the security of things as well as the safety needs to be looked into much more carefully because it seems to be something many people overlook now-a-days. For example, one way to look at it is people’s security in these high risk of attack buildings that lie in major cities all over the world. Every architecture must keep in mind the ability of outside attacks on the buildings they are designing. Peoples security in those buildings is extremely important! Either way we look at a situation like this the main point lies in the fact that the developers designing and building any kind of product no matter the shape or form must keep in mind many factors that can affect the users.