Tackling the COVID elective surgical backlog: Prioritising need, benefit or equality?

The National Health Service (NHS) in the UK is currently facing a significant waiting list backlog following the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, with millions of patients waiting for elective surgical procedures. Effective treatment prioritisation has been identified as a key element of addressing this backlog, with NHS England's delivery plan highlighting the importance of ensuring that those with ‘the clinically most urgent conditions are diagnosed and treated most rapidly'. Indeed, we describe how the current clinical guidance on prioritisation issued by The Federation of Surgical Specialty Associations serves this aim. However, whilst there are strong reasons to prioritise elective surgery in accordance with clinical need, we argue that it would be a mistake to assume that prioritisation in accordance with clinical need requires only a clinical or scientific judgement. The understanding of clinical need that we choose to employ in a prioritisation system will be grounded by some key ethical judgements. Moreover, we may also have to make trade-offs between addressing clinical need, safeguarding equality, and achieving other benefits. As the UK faces up to the backlog, it is important that surgical prioritisation guidelines enshrine a broad range of values that we believe ought to determine access to care in non-emergency circumstances. Our analysis suggests that the current approach to prioritisation is not a sufficiently nuanced way of balancing the different moral values that are operative in this context. © The Author(s) 2023.

Engineering in a Crisis: Observing Students' Perceptions of Macroethical Responsibilities during Pandemics and Natural Disasters

When the ethical responsibilities of engineers are discussed in classrooms, the focus is usually on microethics, which concentrates on individual decision-making, rather than macroethics, that addresses broad societal concerns. Pandemics (e.g., COVID-19) and natural disasters (e.g., hurricanes, derechos) have presented unique opportunities to observe engineering macroethical responsibilities, because unjust social, economic, and environmental systems have been brought to the forefront amidst the responses (e.g., inequitable transportation access). In this paper, we consider pandemics and natural disasters through the lens of engineering macroethics, aiming to understand students' perceptions about the macroethical responsibilities of engineers. In the fall of 2020, we deployed a survey to undergraduate engineering students at two universities (n=424). Students were asked to discuss what they perceived to be the role of engineering professionals in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic and natural disasters. We used a qualitative content analysis to explore the macroethical responsibilities mentioned in students' responses. Many of these responses include considerations of infrastructure resilience, resource distribution, and community equity. Logit models were used to identify which sociodemographic factors were associated with responses that included macroethical responsibilities, revealing engineering major (specifically, civil engineering), employment status, gender identity, and family size, among others as significant factors. The implications from this study include recommendations on curricular content, and identifying which student sociodemographic groups would especially benefit from macroethical content in coursework. © 2023 American Society of Civil Engineers.

Collection and Analysis of Narratives for a Values Charter of the Italian Society for Hospital Pharmacy

In recent years, the field of Narrative Pharmacy was introduced, which particularly addresses the pharmacist not only to guide a relationship of listening to and caring for the patient but also to strengthen and motivate toward the profession, improve relationships with colleagues, enhance the ability to teamwork, and understand emotions. In this paper, we report the analysis behind the construction of the Value Chart from the personal narratives of members of the Italian Society of Hospital Pharmacy. Each member's subjective professional experiences and their own view of themselves within society were collected through a semi-structured interview. Personal thinking, including experiences, feelings, opinions, desires, and regrets was classified by objective methods, from which main concepts were extracted for the Value Chart. The feedback to the survey, including activities during the Covid-19 pandemic management, is classified according to the analytical methods of Kleinman, Frank, Bury and Launer-Robinson. Regarding sentiment analysis, the emotional and subjective context of the text provides an ideal baseline to validate the result. The analysis was implemented using neural networks trained on dictionaries and natural language (i.e., Tweets). The originality of the work lies in the fact that generally value charters are built on a Society's values. In contrast, in this case, individual contributions were gathered to complement the ethical values on which the society is founded. © 2022 IEEE.

Uncoupling Inequality: Reflections on the Ethics of Benchmarks for Digital Media

Our collaboration seeks to demonstrate shared interrogation by exploring the ethics of machine learning benchmarks from a socio-technical management perspective with insight from public health and ethnic studies. Benchmarks, such as ImageNet, are annotated open data sets for training algorithms. The COVID-19 pandemic reinforced the practical need for ethical information infrastructures to analyze digital and social media, especially related to medicine and race. Social media analysis that obscures Black teen mental health and ignores anti-Asian hate fails as information infrastructure. Despite inadequately handling non-dominant voices, machine learning benchmarks are the basis for analysis in operational systems. Turning to the management literature, we interrogate cross-cutting problems of benchmarks through the lens of coupling, or mutual interdependence between people, technologies, and environments. Uncoupling inequality from machine learning benchmarks may require conceptualizing the social dependencies that build structural barriers to inclusion. © 2022 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.

Beyond COVID: The Value of Wastewater Based Epidemiology (WBE) Monitoring for Municipal and Industrial Systems

The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how Wastewater Based Epidemiology (WBE) can be used after COVID-19 in both Municipal and Industrial wastewater systems to proactively monitor, manage, and avoid risks that could negatively impact the business continuity and resiliency of an organization. The history of WBE will first be reviewed to show how it has been used to maximize public health protection and social well-being while minimizing economic impacts and unintended consequences in public and private settings. The design of a WBE monitoring program for Closed, Semi-Closed, and Open Municipal and Industrial wastewater systems will be evaluated through a couple of case studies. Alignment between WBE programs and an organizations' risk management programs, sustainability goals, and ethical considerations will also be explored. Copyright © 2022 Water Environment Federation.

Determinants of e-Learning user satisfaction at a South African University of Technology

This The COVID-19 and its safety precautionary protocols triggered an instantaneous transition to online learning in the higher education institutions (HEIs), to ensure the completion of academic calendars. However, the complexities associated with lingering digital divide in Sub-Saharan Africa and transition to virtual learning means learners from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds become more vulnerable and unlikely to benefit from the paradigm shift. Therefore, building a resilient education system through learning management systems (LMS) for remote learning, that is all-inclusive for students would be hampered by varied degrees of users' satisfaction. The objective of the study was to identify determinants of e-Learning user satisfaction for remote learning at a South African University of Technology. An online questionnaire was administered through a Microsoft form link. A sample of 40 participants were selected from the student population that have experienced blended and exclusive online learning. The data was analyzed to identify determinants of user satisfaction with LMS for learning within the context of study. An ethics clearance certificate was obtained from the relevant Faculty research ethics committee. Learners expressed positive experiences that LMS met their immediate academic needs. Challenges experienced during the learning process were not attributed to the LMS quality, but inadequate facilitating conditions and contextual peculiarities. The post-adoption success of online learning is critical towards building a resilient education system. The results from this study can help HEIs' management and LMS designers to make an informed decision on best practices for an inclusive virtual learning environment with peculiar contextual characteristics. © 2022 IEEE.

A CANVAS FOR THE ETHICAL DESIGN OF LEARNING EXPERIENCES WITH DIGITAL TOOLS

The use of digital tools has drastically increased in engineering education, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. These tools generate important ethical issues, in particular in terms of privacy and fairness. However, very few teacher training programmes address those topics, which means that teachers are often left to figure out by themselves how to address these issues when they want (or have) to use digital tools in their teaching. In this workshop, participants will be introduced to a pragmatic approach to the ethical design of learning experiences that involve digital tools using a visual thinking guide called a 'canvas'. Applied and hands-on, this workshop will help participants to develop a practical understanding of the specific ethical issues related to the use of digital tools in teaching and to integrate ethical reflection into design processes when digital technology is involved. © 2022 SEFI 2022 - 50th Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education, Proceedings. All rights reserved.

Introducing Ethics by Design in Engineering Education: Designing COVID-19 Tracing Apps

Including ethical concepts and considerations in engineering education has attracted significant interest in recent years, mainly due to the impact of some AI applications in different areas of our life. The use of case studies in teaching ethics is a well-known and useful approach. The debate related with a given case study helps students think about the implications, motivations and foreseeable impact of the technologies. This fact is in contrast with the common easy-thinking that technologies are neutral and that an engineer should not bother about ethics and does not have any responsibility at all. While many basic technologies may be considered neutral, more developed and complex systems are not so neutral;they have a motivation and some foreseeable impact and consequences. Thence, the main message is that engineers have a responsibility when developing these systems. This paper presents a case study used in a course for Ph.D. students in a Technical University to introduce the concept of ethics by design and to stress the idea of responsible conduct in engineering. The case under study is the design and development of tracing applications for fighting against the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The analysis of the case requires to understand the basic technologies proposed, the different alternatives considered at that time, the basic facts related with the contagion chain and the main factors to be addressed, the consideration of the balance between public health rights and individual privacy rights, and the social aspects related with the acceptability by citizens. © 2022 SEFI 2022 - 50th Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education, Proceedings. All rights reserved.

CHEATING IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION: MODERN METHODS AND POTENTIAL COUNTER MEASURES

Engineers must engender trust in order to collaborate successfully to produce solutions that the world needs. As part of building this confidence, students with an accredited degree must meet learning outcomes i.e. demonstrate skills to an acceptable standard. Cheating during such assessments reduces professional integrity and future work quality. Through careful assessment practice and encouraging a professional culture with ethics, we may minimise student's opportunity and motivation to take short-cuts. With this in mind, it is useful to understand which technical and professional skills are most affected. Cheating is evolving, with more collaborative online opportunities. Previous research suggests a majority of student's admit to dishonesty at least once, and that there are several motivations, including individual, demographic, institutional, and societal. We describe today's engineering education environment in terms of how it affords cheating behaviours and their methods, including the popularity of online services such as Chegg. By analysing potential cheating methods against a current agreed inventory of contemporary engineering skills, we highlight where educators might focus efforts to reduce bad learning practices. We also consider how the covid pandemic with more online and remote studying amplifies the situation. © 2022 SEFI 2022 - 50th Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education, Proceedings. All rights reserved.

Ethics and Marketing of Social Integration in Cultural, Heritage and Educational Contexts

In the current situation, Covid-19 has highlighted inequalities in all parts of the planet, demarcating a gap between the pandemic framework and social relationships, which require ethics and care in the distance scenario. In this sense, there is an urgent need to proceed with the ethics of care, both in terms of knowledge and action, and it is opportune to reflect on the link between health and education, in a systematic way. Therefore, in this article, the objective is to analyze the systems of acquisition of peace, education and health, aiming to highlight a culture based on the stimulation of conscience, in favour of integration and peaceful transposition of life in society. It is believed that the ethics of care is an element of social integration, based on moral feelings and the human ability to responsibly care for others. From this perspective, it appears that adequate support guarantees the continuity of learning and helps to reduce socio-educational gaps. In this way, it is necessary to defend a social experience in which differences can be recognized, valued and used, in line with the fulfillment of human rights, and the equality of conditions for all, especially those that allude to the containment of the recent pandemic. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Universities as Spaces of Knowledge Creation—Going Through the Test of the Pandemic

Generating knowledge and ensuring that it is presented in an adequate and timely manner is the main challenge of knowledge management in organizations. Learning organizations are formed by collaborators who learn and can share, develop co-knowledge, promote improvements, generate changes and innovation in the processes and results of institutions. Universities are spaces of knowledge creation, but the Covid-19 pandemic has put to the test the processes of knowledge management, both for the resolution of the health crisis and for the new pedagogical organization in the digital context. Based on a speculative philosophical and dialectical critical approach, the article aims to analyze the application of knowledge management categories in universities. The results show the rapid adaptation of institutions to the new reality of the pandemic. It is concluded that the internal communication mechanisms, traditionally applied in the organization of universities, have contributed to a better adaptation to the pandemic scenario. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Online Learning and Students' Ethical Behavior During Covid-19: For Better or for Worse?

With Covid-19 limiting social interaction to prevent the spread of viral infections, the education sector in Indonesia, 'forced' schools and higher education to carry out online learning. However, there is a concern that online learning may affect the students' ethical behavior. As there is no human interaction, students are getting used to not meeting people or socializing, so they tend to ignore ethical norms in socializing. The purpose of the study is to find out if students' ethical behavior is related to interpersonal and communication skills. The study used a quantitative method with a sample of 132 active students at the Creativepreneurship Study Program using purposive sampling. The findings showed online learning supports communication and interpersonal skills, but unable to form students' ethical behavior. Online learning behavior, online courses require definite objectives, inner motives, synchronous feedback, and independence of the learners. Even though there are rules regarding ethical behaviour, the rules themselves are not able to influence the student's ethical behavior. Online learning and students' behavior is not only the responsibility of the lecturer, but also the responsibility of the students and their parents. © 2022 IEEE.

African Diaspora Engineering Education Student Experiences in the US: A Collaborative Autoethnographic Study

The number of students of African origin traveling abroad for postgraduate engineering education has increased over the last 30 years. Studying abroad provides unique experiences and benefits for African students and the host country. These experiences place international scholars in an ideal position to reflect on the different experiences between the practices, attitudes, social diversity, and competency development they find in their new study destinations and hence can make suggestions for improvement in their home and host countries. This paper explores the experience, reflections, and adaptation of African scholars to their international educational context during the COVID pandemic, using a collaborative autoethnography methodology. Elements of the theoretical frameworks of acculturation theory and adaptability theory were used in the collection, analysis, and discussion of the paper to address the following research questions: 1) What are the experiences and perspectives of African Diaspora graduate scholars in undertaking engineering education studies in the US? 2) What improvements are suggested for the study environments in their home countries and in the US? The findings raise provocative thoughts about the culture of and the philosophies behind the present nature of instruction, assessment, student supervision, experiences, and workload in the US and African countries. We argue for a need to disrupt several realities that have become a norm for African diaspora students and suggest how this can be done drawing from our own experiences within these unique environments. © 2022 IEEE.

Application of the lean method in designing the layout of face mask manufacturing plants for the prevention of covid-19

The prolonged global coronavirus pandemic (Covid-19) has affected all aspects of life, economy, and society, especially small and medium businesses. To meet this challenge, many companies are transforming models and reorganizing production and operations to adapt to this situation. These companies have adopted a variety of philosophies to remove non-value-Added activities from their production processes to maintain efficiency, flexibility, and profitability. In the context of Industry 4.0, solutions are ready to combine automation technology together with the Lean manufacturing approach. Furthermore, when it comes to efficient use of resources (financial, labor, materials, machine, and equipment), Industry 4.0 should be applied to Lean Processes. Thus, this article shows how to apply the Lean method to optimize plant design to cut waste, improve the efficiency of input resources, increase labor productivity by reducing labor costs, waiting (man-To-man;man-machine), reduced movement, and redundancy of operations in the workflow. Especially, the paper uses the SLP (Systematic Layout Planning) method to arrange the areas, material flow, and supply chain in the factory, Lean application to visualize the factory and combines IoT (Internet of Things). Moreover, using automation and Lean Production theory will support much for factory construction in the future, minimizing irrationalities when applied in practice. The result of the paper will mention a case study on the design and simulation of a face mask plant © 2022 IEEE.

The Influence of Disease Avoidance Motive on the Economic Behavior Ethics under the Impact of Pandemic: A Moderated Mediation Model

Objective: As one of the basic social motives, Disease Avoidance Motive is the deep psychological factor behind many social behaviors. Since the emergence of the COVID-19 and its continuous spread across the world at the end of 2019, the ever-changing and recurring COVID-19 pandemic has increased people's fear and rejection of the threat of infectious diseases, and activated people's Disease Avoidance Motive, which has remained at a high level for a long time. This study takes Disease Avoidance Motive as the starting point, introduces COVID Control Regulations as the intermediary, and disease vulnerability as the regulator, to explore the influence of Disease Avoidance Motive on Economic Behavior Ethics. Methods: Regression analysis, SPSS Statistics and Moderated Mediation Model were applied and 524 random respondents were surveyed through Basic Social Motivation Scale, Pandemic Norm Compliance Questionnaire, Economic Behavior Ethics Questionnaire and Scale of Perceived Vulnerability to Disease. Results: (1) Disease Avoidance Motive positively predicts Economic Behavior Ethics;(2) COVID Control Regulations play a mediating role between Disease Avoidance Motive and Economic Behavior Ethics (3) Perceived Vulnerability to Disease positively moderates the direct effect of Disease Avoidance Motive on Economic Behavior Ethics. Conclusion: Under the moderation of Perceived Vulnerability to Disease, Disease Avoidance Motive exerts an influence on the Economic Behavior Ethics through COVID Control Regulations. © 2022 ACM.

Digital and Language Inequalities in Disseminating COVID-19-Related Health Campaigns in Uganda: The Effects of Confinement and Social Distancing Strategies

This article unveils existing gaps in the use of digital technologies and local languages in the context of official COVID-19 pandemic communication strategies in Uganda. It entails an analysis of a purposively drawn sample of official COVID-19 communication from the Ministry of Health through its website, notably in English and translations into few native Ugandan languages, to argue for the need for a more diverse and inclusive language strategy in pandemic containment and prevention communication strategy. Interviews were also held with a convenient sample of Ugandans from diverse ethnolinguistic and socio-demographic backgrounds to explore the way in which social distancing, a dominant strategy used in COVID-19 infection prevention control was understood by sections of the population and factors influencing their understanding, acceptance or rejection of this strategy. Discursive thematic analysis was employed to examine the ways in which important public health information and strategies aimed at controlling the spread of COVID-19 are communicated to the culturally and linguistically diverse Ugandan population. The study critically analyses the implications of the cultural interpretations and multiple meanings of strategies such as social distancing and the use of sanitizers amongst a linguistically and socio-economically diverse population. The study argues that local languages, including specialist languages such as braille and sign language play a pivotal role in spreading information and raising awareness about the current global pandemic. It highlights the need to create an inclusive, responsible and ethical mass media and internet communication and content in local Ugandan languages in addition to English which is the official language. © 2022, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.

Digital Contact Tracing Solutions: Promises, Pitfalls and Challenges

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many countries to deploy novel digital contact tracing (DCT) systems to boost the efficiency of manual tracing of infection chains. In this paper, we systematically analyze DCT solutions and categorize them based on their design approaches and architectures. We analyze them with regard to effectiveness, security, privacy and ethical aspects and compare prominent solutions based on these requirements. In particular, we discuss shortcomings of the Google and Apple Exposure Notification API (GAEN) that is currently widely adopted all over the world. We find that the security and privacy of GAEN has considerable deficiencies as it can be compromised by severe large-scale attacks. We also discuss other proposed approaches for contact tracing, including our proposal <sc>TraceCORONA</sc>, that are based on Diffie-Hellman (DH) key exchange and aim at tackling shortcomings of existing solutions. Our extensive analysis shows that <sc>TraceCORONA</sc> fulfills the above security requirements better than deployed state-of-the-art approaches. We have implemented <sc>TraceCORONA</sc> and its beta test version has been used by more than 2000 users without any major functional problems<uri>https://tracecorona.net/download-tracecorona/</uri>, demonstrating that there are no technical reasons requiring to make compromises with regard to the requirements of DCT approaches. IEEE

Predicting and Characterizing Legal Claims of Hospitals with Computational Intelligence: the Legal and Ethical Implications

In this paper we propose a fuzzy logic-based approach to analyze UK National Health Service (NHS) public administrative data related to pre-and post-pandemic claims filed by patients, analyzing the legal and ethical issues connected to the use of Artificial Intelligence systems, including our own, to take critical decisions having a significant impact on patients, such as employing computational intelligence to justify the management choices related to Intensive Care Unit (ICU) bed allocation. Differently from previous papers, in this work we follow an unsupervised approach and, specifically, we perform an analysis of UK hospitals by means of a computational intelligence algorithm integrating Fuzzy C-Means and swarm intelligence. The dataset that we analyse allows us to compare pre-and post-pandemic data, to analyze the ethical and legal challenges of the use of computational intelligence for critical decision-making in the health care field. © 2022 IEEE.

Instructing First-Year Engineering Students on the Ethics of Algorithms through a Role-Play

Introductory engineering courses teach a range of foundational topics to first-year engineering students. An ethics component is often presented as one of these broad topics, usually through a case study module that examines past catastrophic engineering events. In this Research-to-Practice paper, we present findings from a study using role-play scenarios (RPSs) to teach ethics to first-year engineering students. Role-play discussions serve as a collaborative means for students to discuss and negotiate ethical issues to reach an actionable consensus. We designed a role-play scenario that places students on a university task force that is evaluating the adoption or rejection of facial recognition technologies (FRT) to track and identify the COVID-19 reporting status of students, faculty, staff, and visitors. Students were asked to prepare and then participate in role-play discussions which were then assessed for learning. The data supporting this research comes from the role-play discussion transcripts of 86 first-year engineering students who participated in four sections of an undergraduate engineering concepts class during Fall 2020. Our findings show that students successfully identified a breadth of ethical issues, dilemmas, and topics related to the use of FRT on campus. In addition, students employed an ethical reasoning process to create a group consensus with their peers, supporting the overall goal of developing a more situated understanding of ethical decision-making. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022

Faculty Responsibility for Student Safety, Health, and Welfare?

Many engineering codes of ethics state that engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public. As engineering educators should we extend this responsibility to our students? And if so, how? Each of these three elements are distinct in some ways. Faculty are responsible for student safety in experimental laboratory and hands-on design/build settings, for example. Unique safety concerns may arise during study abroad and community engagement activities. During the COVID pandemic faculty may have experienced dilemmas regarding student health (and the health of the surrounding community) as campus administrators made decisions about in-person versus online instruction. Universities and faculty are also increasingly attending to student mental health. Finally, it is argued that considerations of welfare are the most challenging. Faculty perhaps think of student welfare long-term, as they help students build knowledge and skills that may yield post-graduation benefits in terms of employment. But does this long-term perspective cause us to undervalue in-the-moment student welfare? Our policies and practices may cause stress, and stress has been shown to inhibit learning. But other research and theories of learning indicate a positive role of dissonance and stress to the learning process. Thus, overemphasis on short-term avoidance of discomfort in the pursuit of student welfare may impede learning. Exploring these ideas is congruent with faculty who see their role as teaching people (their students) versus teaching subjects/topics/content. Examining our teaching practices through this lens of our foundational ethical obligation as engineers may cause us to change our approaches. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022