It’s been a weird couple of months since I came back from my summer vacation. I haven’t kept track of how my working time has been split among the tools I’ve used, but if I had, I’m pretty sure that number one on the list would be PowerPoint. So many lectures and presentations! I guess it’s good that I get to work on my communication skills, and I do even quite enjoy it when I get to give a well-prepared presentation on a topic I’m genuinely interested in and have something original to say about, but still, enough is enough. I’m hoping this is just a temporary state of affairs, but if not, I may need to work on my saying no to speaker invitations skills.

Indeed, 2024 is already a record year for me in terms of the number of various speaking engagements I’ve had. There are two major reasons for this, the first one being the Reboot Skills project, in which I designed and implemented a course titled Data Governance and Privacy. In addition to the course sessions – three main ones in Finnish, plus an additional one in English in collaboration with the University of Limerick – I’ve attended at least three industry events where I spoke on the subject and pitched the course before it began. Despite these efforts, the course attracted a disappointingly small number of participants, but even so, I’m quite happy to lay it to rest for now and focus on other things.

The other reason is my work on AI ethics, which has gotten me invited to a bunch of seminars recently. This semester I’ve already participated in two: in August, there was a university pedagogy seminar where I presented again the results of my pilot study on integrating AI tools into AI ethics teaching, and a week ago I spoke on responsible AI in research in a seminar organised by the university’s Ethics Working Group. Coming up next is the Tethics conference, where I will both present a paper and co-host a workshop on technology ethics education, and at the end of November comes a seminar at the Finnish National Defence University in Helsinki, where I’m slated to give my perspective as an AI ethicist on the topic of AI in the battlefield. Nothing yet scheduled for December, but there’s still time…

Tethics, for me, is going to be a somewhat more hurried affair this year. I will be there for the whole duration of the conference, but instead of traveling the day before as I normally would, I’m going to take a night train that arrives in Tampere in the morning of the first day. The reason for this is that I have commitments in Oulu that prevent me from leaving much earlier than midnight on the night between the 5th and 6th of November. More specifically, on the evening of the 5th is the first of three dress rehearsals for a stage adaptation of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol at Oulu City Theatre, and I won’t be in town for the other two so I can’t afford to skip it.

That’s right, I’m going to be back on stage, less than a year after the end of The Magic Flute! The director is the same, and when I heard she was looking for singers for this production, it didn’t take me too long to decide that I want in. The only reason why I needed any time at all to think about it was that the rehearsals clash with those of Cassiopeia, so I’ve been mostly absent from the choir since the beginning of September. However, it’s not that often that an opportunity like this turns up, and the only big choir thing remaining this year is the traditional Christmas concert, so I figured now’s not the worst time to take a little break.

Compared to the opera, working on the play is notably different in a few respects. For one thing, instead of a whole chorus of forty singers there’s only a quartet, and we also have significantly more time on stage, so I have a bigger role now, even though I’m not playing an actual named character. I even have a couple of spoken lines! I’m also officially employed by the theatre this time – the pay is hardly worth mentioning, but just the fact that I’m getting money for something I’m basically doing as a hobby is pretty cool.

Artistically speaking, the biggest difference is that we’re not on stage as singers, but rather as actors playing singers. This may seem like semantic quibbling but is actually a significant distinction, as everything we do on stage must be in service of the story. To some extent this was the case also with The Magic Flute, but surely it would have been too sacrilegious to touch Mozart’s music, no matter what the director’s vision is calling for. Here, on the other hand, it’s often the case that we don’t get to sing a song all the way through because the rhythm of the scene doesn’t allow it, and on a couple of occasions we get interrupted mid-verse by stage events. Apart from that, everything feels quite natural and I’m really happy and excited to be doing theatre again.

Another thing I’m very happy about is that with the Data Governance and Privacy course finished, I have some time to work on things that aren’t my next PowerPoint slideshow for a change. Like writing papers! There’s one I’ve been itching to get started on for a good while now, and it looks like now is finally the time. I’m also supposed to be working in a couple of projects besides Reboot Skills, and “no updates from me” is a phrase I’ve had to use a bit too frequently in meetings of late. Who knows – maybe there’ll be more papers to write once I’ve reminded myself what it is that I’m meant to be doing in those projects…