Brown Socially Responsible Computing Handbook
The Brown Socially Responsible Computing Handbook is an open teaching resource for integrating ethics, responsibility, and social context into computer science education. It is designed for instructors, TAs, and students, and offers practical material for embedding socially responsible computing into existing technical courses rather than treating it as a separate add-on.
The handbook includes curated modules on themes such as privacy, accessibility, automated decision making, and generative AI, along with case studies, discussion prompts, and adaptable classroom activities. It is intended to help course staff structure lessons, connect technical content to real societal impact, and support students in critical, inclusive design thinking. Learn more at srch.cs.brown.edu.
A Stakeholder Framework for Assignment Design
This research project introduces a stakeholder-based framework for designing technical assignments that make social values and trade-offs explicit. The framework asks students to implement a concrete feature (in this case, privacy-related functionality) while working through tensions between stakeholders with competing goals.
Our paper in USENIX Security 2025 reports on the framework in a second-year computer systems assignment and finds that different stakeholder conflicts lead students to different design choices and value priorities. More broadly, the work shows how assignment design can help students translate abstract concepts (such as privacy rights) into concrete technical decisions. Read the paper at this link.