Teaching Computer Vision and Its Societal Effects: A Look at Privacy and Security Issues from the Students’ Perspective

In this paper, we look at the societal effects of computer vision technologies from the perspective of the future minds in computer vision: senior year engineering students. Engineering education has traditionally focused on technical skills and knowledge. Nowadays, the need for educating engineers in socio-technical skills and reflective thinking, especially on the bright and dark sides of the technology they develop, is being recognized. We advocate for the integration of social awareness modules into computer vision courses so that the societal effects of technology can be studied together with the technology itself, as opposed to the often more generic 'impact of technology on society' courses. Such modules provide a venue for students to reflect on the real-world consequences of technology in concrete, practical contexts. In this paper, we present qualitative results of an observational study analyzing essays of senior year engineering students, who wrote about societal impacts of computer vision technologies of their choice. Privacy and security issues ranked as the top impact topics discussed by students among 50 topics. Similar social awareness modules would apply well to other advanced technical courses of the engineering curriculum where privacy and security are a major concern, such as big data courses. We believe that such modules are highly likely to enhance the reflective abilities of engineering graduates regarding societal impacts of novel technologies.