Examinations of whether particular actions or intentions are ethical or not must grapple with the questions of what the applicable ethical standards are, how people may act in particular situations and why. These are difficult questions and the subject of much inquiry. There are many schools of thought and disciplines for answers, from religious traditions to philosophical to psychology.

This chapter presents an interview with Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet. The chapter discusses his personal views on ethics, data and privacy, net neutrality, public policy, self-driving cars, genetic codes, and reflections on the future.

The global engineering/construction industry is huge. In 2017, it was estimated to be an $8.8 trillion industry (Market Research Hub, 2016). The US construction industry in 2017 was estimated at $1.2 trillion (Wilcox, 2018). Because the industry is comprised of a myriad of projects to build new facilities or to repair or upgrade existing ones, it is often the location for bribery, fraud, and corruption. Government leaders in Panama, Brazil, and Spain have been removed from office for receiving bribes and kickbacks from projects in their countries. Engineering firms in the United States and Canada have been sanctioned for giving bribes to secure projects. These are the facts.

In an era of corporate mistrust, creating sustainable ethical corporations goes beyond implementing governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) strategy. It requires an ongoing intensified spotlight to make the highest ethical standards the norm, and ruthless intolerance of anything less. Corporations are at a tipping point seeking to build sustainable businesses while striving to avoid a front-page scandal. They are placing greater scrutiny on values as business enabler, leadership accountability, and building ethical decision-making as an integrated business process. The next generation of ethical systems is at our corporate doorstep. As Albert Einstein famously said, “we cannot solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Today’s workplace has an unprecedented four generations working alongside each other. Globalization and the flattened twenty-first-century economy have pivotally shifted the norms of communication, information sharing, and collaboration. Greater visibility through mass media and social media has revealed new consumer and corporate behaviors. With greater transparency at our fingertips, trust has become the new currency, evidenced in the backlash as trust in public officials and corporate leaders steadily declines. The Edelman Trust Barometer has been studying trust across four institutions since 2012: businesses, government, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and media. Their 2017 report reveals that trust has declined broadly across all four institutions and that trust is in crisis around the world.

Large-scale aggregate analyses of anonymized data can yield valuable results and insights that address public health challenges and provide new avenues for scientific discovery. These methods can extend our knowledge and provide new tools for enhancing health and well-being. However, they raise questions about how to best address potential threats to privacy while reaping benefits for individuals and for society as a whole. The use of machine learning to make leaps across informational and social contexts to infer health conditions and risks from nonmedical data provides representative scenarios for reflections on directions with balancing innovation and regulation.

Medicine has a dichotomous personality, some of it is science and some of it is art. The science of medicine focuses on the technical skills and proficiency; whereas the art of medicine examines the ethical decision-making, professionalism, and relationships we foster to provide care to patients, comfort to families, and compassion to colleagues. It is often referred to as bedside manner, but it extends beyond that. It is communication, honesty, and respect.

There is an emerging body of legal thought directed at contemporary profiling and data science. Some of this focuses on limiting ‘human computability’, some addresses questions of ‘manipulation’ and ‘behavioural optimisation’, and some suggests ways to introduce friction into the information environment to interrupt the translation of data into meaning. This chapter looks at how some of these ideas might be implemented as computational legal applications. It argues that the legal subject of algorithmic accountability can be expanded into a rights-bearing entity that can actively contest how it is computationally interpreted, through mechanisms of ‘contestation by design’. The chapter also describes the utility of concepts like ‘context’ for building boundaries and friction into information architectures, not simply in terms of information flow but also for constraining how the design of those architectures influences and structures behaviour. Finally, it suggests the shape of a new ‘composite’ legal person as a mechanism to constrain profiling behavior by producing an identity as an interface to the ‘world state’ it inhabits.

It has been twelve years since our article “Women in Computer Science: No Shortage Here!” (Othman and Latih, 2006) was published. It is disheartening that after more than a decade, gender disparity in computer science (CS) is still an issue. Among important findings of our previous study is that young Malaysian females and males have a markedly different attitude toward science and mathematics compared with their Western counterparts. CS and information technology (IT) is not viewed as a masculine field by young Malaysians, which is a key reason why this nation does not encounter the problem of too few females being interested in pursuing a degree in CS/IT.

Historically, it is known that women had an important role in computing. History lessons on computer science narrate that women were some of the first software engineers until technology and practices changed the role of women as programmers.