Find below some available and past project proposals for Capita Selecta projects. Feel free to write me an email to discuss any of them.

Some of these projects might lead to publications if they are rigorously conducted, which contribute to a high grade and look nice in your CV.

You may also want to read this research roadmap paper for ideas on other potential Capita Selecta projects on Responsible Software.

Currently available projects

• Developing a tool that ranks the societal relevance of a list sustainability topics by performing text mining over social networks and news sites. Such functionality is useful for materiality assessment; that is, deciding which sustainability topics a company should report about (e.g, see how Nestlé reports about this).
• Creating a repository of best practices on democratic processes, with an emphasis in corporate democracy (i.e. democracy within enterprises). Each best practice will be specified with a textual explanation plus an enterprise model of the best practice (i.e. models of the necessary organisational structures, business processes, business rules, data, supporting technology, etc.).
• Comparing a method for impact assessment with a method for software sustainability assessment. It involves metamodelling both methods and analysing similarities and differences, and applying them to one or several cases in order to ascertain those differences.
• Comparing the expressiveness of several mathematical languages to specify sustainability indicators (e.g. MathML, LaTeX, troff/eqn, AsciiMath, Excel or Google Sheet formulas) and carrying out an experiment to assess their learnability, comprehensibility, ease of editing, and the user perceptions.
• Defining the architecture of an open-source, versatile socio-environmental auditing tool that will include some model-driven features. It should include variants and rationale for some architectural decisions.
• A review of interface modelling languages and model-driven tools to generate or interpret interfaces. And implementing a proof of concept of a user interface interpreter, based on the best possible candidate technology.
• A review of technologies for automatically generating documents such as PDF files and websites. These will include model-driven tools of several natures (e.g. model-driven transformation environments, libraries, plug-ins).
• Gather information about organisations that conduct socio-environmental auditing, in order to find out the improvement actions they defined by over the years and the actual impact of these. To do this, you will collect sustainability reports available in company websites and repositories, and you will also conduct interviews with enterprise stakeholders. Then you will properly analyse the results with Nvivo to come up with evidence-based conclusions. Collaterally, you will also investigate the perceived limitations of current tools that support socio-environmental auditing.
• Analysis of existing tools for socio-environmental auditing. Among other aspects, you will compare the features they offer, the implementation technology, the type of deployment, and their licensing scheme.
• Analyse the results of an experiment on model-driven requirements engineering. You will have understand the experiment by reading a paper that describes it. Then you will review in depth the quality of ca. 20 class diagrams, using a template implemented in Excel. Then you will run some statistical methods to verify the hypotheses.

Past projects

• Creating a repository of business models and methods around socio-environmental auditing. Carried out Rim Mukhopadhyay and Carolus Widiyatmoko.
• Developing a tool for materiality assessment that performs text mining over sustainability reports. Carried out by Cas Jongerius.