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?