Summer seems to have an impeccable timing this year: on Friday I came back from my vacation and immediately the temperature dropped by about ten degrees and it started raining. Certainly helped me feel less bad about spending the day indoors! Until then, July had been so consistently hot and sunny that it was almost enough to make you forget what a more typical Finnish summer looks like. Today in Oulu it’s +15°C and raining again, but the weather should get nicer toward the weekend, which is fortunate since I have some tickets booked for outdoor concerts. 

“Officially”, I was still on vacation all week last week – not that it makes much of a difference, since for now I’m still working from home; the university is currently not explicitly recommending remote work, but the city of Oulu is, and anyway all of my closest colleagues are still on vacation, so there doesn’t seem to be much point in going to the campus since I wouldn’t find anyone there to socialise with. Besides, given the most recent news about the development of the COVID situation, it may be best to wait until after the university’s response team has convened to see if there’s any update to the instructions currently in effect. 

The reason why I worked on Friday – I could get used to a one-day work week, by the way – is a happy one: a paper of mine got accepted to the 13th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development, and the camera-ready version of the manuscript was due on July 30. The version submitted for review was ten pages long and was accepted as a short paper, which technically meant that the final version should have been two pages shorter, but I used the loophole of paying extra page charges and ended up adding a page so I could meaningfully address some of the reviewers’ suggestions. 

Already at the very beginning of my vacation I had received the pleasant news that another paper had been accepted to the Conference on Technology Ethics, so that’s a double whammy for the month of July! In fact, not only was the manuscript accepted – it received all “strong accept” ratings from the reviewers, which is surely a career first for me. What’s particularly exciting is that while all of the details are still TBA, it looks like the conference is going to be organised as an actual physical event in the city of Turku, which means that I may get to go on my first conference trip since 2019! I would certainly appreciate the opportunity to visit Turku, since it’s a city I’m way too unfamiliar with, having been there only once for a couple of days for work. 

I’m giving my next lecture on AI ethics already on Thursday, with two more to follow later in August, as part of a 10 ECTS set of courses in learning analytics. There seems to be no escaping the topic for me anymore, but I don’t exactly mind; it’s actually kind of cool that I’ve managed to carve myself a cosy little niche as a local go-to guy for things related to computing and ethics. Really the only problem is that I don’t always get to spend as much time thinking about ethics as I’d like to, since there are always other things vying for my attention. Generally those other things represent where the bulk of my salary is coming from, so then I feel guilty about neglecting them – but at the same time I’m increasingly feeling that the ethics stuff may be more significant in the long run than my contributions to more “profitable” areas of research.

Last spring term, during the AI ethics course, I was unhappy about it eating up so much of my time, and indeed for a while I barely had time for anything else. It didn’t help matters that the course kept spilling into what should have been my free time, but if you look at the big picture, you could say with some justification that it’s not the ethics eating up time from everything else but the other way around. Now I just need to find someone who’s willing to pay me a full salary for philosophising all day long…