About

The Workshop on Hot Topics in Ethical Computer Systems (HotEthics'24) provides a unique forum for cutting-edge research on identifying challenges and exploring innovative approaches to align technology with ethical principles in computer systems.This motivation is in the same vein as the recent plenary talk at FCRC by Prof. Margaret Martonosi, the ex-NSF associate director, on the need for emerging research on socially-responsible system design. Researchers can share their research and experiences, while discussing new challenges and opportunities in building socially conscious system infrastructures. The topics span across the full system stack with a focus on potential ethical concerns arising from system and architecture design choices, or resolving existing ethical issues through careful system and architecture design.

Call for Papers

HotEthics'24 welcomes submissions on topics related to addressing or pointing out the ethical implications of modern systems and architectures. Some examples include addressing or pointing out the ethical implications of:

  • Environmental impact of system designs
  • Systems for rural/developing communities
  • Biases introduced by modern computer systems
  • Low-cost / low-power device design
  • Privacy and security
  • Biases in ML for systems
  • Benchmarking
  • System reliability / maintainability

Submission Guidelines

HotEthics'24 welcomes submissions of both short papers (2 pages) and long papers (4 pages), excluding references, using a double-column format (11 pt and 8.5 in x 11 in). Accepted papers and presentation slides will be made available on the workshop website. Reviews will not be blind, so please submit without anonymizing authors.

There will be no formal proceedings, allowing authors the flexibility to extend and publish their work in other conferences and journals. The workshop also welcomes summaries of the authors' previous work in the area and how it applies to socially-responsible system design. The HotEthics'24 workshop will also extend invitations for talks from both industry and academia.

Please submit your work here.

Important Dates

  • Submission Deadline: March 26, 2024 AoE
  • Workshop: April 28, 2024

Workshop Program

Location: Grande D, Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines

(All times are in PT)

Breakfast

Opening Remarks

Session 1: On a Mission to Reduce Emissions

  •  
    The Sustainability Gap for Computing
    Lieven Eeckhout (Ghent University)
  •  
    Silicon Efficiency in Post-Moore Servers
    Ali Ansari, Shanqing Lin, Ayan Chakraborty, Bugra Eryilmaz (EPFL); Mohammad Alian (University of Kansas); Babak Falsafi (EPFL); Michael Ferdman (Stony Brook University)
  •  
    Intergenerational Embodied Carbon
    Aster Plotnik, Karthik Ganesan, Natalie Enright Jerger, Mark C. Jeffrey (University of Toronto)
  •  
    Towards Understanding the Carbon Impact in End-to-end Sensing Pipelines
    Harsh Desai, Sara McAllister, Nathan Beckmann, Brandon Lucia (Carnegie Mellon University)

Session 2: Thinking Outside the (Carbon) Box

  •  
    The Environmental Impact of Forever Chemicals in Computing Systems
    Mariam Elgamal, Abdulrahman Mahmoud, Gu-Yeon Wei, David Brooks, Gage Hills (Harvard University)
  •  
    Repair as Design: A Study on Engineering Student Attitudes and Experiences in Electronics Repair
    Esther Roorda, Emily Shilton, Sathish Gopalakrishnan (The University of British Columbia)
  •  
    Electronic Waste Footprint of Computer Systems
    Pranjali Jain, Claire Pemberton, Ivan Hernandez, Mariana Rosillo, Samantha West, Jonathan Balkind, Timothy Sherwood (UC Santa Barbara)

Session 3: This Session is a No BrAIner

  •  
    Towards Socially and Environmentally Responsible AI
    Pengfei Li, Yejia Liu, Jianyi Yang, Shaolei Ren (UC Riverside)
  •  
    Is TinyML Sustainable? Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Machine Learning on Microcontrollers
    Shvetank Prakash, Matthew Stewart, Colby Banbury, Mark Mazumder (Harvard University); Pete Warden (Useful Sensors, Stanford University); Brian Plancher (Barnard College, Columbia University); Vijay Janapa Reddi (Harvard University)
  •  
    Towards Forever Access for Implanted Brain-Computer Interfaces
    Muhammed Ugur, Raghavendra Pradyumna Pothukuchi, Abhishek Bhattacharjee (Yale University)
  •  
    The Interplay of Computing, Ethics, and Policy in Brain-Computer Interface Design
    Muhammed Ugur, Raghavendra Pradyumna Pothukuchi, Abhishek Bhattacharjee (Yale University)

Session 4: Social(ly Conscious System Design) Commentary

  •  
    Why Do We Need This Workshop?
    James McCauley (Mt. Holyoke College); Aurojit Panda (NYU); Scott Shenker (ICSI and UC Berkeley)
  •  
    Can we optimize without specializing?
    Aurojit Panda (NYU)
  •  
    Ethical Considerations of Benchmarking
    Victor Kariofillis, Jingyang Liu, Natalie Enright Jerger (University of Toronto)

Session 5: Socially Conscious System Re-Design

  •  
    The Once And Future Internet
    James McCauley (Mt. Holyoke College); Arvind Krishnamurthy (University of Washington); Tejas Narechania (UC Berkeley); Aurojit Panda (NYU); Scott Shenker (ICSI and UC Berkeley)
  •  
    Towards Privacy-Preserving Audio Classification Systems
    Bhawana Chhaglani, Jeremy Gummeson, Prashant Shenoy (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
  •  
    Demographic Bias in Data Center Scheduling Systems
    Sara Mahdizadeh Shahri (Carnegie Mellon University)
  •  
    The Need for Equitable System Design: Lessons Learned From A Co-design Study with Low-Income Communities
    Stefany Cruz, Stephen Xia, Maia Jacobs (Northwestern University); Josiah Hester (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Audience Panel/Discussion

As a group, discuss how the systems community can begin to consider ethical system design as a first-order consideration. (e.g., What are the challenges and opportunities in this space? How can we ensure that ethical considerations are not an afterthought, but rather a core part of the design process?)

Organizers

Jaylen Wang

Carnegie Mellon University
jaylenw at cmu dot edu

Sara Mahdizadeh Shahri

Carnegie Mellon University
smahdiz at cmu dot edu

Akshitha Sriraman

Carnegie Mellon University
akshitha at cmu dot edu