There are growing interests over various ethical issues (e.g., unclear licensing, privacy, fairness, and environment impact) in the process of software development. In this talk, I will start by introducing several examples of unethical behavior (e.g., self-promotion, unethical naming) in the context of open-source software projects. Then, I will discuss several recent papers that draws upon research supported by the Government of Canada’s New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF). To ensure responsible code generation, we introduce a novel coverage-based harmfulness testing technique that identifies harms in automatically generated code by large language models (LLM). Finally, I will introduce the novel notion of Ethically Sourced Code Generation (ES-CodeGen) to refer to managing all processes involved in code generation model development from data collection to post-deployment via ethical and sustainable practices .The concept of ES-CodeGen draws upon insights gained from our multi-disciplinary literature review and survey with experienced developers. Our study identifies several findings and key challenges for future research towards ethically sourced code generation.

Bio: Shin Hwei Tan is an Associate Professor (Gina Cody Research Chair) in Concordia University. Before moving to Concordia University, she was an Assistant Professor in Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China. She obtained her PhD degree from National University of Singapore and her B.S (Hons) and MSc degree from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her main research interests are in automated program repair, software testing and open-source development. She is an Associate Editor for TOSEM and the Guest Editors-in-Chief for the New Frontier in Software Engineering track in TOSEM. She has also served as PCs for top-tier software engineering conferences, where she won 3 best reviewers award (FSE 2020, ASE 2020, ICSE 2022 NIER-track). She is also the general chair of FSE26 which will be held in Concordia University. She recently won the 2025 ACM-W Rising Star Award, ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper award for ICSE 2025 and IEEE Distinguished Paper Award for ICST 2025.