Gotterbarn receives ACM award
JOHNSON CITY (June 6, 2018) – Dr. Donald Gotterbarn has been named a recipient of the 2018 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Presidential Award for his role in the development of the blueprint for professional conduct in the international computing community.
Gotterbarn, professor emeritus in the Department of Computing at East Tennessee State University, is being recognized for 25 years of service as the chief architect of the ACM’s Code of Professional Ethics. This living document has been adopted by the computing community worldwide.
“A lot of people want to talk about country differences, but when it comes to the profession of building software that’s usable and helps people, those things don’t matter,” Gotterbarn said. “Language differences don’t matter. It’s about the testing and how the software impacts people. In that sense, the code is international.”
As chair of the ACM’s Committee on Professional Ethics, Gotterbarn has led an international task force to develop the 2018 code revisions to be released this summer.
“In 1992, when I was helping develop the first code of ethics, computing didn’t run pacemakers, there was no social media, no internet, so it doesn’t address a lot of the current issues,” Gotterbarn said. “Now we have machines that write their own programs – machine learning. Predictability becomes more difficult, so your responsibility is greater.”
Among his many achievements, Gotterbarn has helped to define what it means, ethically, to be a computing professional. He was a forerunner in recognizing the critical importance of professional ethics and has worked tirelessly—as both an educator and a practitioner—to advance this message to a global audience by developing a computer ethics curriculum, leading workshops and holding leadership roles in the ACM.
Gotterbarn is founder and director of the Software Engineering Ethics Research Institute at ETSU. He came to the university in 1990 to help establish a computer science master’s program in software engineering and developed a passion for ethics as computers began to have a greater impact on daily life. Gotterbarn started the virtual research institute in 1996 and it continues to be a valuable resource for computing students and practitioners.
Gotterbarn received a master of divinity degree from the Colgate Rochester Divinity School, as well as an M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Rochester. His honors include three faculty excellence awards for scholarship from ETSU’s College of Business and Technology, as well as the ACM Special Interest Group for Computers and Society (SIGCAS) Making a Difference Award and the International Society for Ethics and Information Technology (INSEIT) Weizenbaum Award.