Month: November 2018

Busy times

With the end-of-year holidays approaching, things tend to get busy in a lot of places, not just in Santa’s workshop. My life in Ireland is no exception: there are five major work-related (or at least university-related) things that I’ve been trying my best to juggle through November, with varying success. Many of these will culminate over the next two weeks or so, so after that I’m hoping it will be comparatively smooth sailing till I leave for my well-deserved Christmas break in Finland. The blog I’m not even counting among the five and I’ve been pretty much neglecting it, so this post is rather overdue, and also a welcome break from all of the more pressing stuff that I should really be working on right now.

One area where I’ve had my hands full is data protection, where it seems that whenever a document is finished, there’s always another one to be prepared and submitted for evaluation. Getting a green light from the Research Ethics Committee was a big step forward, but there’s now one more hurdle left to overcome in the form of a Data Protection Impact Assessment. I’m very much learning (and making up) all of this as I go along, and the learning curve has proved a rather more slippery climb than I expected, but I’m getting there. In fact, I’m apparently one of the first to go through this process around here, so I guess I’m not the only one trying to learn how it works. I hope this means that things will be easier for those who come after me.

Meanwhile, I’ve been preparing to give my very first lecture here at DCU – thankfully, just one guest lecture and not a whole course, but even that is quite enough to rack my nerves. It is a little strange that this should be the case, even after all the public speaking I’ve had to do during my fifteen-plus years in research, but the fact of the matter is that it does still feel like a bit of an ordeal every time. Of course it doesn’t help that I’m in a new environment now, and also I’ll be speaking to undergraduate students, which is rather different from giving a presentation at a conference to other researchers. Still, I’m not entirely unfamiliar with this type of audience, and I can recycle some of the lecture materials I created and used in Oulu, so I think I’m going to be all right.

Speaking of conferences, I’m serving in the programme committee of the International Conference on Health Informatics for the second year running and the manuscript reviewing period is currently ongoing, so that’s another thing that’s claimed a sizable chunk of my time recently. Somewhere among all of this I’m somehow managing to fit in a bit of actual research as well, although it’s nowhere near as much as I’d like, but I guess we’ve all been there. The software platform is taking shape towards a minimum viable product of sorts, and I have a couple of ideas for papers I want to write in the near future, so there’s a clear sense of moving forward despite all the other stuff going on.

So what’s the fifth thing, you ask? Well, I’ve rekindled my relationship with choral singing by joining the DCU Campus Choir, having not sung in a proper choir since school. Despite the 20-year gap (plus a bit), I haven’t had much trouble getting into it again: I can still read music, I can still hit the bass notes, and I don’t have all that much to occupy myself in the evenings and weekends so I have plenty of time to learn my parts (although I’m not sure how happy my neighbours are about it). The material we’re doing is nice and varied, and the level of ambition is certainly sufficient, as it seems like we’re constantly running out of rehearsal time before one performance or other. Our next concert will be Carols by Candlelight at DCU’s All Hallows campus on the evening of Monday the 10th of December, so anyone reading this who’s in town that day is very warmly welcome to listen!

Sleepytime

I recently obtained approval for my research from the DCU Research Ethics Committee, so I’m now officially good to go. This might seem like a rather late time to be getting the go-ahead, considering that I’ve been doing the research since February, but so far the work has been all about laying the foundations of the collaborative knowledge discovery software platform (for which I’m going to have to come up with a catchy name one of these days). This part of the project doesn’t involve any human participants or real-world personal data, so I’ve been able to proceed with it without having to concern myself with ethical issues.

As a matter of fact, if it were entirely up to me, the ethics application could have waited until even later, since it will be quite a while still before the platform is ready to be exposed to contact with reality. However, the Marie Curie fellowship came with T&Cs that call for ethics matters to be sorted out within a certain time frame, so that’s what I’ve had to roll with. I’d never actually had to put together an application like this before, so perhaps it was about time, and presumably it won’t hurt that some important decisions concerning what’s going to happen during the remainder of the project have now been made.

One of the big decisions I’d been putting off, but couldn’t anymore, was the nature of the scenario that I will use to demonstrate that the software platform is actually useful for the purpose for which it’s intended. This will be pretty much the last thing that happens in the project, and before that the software will have been tested in various other ways using, for example, open or synthetic data, but eventually it will be necessary to find some volunteers and have them try out the software so I can get some evidence on the workability of the software in a reasonable approximation of a real-world situation. It’s hardly the most controversial study ever, but it’s still research on human subjects and there will be processing of personal data involved, so things like research ethics and the GDPR come into play here and need to be duly addressed.

What I particularly needed a more precise idea about was the data that would be processed using the software platform. In the project proposal I said that this would be lifelogging data, but that can mean quite a few different things, so I needed to narrow it down to something specific. Of course it wouldn’t make sense to develop a platform for analysing just one specific kind of data, so as far as the design and implementation of the software is concerned, I have to pretend that the data could be anything. However, the only way I can realistically expect to be able to carry out a meaningful user test where the users actually bring their own data is by controlling the type of data they can bring.

There were a few criteria guiding the choice of the type of data to focus on. For one thing, the data had to be something that I knew to be already available at some sources accessible to me, so that I could run some experiments on my own before inflicting the software on others. Another consideration was the availability of in-house expertise at the Insight Centre: I’ve never done any serious data mining myself, having always looked at things from more of a software engineering perspective, so it was important that there would be someone close by who knows about the sort of data I intend to process and can help me ensure that the platform I’m building has the right tools for the job.

When I discussed this issue with my supervisor, he suggested sleep data – I’m guessing not least because it’s a personal interest of his, but it does certainly satisfy the above two criteria. Furthermore, it also satisfies a third one, which is no less important: there are many different devices in the market that are capable of tracking your sleep, and these are popular enough that it shouldn’t be a hopeless task to find a decent number of users to participate in testing the software. The concept of lifelogging if often associated with wearable cameras such as the Microsoft SenseCam, but these are much more of a niche product, making photographic data a not very attractive option – which it in fact was anyway because of the privacy implications of various things that may be captured in said photographs, so we kind of killed two birds with one stone there.

Capturing and analysing sleep data is something of a hot topic right now, so in terms of getting visibility for my research, I guess it won’t hurt to hop on the bandwagon, even though I’m not aiming to develop any new analysis techniques as such. Interestingly, the current technology leader in wearable sleep trackers hails from Oulu, Finland, the city where I lived and worked before joining Insight and moving to Dublin. There’s been quite a lot of media buzz around this gadget recently, from Prince Harry having been spotted wearing one on his Australian tour to Michael Dell announcing he’s decided to invest in the company that makes them. I haven’t personally contributed to the R&D behind the product in any way, but I feel a certain amount of hometown pride all the same – Nokia phones may have crashed and burned, but Oulu has bounced back and is probably a lot better off in the long run, not depending so heavily on a single employer anymore.