We did it!

Did what, you ask? I am, of course, referring to Cassiopeia singing in the European premiere of Ellen Reid’s Earth Between Oceans, which we managed to survive. Not only that – I think we did rather well! It wasn’t perfect, not even close, but certainly nothing to be ashamed of either. In fact, I would go so far as to say that we can be pretty damn proud of ourselves, considering how little time we had to prepare for the performance of by far the most difficult piece we’ve ever done. Not counting two rehearsals before the summer break where we were basically just learning to read the score, we had two months from the start of the choir year to the concert; twice that would have been more like an appropriate time frame.

The conductor, thankfully, turned out to be quite easy to follow as well as generous to cue us in whenever needed, which were the main two things we were hoping for because the piece has many sections where counting the bars is effectively impossible. We definitely could have used some more rehearsal time with the full orchestra, and inevitably there was still some confusion during the performance, but nothing too obvious to the audience. The conductor seemed happy with the outcome, the feedback I’ve heard from others has been enthusiastic, and for me personally the concert left a feeling of accomplishment and relief that still lingers a couple of weeks later.

The Finnish national public broadcaster Yle recorded the concert and it is now streaming on the company’s Areena service, so you can check it out yourself if you’re so inclined. This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first recording of Earth Between Oceans available for the public to listen to. The Areena stream is only accessible in Finland – purportedly anyway, I don’t know if a VPN will do the trick – but the concert is part of an exchange programme run by the European Broadcasting Union and so should be available via other public broadcasters in Europe. I don’t have the details of any other streaming options, but from the EBU website I learned that the total number of people reached by the services of the various member bodies comes to just above one billion. As potential audiences go, I won’t be topping that anytime soon!

The successful completion of the Earth project is made all the more satisfying by the fact that we had to allocate some of our precious rehearsal time to Harmonia, the soundscape performance we presented as part of this year’s Researchers’ Night celebrations in Oulu. For this, the choir was divided into one-hour shifts and each shift further split into two groups, performing in parallel in the two glasshouses of the university’s botanical garden and gradually switching places around the half-hour mark. In the tropical house, “Romeo”, the soundscape was all improvised jungle noises and melodies, whereas in the cooler and drier “Juliet” it had a bit more structure, with the scientific names of plants sung over a droning background chord. For the jungle part we were encouraged to use instruments appropriate for the theme, so I brought a wooden flute I once bought at a folk music festival, allowing me to expand my range of sounds and even sneak in a brief excerpt from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. Surprisingly fun and not at all cringey, at least in my experience!

The day after the Earth concert I departed for an extended weekend holiday in London. The primary motivation for the trip was to see my favourite band play a show at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, but around it I built a fairly intense daily programme of theatre, museums and other cultural experiences. One of the places I visited was the Treasures Gallery at the British Library, where I saw, among many other noteworthy literary items, a leaf from a paper by Alan Turing where he discusses the possibility of machines exhibiting intelligence. I also made a day trip to Oxford where I visited a rather smaller but in other respects much more impressive library, the Old Bodleian. In case you didn’t guess it already, I absolutely love old libraries, so I was in heaven even though the tour only lasted 30 minutes and we only got to see Duke Humfrey’s Library because the Divinity School was closed for a private event. As anachronistic as it may seem and despite its status as a popular tourist attraction, the Old Bodleian is still a working library, and I couldn’t help but envy the fortunate souls who actually get to study those big beautiful books.

As for my own work where I most unfairly have to settle for reading PDFs on a computer screen, the deadline of the winter call of the Research Council of Finland is coming up in a few weeks, so preparing my application is going to occupy most of my attention until then. A new rule introduced this year is that if you apply for Academy Project funding now and don’t get it, you’re not eligible to apply again in the next call but have to wait for the one after that, unless you got an evaluation rating of at least 5 out of 6 for your proposal. Will this cause a big drop in the number of applications next year? Will some researchers anticipate this and tactically postpone their applications? I don’t know, but in any case, I have so much material from previous years to build on that I’m just going to go ahead with it, although I am introducing some bigger changes this time.

Alongside the proposal, I’ve been preparing a presentation on AI and ethics for the Regional Days of the Council of Oulu Region. When I got the invitation, I was told the event is expected to have 400–500 visitors over two days; my talk is going to be one of three parallel sessions, but even so, I guess I can expect a fairly sizable audience. As with my guest lecture in September, preparing my presentation was mostly a matter of selecting and adapting the most suitable bits from my reservoir of existing material, but for the opening I wanted something new that would be particularly relevant to an audience comprised mainly of municipal decision-makers and public servants.

As luck would have it, when I was thinking about this in early October, I came across a bulletin released by the Confederation of Finnish Industries (EK) that was exactly what I was looking for. The bulletin is only available in Finnish, but basically it proposes that the Finnish constitution should be amended to enable AI to be used more extensively by government agencies. The reasoning behind the proposal goes that the traditional idea of government employees being personally accountable for decisions is hard to reconcile with automated decision-making using AI, so there should be a shift towards organisational accountability where the focus is on management and governance rather than the actions of individual employees.

Here we have, courtesy of the EK, a textbook example of a value conflict involving AI that the audience should definitely be able to relate to. AI promises more efficiency, which is generally a good thing, but cannot take precedence over citizens’ rights when there are decisions being made that affect those rights. Would the proposed concept of organisational accountability provide sufficient protection to justify more extensive delegation of government decision-making to computers? Hopefully that question will get the listeners into the right frame of mind to enjoy my talk. On Monday we’ll see!

Stars in my eyes

It’s September already and I’ve been back from my summer vacation for over a month, so I guess it’s about time for a blog update. About a week after my return, a piece of good news hit my inbox: the proceedings of the Tethics 2025 conference have been published at last! From past experience I already knew that there would be a significant gap between the conference and the CEUR-WS publication, but this time that gap turned out to be just shy of nine months, the longest one yet by far. I have no idea why the process took so long – the notification from the organisers merely alluded to a number of “odd obstacles” encountered along the way – but at least it was completed well in time before the next conference.

In my paper “Death by AI: A Survey of the Literature and Known Incidents”, I examine the relationship of AI, ethics and death through the twin lenses of academic literature and AI incident reports. As one would expect, AI-controlled physical machines such as self-driving cars account for a lot of the material in both categories, as do AI systems used to make decisions with potentially fatal consequences, such as medical AI. I later did a survey of AI incidents in healthcare, though not exclusively fatal ones, for my NCDHWS 2026 paper.

More interesting than any of the above I found the cases where the link between AI influence and deadly harm is more subtle, debatable even. There is a growing number of incidents where interactions with social media algorithms or conversational AI systems have been linked with death by accident, violence or suicide, but we can’t just attribute all these to AI without considering other possible contributing factors. On the other hand, it would likewise be a mistake to simply dismiss them as isolated incidents and not look into the possibility that they are manifestations of real safety issues in AI systems that influence human behaviour.

Curiously, the literature I found had very little to say on this subject, and I can only speculate as to why. Clearly the safety of these systems is not being ignored – there’s a lot of work out there on guardrails in conversational AI, for instance – but it seems that the relevant literature seldom makes an explicit connection between unsafe AI behaviour and death. How much should we read into this observation – is it insignificant, or could it indicate some kind of blind spot in the research?

Conversely, a topic that came up a lot in the literature but not in the incident reports was digital resurrection: using AI to bring back a deceased individual in some form. This can mean replicating the person’s physical appearance, of which there are some famous examples from the world of entertainment, but more intriguing than this is the possibility of creating a simulation of someone’s personality based on digital materials they’ve left behind. This had led to the development of so-called deathbots or griefbots: chatbots designed to communicate like a deceased person by fine-tuning a large language model with the person’s writings. I’m frankly not sure what to think about these; I suppose they may help some people process their grief after losing a loved one, but they feel morally ambiguous in a way I can’t quite put my finger on. Something to discuss during the next implementation of my AI ethics course perhaps!

Coming back to the present day, the beginning of the new academic year has been a mixture of old routines and new responsibilities. Preparing for and delivering my lecture on the Towards Data Mining course is firmly in the former category, and checking out the personal study plans of new students in the international master’s degree programme has also found its way there now that I’ve been doing it for a couple of years. On the new responsibilities side, there’s the Ethics Committee of Human Sciences, where I’m taking on a more active role now, having spent my first meeting in June mostly observing.

Another new task I took upon myself before the summer is giving a guest lecture on AI on a creative writing course offered by the Faculty of Humanities under the Film and Creative Medias minor subject. The main lecturer is going to talk about AI as a writing partner and was looking for a guest lecturer with a technical AI background, which suited me nicely since I’d already been looking into ethical and legal issues related to AI-generated creative works and could reuse the materials I’d prepared for the AI ethics course. Of course I’ve still had to decide which elements of my existing materials are the most relevant in this context and adapt them for the target audience, but overall it’s been a very reasonable amount of work to create what is technically a brand-new lecture. Curious to see what the students take away from it.

The choir has also returned from its summer break, and rehearsals for Earth Between Oceans are in full swing. At the same time, we are also preparing for Harmonia, an improv-based vocal soundscape that we’ll create in the university’s botanical garden as part of this year’s Researchers’ Night. Both of these are quite unlike anything I’ve performed before, and I daresay there isn’t anyone in the whole choir who’s entirely in their comfort zone with them, but I’m feeling positive about both, even though especially EBO felt rather overwhelming when we first got the score and tried to make sense of it. My main worry is that for this piece we’re going to need a lot of support from the conductor, and we won’t know how much attention we’re actually getting from him until the concert week when we have rehearsals with the orchestra. At least there’s the silver lining that probably no one in the audience will know what the music is supposed to sound like!

Last week we also kicked off the choir rehearsals for Beyond the Sky, another headline event of Oulu’s year as European Capital of Culture. The show combines a suite of music for orchestra, chorus and soloists by Lauri Porra (whom some readers may recognise as the bassist of the Finnish metal band Stratovarius) with visuals by Jukka-Pekka Metsävainio, a local astrophotographer of international renown (who has his own connection to the world of rock music through his book collaborations with Queen guitarist and astrophysics PhD Brian May). I’ve been an astronomy buff pretty much all my life and I have several prints of J-P’s gorgeous photos on the walls of my apartment, so if I wasn’t going to be on stage I would most definitely buy a ticket. Art and science coming together in a grand spectacle of sound and light – what’s not to love?

Astronomy was, in fact, an option I seriously considered when I was in secondary school and thinking about where and what to study after graduation. I eventually decided that I was much more likely to get a career out of a computer science degree, but then, at the time I wasn’t really thinking of going into academia, envisioning myself making big bucks as a software developer instead. I’m not regretting the choice I made, but I have occasionally wondered how my life would have turned out if I had chosen differently. I am, of course, fully aware that looking at pretty pictures of galaxies and nebulae has very little to do with the actual work of a professional astronomer, but I still believe it might have been something I would have enjoyed and been good at. I’m not realistically expecting to ever find out for real, but at least I’ll always have the pictures!

Shutting up shop

It’s July at last, which means I’m just about ready to start my vacation! The last two weeks have been rather uneventful, to the point that I’ve occasionally found myself wondering what I should actually be spending my time on. It’s such a luxury to be able to just read and think without any immediate purpose to be served, but the flip side is that it can get a bit too aimless and you lose sight of when it’s time to stop planning and start doing. There’s definitely a thing or two to be said in favour of timetables and deadlines, but I expect that there will be plenty of those again in the autumn term.

To be fair, I have been working on a journal paper manuscript, albeit with mixed results. Some days I’ve actually made some decent progress, but others I’ve manage to commit more or less sod all on paper. I know that not having produced any tangible outputs doesn’t necessarily mean that I haven’t done any useful mental work, but even so, it’s hardly uplifting when you take what seems like ages to write a paragraph that you then end up deleting because you realise it’s not going anywhere. I’m not sure if the problem is more that the concept of the paper is not yet clear enough in my head or that I’m out of juice and need time to recharge before I can effectively convert that concept into coherent sentences, but either way, it shouldn’t hurt to lay it to rest for a while.

The week before the last two was anything but uneventful. On Monday evening I went to the City Hall for the pre-conference get-together of NCDHWS 2026 (although I left in time to catch the second half of Spain vs Cape Verde in the FIFA World Cup – surprisingly exciting despite the Spanish domination and the failure of either side to score), and Tuesday was the first day of the conference proper. I had my own presentation in one of the last parallel sessions of the afternoon, not the greatest time slot but at least the day was then over and there was still time for a quick rest at home before the gala dinner.

The format of the scientific sessions was somewhat different from what I’m used to. Usually I’d expect the sessions to consist of paper presentations lasting around 20 minutes each, but here each session started with one or two invited talks of 20 minutes each, followed by a bunch of paper presentations of only seven minutes each. That was the plan anyway – I had my doubts about the feasibility of keeping such a tight schedule and they proved to be justified, but my own conscience is clear, because I’d rehearsed my talk with a stopwatch to make sure I’d stay within my allotted time. I found it surprisingly easy even, but some of my fellow presenters clearly struggled to compress everything they wanted to say into such a narrow window.

The paper I presented was “Ethical Impact of AI Systems in Healthcare: A Survey of Recorded Incidents”, available here. It’s built on the premise that to understand the risks associated with the use of AI in healthcare, we should look into what we can learn from real-world AI incidents, and there isn’t a great deal of published research in this area so far. The paper makes an admittedly modest contribution to the discussion by surveying relevant incidents found in the AI Incident Database and classifying them by the sector where the incident occurred, the purpose for which the AI system was deployed and the principal ethical requirement violated in the incident. The results are very much tentative and I have no plans to build on them at the moment, but I don’t necessarily want to leave the paper as a complete one-off either. Something to develop into a funding proposal perhaps?

While I was at the conference, the university’s PR department dropped quite a bombshell by announcing that Arto Maaninen had resigned from the position of Rector, effective immediately, less than 18 months into his five-year term. The details are scarce, but apparently the University Board had been reviewing its confidence in the Rector over his “use of alcohol and inappropriate conduct at a University staff event”. What would have happened if Maaninen had not elected to resign – whether the Board would have dismissed him in that case – is not known, but in any case we’re going to have to find ourselves a new Rector, with the Vice Rector for Cooperation stepping up to the position in the interim.

I feel ambivalent about writing on this, because I don’t really have anything to say beyond what’s already there in the official statement. I could comment on the additional information regarding the circumstances of the resignation reported in the press, and/or the public debate that this has sparked, but I don’t think that it’s my place to do so – not that I’m under any illusions as to the impact of my blog, but I’m still representing the university here for what it’s worth. On the other hand, I felt that I couldn’t just leave news like this totally unacknowledged either, so there’s my two cents for you.

Back to the conference then – or rather not, because I ended up skipping the second day altogether. In the morning there were some site visits, which I was going to skip anyway, and in the afternoon I had my first proper meeting as a member of the Ethics Committee of Human Sciences, so I was also going to miss the closing plenary. This basically meant that I only would have been able to attend one session, and I eventually decided it wasn’t worth the hassle to go all the way across town just for that, although I felt a bit bad about missing the presentation of my colleague Pekka’s paper.

The committee meeting turned out to be quite an interesting experience, even though I didn’t yet have much to contribute myself. The job of the committee is to give statements on research proposals that involve human subjects but aren’t medical research, and at a university as multidisciplinary as Oulu, this translates into a great variety in the topics and approaches of the proposals to be reviewed. Thus, in addition to the opportunity to do some service for the university community, you get a rather enlightening window into what’s going on in other faculties, research-wise. I can’t share any details of course, but I can say that even though I’ve only been in the committee for a month, it’s already been an eye-opener in terms of the range of ethical concerns that researchers in different fields need to address. There’s definitely more to it than just getting your consent forms and privacy notices right!

That’s about it for the spring term, I guess. The AI ethics course is all wrapped up, and for the first time ever, it was completed by over 40 students. The feedback from the students was positive and I’ve written and published my response to it on the study information system, something I haven’t always remembered to do I regret to say. I’m still not a hundred percent sure I’ve done everything I was supposed to do before I sign off, but I think I can live with that. Back in August, brimming with energy and fresh ideas I hope!

The council has spoken

Like a lot of people these days, I work often work from home, and when I do, I set up my laptop in the living room, next to a south-facing window. Being able to work in natural light is great, but on some days the temptation to forget about work and go outside gets a little too intense. As I’m typing this it’s about 20 degrees Celsius and sunny, and the rowans in the backyard are in full bloom. The lilac has started as well, and the bird cherry is already done. Summer has well and truly arrived, so why am I not out there making the best of it?

Summer means, of course, that ‘tis the season for summer parties! I had two last week – one with the research group, one with the choir – and this week it’s the faculty’s turn. A week after that it’s Midsummer weekend already, and two weeks after that I’m going to leave work behind for a month or so. I’ve made some travel plans, but I’m also very much looking forward to just spending quality time on the balcony of my apartment, book in hand and a cold drink at my side. Already before that, with teaching duties all but finished and no more big deadlines left to meet, I get to enjoy the luxury of actually having some freedom to decide how I will spend my remaining working days. 

Another staple of the season is the making of funding decisions by the Research Council of Finland. My application was, unsurprisingly, rejected, but interestingly, my referee scores went up a notch from last year even though the proposal I submitted was essentially the same. Maybe I should just keep doing that year after year until I get the funding? Okay, maybe not, but the comments were fairly encouraging and actionable, so perhaps I won’t abandon the project idea either. In any case, I should probably devote a sizable portion of my time in the next three weeks to getting something moving in the area of research funding, now that I have some energy and brain capacity to spare for such things. 

Before the choir started its summer break, we got our first taste of Earth Between Oceans, the Ellen Reid piece we’re going to perform in October. The vocal score looks rather wild compared to anything I’ve sung before, and to make things even more exciting, the performance won’t be just the Finnish premiere but the first public performance of the work anywhere outside the United States. It was commissioned by the LA and NY Philharmonic Orchestras, and the first orchestra in the whole world to take it on after those two giants is Oulu Sinfonia with little old Cassiopeia, which of course is entirely par for the course for us and not intimidating at all. Thankfully, we’ll have the help of another highly capable local choir and their equally capable musical director, and we’ve also been provided with some material to support independent rehearsal of our parts over the summer. Challenge accepted! 

The second period of the spring term proceeded in the usual way, with the delivery and assessment of the AI ethics course eating up most of my work hours. This is now almost all done, and though I’m still waiting for a few students to turn in pending assignments, it looks almost certain that once again a new record will be set in the number of passed students. In total, the course has now been completed by close to 150 students since its inception in 2021, and while I’ve no doubt that many of those students just took the credits and ran, there have also been many who were genuinely into the subject matter and whom I can expect to put their knowledge to good use. Doing research and publishing papers is great, but in terms of making a positive impact on the world, it’s probably the teaching aspect of my work that counts the most.

One pleasant diversion from business as usual came in the last week of May, when I went to Helsinki to attend Huawei’s Future Trustworthiness Technology Summit. Although it wasn’t the kind of conference I usually go to, where you submit a paper for peer review and present it if it gets accepted, it wasn’t all that different either: there were talks by academics on various technical topics, with Q&A after each talk and more casual conversations between sessions over coffee or lunch. However, whereas usually I’d have to make my own travel arrangements and find some project to cover the expenses, this time I just told the organisers when I want to travel and they took care of everything for me. Felt almost criminal, but I could get used to it! 

Apparently the reason why I had showed up on the organisers’ radar was the Tethics 2024 paper I wrote with Kimmo Halunen, and most of the content of my talk came from that paper, but I also mentioned a couple of other things done here in recent years in the area of AI vulnerability research: the AI vulnerability taxonomy and the AI vulnerability database that uses the taxonomy as its underlying classification framework. I got the impression that the ethics perspective on AI vulnerabilities struck the audience as rather novel, and generally there seemed to be quite a lot of interest in our work. Whether that leads to anything concrete remains to be seen, but I certainly appreciated the break from grading AI ethics learning diaries, even though it meant that I then had to work extra hard for the rest of the week to finish the job on time. 

Next week I’ll again go to the kind of conference I’m more accustomed to, although this time I won’t have to travel any further than the university’s Kontinkangas campus. For once, I’ve prepared my presentation well in advance, since the organisers requested that all speakers send in their slides no later than the 1st of June. This was because the schedule of the oral sessions is extremely tight: only six minutes per speaker, plus one minute for Q&A. To be quite honest I don’t mind this at all, even though it’s going to take some rehearsing to make sure that I’ll stay within the allotted time. Preparing the slides was a breeze, especially compared to the Huawei event, where I had a 45-minute slot: just fill in the blanks in the template provided by the organisers. 

Although the ethics course is finished for now, I’m always on the lookout for new developments that might be useful as teaching material, and this week came up with a doozy when Yle reported that authorities in Finland have been quietly using Palantir technology for years. The story is in Finnish, but in a nutshell, it says that the Finnish customs, police and border guard have been using Palantir since 2013, then goes on to talk about other known clients of the company and the various controversies surrounding it. The latter are nothing new and come up in discussions every time I lecture the course, but this latest revelation makes them hit home in a much more personal way. 

There are so many concepts and debates I could illustrate using just this one piece of news, and as a teacher I would naturally try to avoid steering my students towards any given “correct” answer, but here I’m going to put my concerned citizen hat on and concentrate on the argument that the tech is just software and whether it’s good or evil depends entirely on how the deployer chooses to use it. The people behind the company have made it clear that they have a societal agenda, and it’s not one that I want my country to be advancing, directly or indirectly. Framing mass surveillance as inevitable, or even desirable as long as it’s the “good guys” doing it, is just the sort of normalisation of the erosion of civil liberties that we need exactly none of if you ask me. Call me an idealist, but it’s only inevitable if we believe the rhetoric and let it become that way. 

The MASS is ended, go in peace

It’s always nice to start a post with some good news, so here goes: I got a paper accepted to the Nordic Conference on Digital Health and Wireless Solutions, to be held here in Oulu in June. It’s basically another qualitative analysis of AI incidents, this time from a healthcare perspective, and probably the last one I’ll do, at least for a while. It’s been fun and instructive working on them, but it would feel rather cheap to keep churning out endless one-off surveys of incident reports, so I’d rather concentrate on something with more depth for a change. It would still be nice to come up with something suitable (i.e. not journal paper calibre) for this year’s Tethics conference, which has its submission deadline coming up in mid-May, but I suppose it’s not a disaster if I don’t.

With the new doctoral researcher we definitely will be using AI incident reports as material, so I’m not abandoning them altogether, but there’s a more long-term research agenda there than behind my last couple of solo papers, and we will be looking into other possible data sources besides the incident repositories. They’re certainly very convenient, but I have my doubts about how full a picture of the real-world harm inflicted by AI systems you can get based on them alone. How much harm is there that doesn’t get recorded in incident databases because there haven’t been any specific incidents to report, or because there have been incidents but for some reason they didn’t make the news?

The databases are also limited in terms of the data recorded in the entries that are there. Especially when it comes to chatbots, a lot of the really interesting stuff has to do with how people interact with them, and the incident reports don’t usually have much first-hand detail to offer. Ideally, the reports would be accompanied by comprehensive chat logs so that you could discover patterns in the interactions that are frequently associated with harmful outcomes, but I am of course aware that it would not be realistic to expect to find this sort of data in a dataset curated from second-hand sources such as news stories.

The limitations of currently existing AI vulnerability and incident databases is one of the topics I’m planning to talk about at the Future Trustworthiness Technology Summit 2026 at the end of May. It’s a new kind of event for me, a sort of hybrid academic/business conference, organised by a European subsidiary of Huawei Technologies but with a programme of invited talks by researchers active in the cybersecurity field, broadly conceived. The person who invited me showed me the agenda of a previous event, and based on that I’m expecting quite a few interesting presentations as well as good networking opportunities. Given the somewhat controversial status of Huawei in the West, any actual collaboration with them might prove difficult, plus I’m not sure how interested they’d be in investing in AI ethics research anyway, but at least they’re giving me a chance to speak and paying for my travel and accommodation.

Another new development on the ethics front is that I’ve been appointed as a new member of the Ethics Committee of Human Sciences of the University of Oulu. The committee is in charge of reviewing research proposals that don’t come within the scope of the Medical Research Act but pose such risks to the research subjects or researchers that ethical evaluation is nevertheless required. Proposals are regularly submitted for review from the Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, and longtime faculty representative Prof. Tapio Seppänen is retiring from the committee, so I was selected to succeed him, starting in June. Apparently they were particularly looking for someone with expertise in AI, so this job should be right up my alley.

Meanwhile, the performances of Bernstein’s MASS came and went. In the end, it was hard to believe that it was all over so quickly – just four shows spread across five days. Still, over 9000 tickets were sold, so about the same as for the opera, even though that had five times as many performances. The capacity of the venue was much bigger for MASS, of course, and there were still vacant seats in every show. Artistically, it was nothing short of a triumph in my heavily biased opinion, and it got some very positive professional reviews as well as enthusiastic comments from people who saw it. I would have gladly gone on to do at least another four nights, but I don’t want to give the impression of being greedy or ungrateful – it’s such a monumental piece that it’s pretty incredible it was staged here at all and I got to be a part of it.

The upside of MASS being over is that I now have time and energy for Cassiopeia stuff again! I went to see them in concert yesterday – my first time being on the receiving end I believe – and tomorrow I thought I’d go sing with them in the traditional May Day concert outside the City Hall. I can still catch a few rehearsals before the summer break, and there are cool things coming up in the autumn term, such as the Finnish premiere of Ellen Reid’s Earth Between Oceans. I know the year is far from over, but it’s safe to say already that it’s going to be a peak year, if not the peak year, of my life so far, artistically speaking. Could we just go on being the European Capital of Culture for the rest of the 20s while we’re at it?

A chapter ends, another one begins

After 20 performances, the time inevitably came to say goodbye to Ovllá. What a ride that was! Not quite as big a hit as The Magic Flute, but we had several fully sold-out shows on the weekends and perfectly respectable-sized audiences for the midweek shows as well. The newspaper Kaleva reported this week that nearly 10 000 people saw the opera, with 85% of all available seats booked – not bad at all! Both shows on the closing weekend were among the sold-out ones, and for the very last one we got probably the most enthusiastic crowd of the entire run; each of our big chorus scenes got its own round of applause, even the Kiruna scene in the first act, which had never happened before. Couldn’t have wished for a better finish. 

Now that it’s over, I’m feeling pretty much as I expected to feel: there’s great satisfaction for a job well done, pride even, but underneath it is a profound sadness for having no more shows to look forward to and for having parted with some people possibly for the final time in my life. It’s not exactly the Fellowship of the Ring splitting up, but we built something beautiful and important together and became a community in the process. I didn’t even interact with some of the Sámi soloists and other guest artists all that much, but it’s still rather poignant not knowing if I’ll ever see them again. 

I also find myself wondering what will happen to the opera now, after the inaugural production. There’s been no indication of any plans for a second run of shows in Oulu, but will other opera houses or festivals pick it up now, perhaps in another Nordic country? In my admittedly biased opinion, it’s a work that really deserves to be staged again, so it would be tremendously sad if it were to be simply forgotten. I’d certainly be willing to travel quite far to see it performed somewhere else. I mean, it would be worth it even just for the chance to tell everyone there who’ll listen that I was on stage in the world premiere! 

The empty space left by the end of Ovllá is not just an emotional one; in more concrete terms, it shows up in my calendar as well, with Friday evening this week being the first one in 2026 when I have no performance, no rehearsal, no engagement of any sort. To some extent, this situation is compensated for by the rehearsals for MASS being now in full swing, but for the next month or so it’s only two hours once per week and the weekends are all free. Once we start rehearsing together with all the performers – 220 of them! – it will be a very busy couple of weeks, but then that, too, will be all over. 

Meanwhile at the university, there’s a rather exciting new development: we have a new employee! That in itself is, of course, hardly anything worth making a fuss about, but for me it’s very much a big deal because the employee in question is my new doctoral student, with whom I’ll be doing research on AI vulnerabilities for at least the next three years. It’s a school holiday week in northern Finland and many of my colleagues are taking some time off, including the co-PI of the project she was hired for, but I met up with her to welcome her into the house and get her started with her onboarding. Next week there will be more people on campus for her to meet and we can start doing some actual scientific work. 

Besides the selection of our new researcher, the selection of students for international master’s programmes was completed in February as per usual. I was again a member in the evaluation team for the computer science and engineering programme. As was to be expected, the number of applications went down significantly now that the university is no longer allowed to subsidise the education of non-EEA students through blanket scholarship offerings, although the drop was not as sharp as last year when the application fee was introduced. What did surprise me somewhat was that this did not seem to have much of an impact on where the applications come from; I thought there would have been a noticeable shift towards countries whose citizens are exempt from paying the tuition fees, but based on the applications I reviewed, this did not seem to be the case. 

Next week it’s time to put on my lecturer’s hat once again as the next edition of the AI ethics course gets rolling. I’m keeping the same course format as before, but there are some changes in the guest line-up, as well as some updates to the materials. There are a couple of topics in particular that I want to cover in more depth this year, both of them having to do with generative AI. One is how to use GenAI responsibly for the course assignments – it seems that no matter how many different ways I try to communicate the AI policy to the students, I will never achieve saturation, and besides, I don’t want to just tell them the rules but also give them some positive examples of what they can do within those rules. 

The other topic I’ve been immersing myself in just this week: legal issues concerning generative AI, especially those on which there is already some existing case law. Mainly this has to do with copyright issues, such as the question of whether training AI models with copyrighted works constitutes fair use as defined in US copyright law – if not, some big companies could find themselves in some big trouble. However, there is also at least one case dealing with free speech, specifically whether the maker of a chatbot can invoke it as a defence to avoid liability for a wrongful death allegedly caused by the product. The judge in this case did not buy the argument, and in an earlier one, it was ruled that TikTok can’t claim Section 230 immunity for a fatal incident because of the active role played by the platform’s recommendation algorithm. It’s probably too early to say anything conclusive, but perhaps freedom of expression has its legal limits when it comes to AI, even in America. 

It certainly seems that some kind of limits are in order; just today I read yet another story about someone whose interactions with a chatbot led to them taking their own life. Besides being extremely tragic in their own right, such cases are but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to harm resulting from the way people interact with these new AI systems. The interaction aspect is, I feel, an underexplored one in AI safety research – given how complex and versatile the systems are, there’s only so much that can be done to make them safe and reliable without considering the relationship between the system and the user. As it happens, our new hire has a background in human-computer interaction, so even though we didn’t get nearly as much funding for the project as we were hoping for, I think we have a real chance to do some good here. Evil megacorporations beware! 

Nights at the opera

2026 is here, and for me it’s off to a strong start, with a promotion to the lofty title of Senior Research Fellow (which I have to say sounds so much more impressive than the Finnish equivalent, “yliopistotutkija” or “university researcher”). Technically I wasn’t in fact promoted but recruited to a new position, and so, amusingly, my first work email of the year was an automated one from the university’s HR information system, welcoming me to my new job and inviting me to start my orientation. Thanks, I guess! On a more serious note, I now have, for the first time in my life, an employment contract without a fixed termination date, which in this line of work is a rare luxury to be cherished like a precious antique or faithful family pet. 

So far, my life in 2026 has been, in a sense, quite simple – there’s been no need to wonder what to do with my free time, because I’ve barely had any. In the first two and a half weeks of the year I had exactly five days when I didn’t have to go to the theatre, those five being New Year’s Day, Epiphany and three Sundays. This was all, of course, in preparation for the world premiere of Ovllá, except for one Saturday when we had the last performance of A Christmas Carol. Imagine how weird I felt the day after the opening weekend, when I had just a regular working day at the university without having to go anywhere in the evening! 

Besides devoting dozens of hours of my time to the opera, I made a sacrifice of a more personal nature as well: at the insistence of the hair and make-up department, I shaved off my beard and moustache for the first time since I don’t know when. I’m having a hard time recognising my face right now, and I gather I’m not the only one. Everybody tells me I look younger, so it seems that the intended effect has been achieved, but I’m just shocked at the revelation that I apparently don’t have a jawline. Thankfully, the opera has been very well received by critics and audiences alike, which makes the sight of my naked chin more bearable, and as a delightful little bonus, a week before the premiere it was announced that chorus members will be given employment contracts and paid some money for each performance. 

What about the opera itself, I hear you say – what happens in it? I’m glad you asked! The title character is a young Sámi man brought up in a boarding school where a Finnish national and cultural identity has been imposed on him, leaving him ashamed of his own culture and estranged from his family. He falls in love with a Sámi woman and bonds with her widowed father, both of whom try to help him reconnect with his roots, but his traumatic childhood won’t stop haunting him and he’s unable to take a decisive step away from what he’s been taught to believe about himself and his place in the world. The ending is bittersweet, with Ovllá separated from his wife and daughter but reunited with his mother. 

While the story is fictional, the boarding schools were very much a real thing in postwar Finland and so were the wrongs suffered by Sámi pupils in them, as documented in the final report of the Sámi Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Finland, published about a month before the premiere. The villain roles are therefore reserved for the Finnish characters, particularly the Queen of the Night -esque headmistress and her second-in-command the teacher, who appear in several nightmarish scenes during the second act as Ovllá relives painful memories from his school years. We the chorus are there to back them up like a zombie army, dressed in school uniform and evoking images of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. 

Before that, though, in act one we get to play a variety of parts, appearing as a festival crowd at Davvi Šuvva, where Ovllá first meets his beloved Ánná, then as miners at the LKAB iron ore mine in Kiruna, where Ovllá finds employment, and finally as an anthropomorphic representation of nature in Kautokeino, where Ovllá goes to meet Ánná’s father Lemet. My favourite bit is probably the mining scene, where the tenors and basses sing an unabashedly manly song extolling the joys of being a Finnish miner in Sweden while executing a fun choreography with our headlamps, followed by the sopranos and altos whispering off-stage in spooky voices to remind Ovllá of who he really is. However, a strong contender is the dormitory scene in act two and especially the bit just before it, when we are upstage behind a black curtain, waiting to be revealed to the audience, and the music swells in a way that’s nothing short of magical. 

This being my second opera, it’s only natural to compare it with my first one, and there are some pretty big and obvious differences. Musically, Ovllá is of course a good deal more modern than The Magic Flute, though still accessible, and the blending of Western classical music with Sámi melodies and vocal styles sets it apart even further. Thematically, The Magic Flute was a lighthearted fairytale, whereas Ovllá tells a much more serious story dealing with sensitive issues and doesn’t hide its scathing criticism of the treatment of the Sámi people and their indigenous culture by the Finnish government and the ethnically Finnish majority population. 

I’m reminded of a scene in Dead Poets Society where John Keating, played by the late great Robin Williams, has his students read an essay telling them that they can compare the relative greatness of poems by drawing rectangles whose dimensions are determined by the beauty and importance of the poem and looking at the size of the area they cover. Mr Keating, of course, then immediately goes on to dismiss the idea as “excrement”, but I can’t help thinking that if we were to play along with it and extend it to other forms of art, Ovllá would score quite highly on both axes. It’s not just me either – I’ve heard of various people having been moved to tears by it, and many have praised it for bringing its largely ignored subject to light. 

This post turned out to be almost entirely about opera, but I suppose that was to be expected, since apart from the aforementioned promotion, not a whole lot worth reporting has happened in January in my academic life. I’ve been able to get a fair amount of writing done, which is always nice, but other than that, I’ve mainly been doing various things in preparation for more interesting things to come in the future. Particularly interesting is the recruitment of the doctoral researcher who is to be my first one in the role of principal supervisor; I won’t comment of the process, especially since it’s still ongoing, but I will say that the number of applications we received exceeded my expectation by an order of magnitude if not two. I have no idea whether it’s typical for academic positions at this level to attract that many applicants, but my guess would be that without the AI aspect there wouldn’t have been such a flood of applications. 

Tonight it’s yet another night at the opera, show number eight of twenty. I can really only speak for myself, but I think by now we’ve settled into a routine where we no longer have to be constantly on our toes to remember our cues, which makes the performances less strenuous but also creates the risk of us getting a bit too comfortable. Especially in the festival scene it’s crucial that we have the energy of a proper festival crowd, so we can’t just be going through the motions, we have to look like we’re having the time of our lives. Keeping up that festival buzz for the remaining thirteen performances might well turn out to be the hardest part of the whole project!

Change is in the air

With December underway, I am now – at last! – officially a docent. Hooray, I guess! The most concrete way in which this affects me, in the short term anyway, is that I should soon see an increase in my salary, but I have to admit that the sense of validation I get from the title is a major perk as well. I have had, and continue to have, my occasional struggle with the impostor phenomenon, so it does feel rather nice to have been accepted by the scientific community as an “academically distinguished person” with “comprehensive knowledge of  their own field, a capacity for independent research […] and good teaching skills”, as the criteria for the title are given in the diploma supplement. 

To prove my good teaching skills, I had to give a demonstration lecture in front of the degree programme committee, which was a bit of a strange experience. I had exactly twenty minutes to present myself to the jury in the best possible light: how I structure my lessons, what sort of materials I use, how I talk, how I engage the audience, everything. Hardly the most authentic setting, but I did in fact rather enjoy the challenge posed by the time limit; after all, constraints are often good for creativity, and it was quite the balancing act fitting all the elements of an effective lesson in those twenty minutes in such a way that it wouldn’t feel at all forced or rushed. The short format also allowed me to rehearse the lecture multiple times to make sure I wouldn’t stumble in my delivery or go over time (which I was explicitly warned would be penalised in the evaluation). 

All of that effort probably wasn’t strictly necessary, since I would have had to fail the demonstration pretty badly to not get at least the minimum required grade of 3 out of 5, and with my teaching experience that wasn’t likely to happen. Still, it’s hard not to feel nervous about a high-stakes situation where you are being judged, and I certainly wasn’t going to take my chances by aiming for the bare minimum. In the end, while I didn’t get any official feedback for the lecture, unofficially I was told that I got a very respectable 4, which I’m happy with – 3 would have been something of a disappointment, given the time I’d spent preparing. 

Just one week after the docentship decision came another piece of good news: following a lengthy and somewhat confusing evaluation process, a decision had been reached on Infotech Oulu spearhead projects for the period 2026–2028, and among the proposals selected to be funded was “AIVuTeP – Open Source Artificial Intelligence Vulnerability Testing Platform” by Kimmo Halunen and myself. The grant will allow us to hire one doctoral researcher, bringing some much-needed continuity to our collaboration on the topic of AI vulnerabilities. As we observed in our 2024 paper, the concept of AI vulnerability is not very well understood, and meanwhile the AI incidents have been piling up, so there’s a serious need for research that would help detect safety and security weaknesses in AI systems before they are deployed in the real world. 

An even more recent piece of news, and one that I’m much more ambivalent about, is the decision of the university’s Board of Directors to abandon the current main campus in Linnanmaa altogether in favour of a brand new one to be constructed in Kontinkangas, where the biomedical faculties are already located. This seems to be the final word in the long-running debate about the future of the university in terms of real estate. The previous plan, where the new campus would have been built in Raksila instead, was eventually stopped by the city council, and I suppose that’s still a possibility at least in theory, but in practice it sounds like this time the city is firmly on board with the decision. 

There were three different scenarios in the running, out of which the one selected was apparently the most economical by a significant margin. The one where the university would have continued to use Linnanmaa alongside a smaller new campus was the costliest, which isn’t exactly intuitive but I haven’t seen the calculations, so I suppose I have to give them the benefit of the doubt. Not building a new campus at all was not even an option at this point, the contest was among three scenarios with one campus in Kontinkangas and possibly, but not necessarily, another one somewhere else. 

Officially, the money saved in real estate expenses will enable the university to spend more on education and research, which of course sounds great. I can also see the logic of having everyone under the same roof, except we’re not really going to be; there’s going to be quite a big reduction in floor space, so I’m guessing the assumption is that a lot of people will be working remotely at any given time. Not an unreasonable assumption, but does that mean we’ll have hot desks instead of offices for those days when we’re working on campus? What about teaching spaces? Obviously nothing is going to happen overnight – the timeline for the move is something like ten years – but it’s likely enough that I’ll be around to see how it all pans out. 

I do wonder what will happen to the Linnanmaa campus after the university has vacated the premises. The university of applied sciences has been inhabiting a part of it for some time now and hasn’t given any indication of planning to leave, but it’s hardly going to take over all of the empty space left behind. Sentimental considerations aside, the university holds a fairly big stake in the company managing and developing the campus, so whatever happens, it will have financial implications that I sure hope have been factored into the calculations somehow when the decision to ditch the old campus was made. 

Meanwhile, much more imminent changes are happening within the Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering: as of the first of January, the faculty’s current research units will be demoted to research groups operating under four new, bigger research units, and at the same time, Professor Juha Röning, leader of the BISG research unit (soon to be research group), is retiring. The reorganisation isn’t the first one I’ve lived through during my time at the university, and I can’t find it in me to get worked up about it, but through all those years my line manager has always been Juha, so it does feel a bit weird to think that soon that won’t be the case anymore. 

Even that’s not the end of the news this time – there’s some from the world of music as well: Earth Between Oceans, a new piece by American composer Ellen Reid, will be performed in October 2026 for the first time in Finland by Oulu Sinfonia and Cassiopeia. With that, the Finnish premiere of Bernstein’s MASS and the world premieres of Ovllá and Beyond the Sky, 2026 is really shaping up to be a year of premieres for me! I’ve also had preliminary talks about a couple of possible new projects, but those are still very much uncertain, not least because I want to make sure that all these other engagements don’t take too much of my time away from Cassiopeia. Even without those, it’s going to be quite a full year artistically, so I should be able to give some things a miss without feeling any massive FOMO about it. 

My last academic output of the year came out this week with the official opening of the PhD Supervisors’ Academy, an internally developed collection of resources for university staff members who are supervising or starting to supervise doctoral candidates. One of these resources is an online training course, for which I created a module titled “AI and the PhD supervisor”, aiming for a discipline-agnostic package that would help supervisors both guide their students to use AI responsibly and find ways to benefit from AI themselves. The module is text-based, but last week I gave it the finishing touch by recording a short welcome video. 

Having previously recorded a bunch of lecture videos for the Towards Data Mining course, I was already well familiar with the process, but somehow it still slipped my mind that the studio has a green screen, and so out of all the shirts I could have worn to work that day, I decided to go with the green one. Fortunately that didn’t ruin the video, nor did me being suddenly really self-conscious about what to do with my hands while speaking; apart from those two things, I was very professional, recording the whole thing in a single take. All that performing experience paying off I guess, both at work and on the theatre stage. 

I had high hopes at some point of submitting a journal manuscript I’ve been working on before Christmas, but by now it’s abundantly clear that it’s not going to happen unless I get hit by a flash of divine inspiration, so writing will be the order of the day in January. How much energy I’ll have for that remains to be seen, because the first half of the month will involve very intense preparation for the premiere of Ovllá, with one last performance of A Christmas Carol thrown in for good measure. Even the Christmas break isn’t going to be all rest and relaxation, because I’ll probably have to take some time to start learning my parts for MASS; I picked up my copy of the chorus score about a month ago, but so far all I have is a rough idea of how much learning there is to do, and apparently we’re expected to know the material by late February when the rehearsals begin in earnest. Challenge accepted!

The world is a stage

Another November, another Tethics! This year, the conference was hosted by the University of Vaasa and co-chaired by Ville Vakkuri, who has appeared several times on my AI ethics course as a guest lecturer. As usual, there were a bunch of other familiar faces as well, so in terms of social interaction, the conference was a nice mix of catching up with old acquaintances and getting to know new ones. Vaasa itself was a new acquaintance for me and quite a lovely one at that, insofar as any Finnish city in November can be described as “lovely”. On and near the university campus there were some cool old red-brick industrial buildings, reminiscent of the Finlayson Area in Tampere.

The conference program had a couple of new elements this year. On the first morning, there was a workshop with three papers that the participants were invited to help improve, but I decided to skip it, because I had my own talk in the first regular session that afternoon and wanted to do some rehearsing. The other new thing was a poster session, which followed immediately after I’d given my presentation, and I ended up chatting for a good while with a doctoral candidate from the University of Turku who’s researching the ethics of autonomous weapons, a topic I’ve had some involvement with since my talk in the Seminar on the Art of Cyber Warfare a year ago.

I also touched upon the subject in my own paper, which had the somewhat provocative title “Death by AI: A Survey of the Literature and Known Incidents”. I’ll write about it in more detail once it’s been officially published – which may well be next year, the CEUR-WS process tends to take its time apparently – but in a nutshell, I searched for academic literature associating AI with death, did the same for fatal AI incidents recorded in public databases, analysed the search results to see what sort of themes emerge from them and put the analyses next to each other to see if there are any interesting observations to be made. Not the most rigorous piece of research out there, but it seemed to engage the audience, and it certainly gave me a lot of ideas for future work.

My session was preceded by a keynote speech by Rachael Garrett, which I have to admit went a bit over my head at times, but I did find her experiments with dancers improvising with robots rather cool. The last session of the day had two papers about AI in education, so that of course was right up my alley. On the second day there was some more interesting AI stuff, a particular highlight being a paper on the perpetuation of gender stereotypes by AI image generators; as a bonus, I got to witness the first-ever use (in my career at least, if not the entire history of academia) of the phrase “slay queen” to comment on a conference presentation. In the afternoon there was a town hall meeting, where it was decided that the next Tethics will be organised by LUT University in Lahti (yay!), and then it was time for Kai Kimppa to conclude the programme with his keynote on the past, present and future of IT ethics research in Finland. Kai’s speech made for a very enjoyable end to the conference, and not just because I got name-checked as one of the “new generation” of Finnish IT ethicists!

The week before the conference I got some exciting news: my docentship application received the rector’s seal of approval, so as of the first of December I’m officially a docent of AI ethics and data ethics in the Faculty or Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, University of Oulu. Feels pretty good! This came just in time for me to put the title in my CV for the winter call of the Research Council of Finland, which closed on the 12th. For a variety of reasons, I didn’t have a whole lot of time and energy to spend on my proposal, so I ended up submitting essentially the same one as last year, with some minor revisions to the research plan and a slightly fuller CV. I suppose I can view this as an experiment of sorts – will be interesting to see how the evaluator statements compare to the ones I received this year.

At work, things are now starting to calm down a bit towards the end-of-year holidays, but meanwhile, in the world of performing arts it’s getting busy. Last week we had the first proper rehearsals for the Ovllá opera: not just the chorus but director, soloists, conductor, rehearsal pianist, the works. This week there have been no rehearsals, but next week we’re bringing A Christmas Carol back to the stage, and the week after that the opera rehearsals will resume. I also recently got the notification that I’ve been selected into the choir for Beyond the Sky, so I’m three for three for the big 2026 productions I auditioned for back in May.

Working on the opera is an interesting experience, different from The Magic Flute in a couple of major respects. A rather obvious one is that instead of staging one of the most popular operas ever for the nth time, we are now creating something totally new, to be presented to the world for the very first time right here in Oulu. It’s an exciting thought, but at the same time, I’m very much aware that it’s hardly a safe bet. Will it bring in the crowds, not just the hardcore opera lovers? Not that I’ll have to answer to anyone if it doesn’t, but I do feel like I have my own tiny share of artistic ownership of the production and naturally I’m hoping that it will be a success.

The other big difference is in the level of cultural sensitivity constantly present at the rehearsals. The score brings together two very different musical traditions, and the libretto deals with some rather delicate themes; The Magic Flute has its own issues, sure, but at its heart it’s just a silly fairytale set in a fantasy world. With Ovllá, distancing ourselves from the story and dialogue is not an option, and it’s been clear from the get-go that the portrayal of the Sámi people and Sámi culture must be accurate and respectful. To that end, almost everyone in the design team is Sámi, as are the soloists playing Sámi characters.

That said, the rehearsals have been great fun as well as educational. I was already loving the music, and now that we’re starting to get an idea of what the opera is going to look like on stage, I’m getting properly stoked about it. I know already that there will be days when I’ll come home from work and dearly wish I could spend the evening on the couch instead of going to the theatre, but all things considered, a job in academia where the hours are very flexible is probably one of the easier ones to combine with a hobby like this. Besides, performing to an audience and working in a multicultural environment are surely skills that transfer both ways. Highly recommended!

Teachers still matter, right?

Starting with music news this time, because the new choir term is really off to a flying start: we’ve had seven performances already, with another one coming up tomorrow. A particularly memorable occasion was the grand opening of Nokia’s new “Home of Radio” campus in Oulu, where we had the honour of both opening and concluding the proceedings as well as providing music for the ribbon-cutting ceremony with Christopher Tin’s beautiful and appropriately jubilant Sogno di Volare from the video game Civilization VI. Various luminaries were in attendance, including the President of the Republic of Finland himself, Alexander Stubb. 

It’s also been confirmed now that I will be appearing in the chorus of Ovllá, the new opera composed by Cecilia Damström for Oulu’s year as a European Capital of Culture. One of the performance languages is Northern Sámi, which I have next to no familiarity with despite it being one of Finland’s national languages, but I’ll take it as a challenge and an opportunity to learn. Another challenge is the sheer amount of work I’ve committed myself to: from late November to late April I’m going to have one of the busiest six-month periods of my life, as rehearsals for the opera will run in parallel with rehearsals and performances of A Christmas Carol, and around the time of the last opera performances, rehearsals for MASS will begin. How much Cassiopeia stuff I’ll be able to fit in among all this remains to be seen, but the usual Christmas concerts at least should be perfectly doable. 

On the academic front, I spent the first few work weeks after my summer vacation mostly preparing materials for a training module that I’m developing for a new thing the university’s graduate school is launching this year called the PhD Supervisors’ Academy. Among the things offered by the Academy is a set of short online courses on a range of topics that a PhD supervisor should know about, and I was invited to create one on AI. This being me, there will be a notable emphasis on critical thinking and responsible use, but I’m doing my best to avoid coming across as overly negative and highlight the opportunities as well. 

At the end of August I had to take some time to work on a conference manuscript that got conditionally accepted for publication, so I had to submit a major revision of it before the final decision. The paper definitely isn’t my best work and I felt there was a genuine possibility it might still be rejected after the revision, but thankfully it wasn’t. The conference in question is Tethics 2025, so my streak of having a paper there continues and I’ll get to do my usual trip to go see some old familiar faces. Should be a more relaxed trip than last year, too, since this time the conference doesn’t clash with any of my artistic engagements, and as a bonus I’ll get to visit a new city. 

My Title of Docent application is moving forward as well, with one (positive) reviewer statement in and another one hopefully coming soon. After that, I’ll need to arrange a date for my demonstration lecture, which does frankly feel a little bit pointless – I’m not all that convinced that one twenty-minute lecture can say anything decisive about me as an educator that my CV and teaching portfolio don’t – but then, it’s not like I’m suffering from any dearth of material from which to put together such a lecture. Besides, I’m due to give a guest presentation on the intersection of AI and ethics next week at Oulun Suomalainen Klubi and my plan is to make the demonstration lecture a compressed version of the presentation with some pedagogical interactions thrown in at strategic points, so I’m kind of killing two birds with one stone here. 

Before my vacation, I was interviewed by a journalist working on an article on the use of AI for content moderation on online platforms, more specifically for the detection of hate speech. He contacted me at the suggestion of a colleague of mine and we had a Zoom meeting where I gave him my views on the subject as an AI ethicist. This was my first time appearing as an expert in the media, so quite an exciting experience for me, and I think I managed not to make a complete fool of myself in the process. The article was published in August and is available online, though only in Finnish. 

Another (sort of) new thing in my professional life this academic year is that I’m serving as a teacher tutor for the new batch of students who’ve now begun their studies in the master’s programme in computer science and engineering. It’s only sort of new in the sense that I’ve already been tutoring some students since the beginning of the calendar year, but the new students are the first ones I’m shepherding right from day one. Technically, the most important part of the job is guiding the students in making their personal study plans, but if my experiences from the spring term are any indication, simply listening to the students’ worries and offering encouragement is also a big part of it. 

This got me thinking about how the need for formal tertiary education in subjects such as computing is sometimes questioned on the grounds that there are loads of online resources available that you can use to learn just about any technical skill on your own. It’s even been suggested that AI tutors will make human teachers obsolete by being available 24/7 and adapting perfectly to the student’s learning style and goals. I can’t dismiss such arguments entirely, but I think they’re assuming some kind of “ideal” student who’s crystal clear on what they need to learn and perfectly self-directed in finding and using the required resources. For all those “non-ideal” students, a university provides a structure for your studies and a social environment designed to carry you through them and beyond. 

As it happens, both these aspects – providing structure and presenting a human face – are part of the role of the teacher tutor, and before you ask: yes, I’m fully aware of how convenient this conclusion is for me personally. I don’t suppose anyone likes to think of themselves as easily replaceable, so maybe I’m just trying to rationalise the belief that the university and I matter and will continue to matter even as technology marches on. Or maybe I do have a genuine point here that isn’t just about me refusing to go gently into the good night of AI-induced obsolescence. Take your pick!