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Archive / INF Seminars 2018-2025 / INF_2025_09_25_MarcoRaglianti

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	Dataset Not Anonymized, Reject. A Personal Account of Ethics, Privacy, and Anonymization Issues in SE Research

Chair: Marco Paganoni

Thursday

25.09

USI Campus EST, Room D0.03

16:30 - 17:30


	Marco Raglianti Università della Svizzera italiana

Abstract: Research in software engineering puts many ethical roadblocks (or at least checkpoints) on our path when it comes to performing experiments, conducting surveys, or even analyzing public developer conversations. And I am not talking about forging the answers for that last survey whose reply is two weeks late, despite tomorrow’s deadline for your core PhD paper. Just as an example, when analyzing GitHub repositories, we are (or rather should be) thinking about the potential consequences of our discoveries about developer productivity and the quality of their code. Anonymizing the presented results is not always as straightforward as it seems. And here we start to see the shortcomings of our (at least my) education about ethics.
Starting from the paper by Gold and Krinke, 2020 (Ethical Mining – A Case Study on MSR Mining Challenges), I will go through some episodes in my academic experience that shaped my approach to the problem but also raise important questions on how deep we should go for due diligence. Some institutions (e.g., Carleton University) require preemptive authorization by an Ethics Review Board for the study to be conducted, even for a Master Thesis. While others, like USI, only recently approved (December 2023) an Ethics Code of Conduct, whose chapter 3 includes three (3!) full pages on integrity and ethics of scientific research. The referenced documents just show how inadequate is our preparation to handle the nuances and implications of ethical considerations about our research work. Do we really need to care? Can we improve our current practices on a personal or even institutional level? Are there some inevitable shortcomings tied to the current peer review model?

Biography: Dr. Marco Raglianti is a postdoctoral research fellow in the REVEAL (Reverse Engineering, Visualization, Evolution Analysis Lab) research group, at the Software Institute, USI. He obtained his PhD in Software Engineering just a few months ago in the same lab, under t