Words and music

The proceedings of Tethics 2021 are now available for your viewing pleasure at ceur-ws.org. This means that both of the papers I presented during my two-conference streak in October are now (finally!) officially published! Although I’ve mentioned the papers in my blog posts a few times, I don’t think I’ve really talked about what’s in them in any detail. Since they were published at more or less the same time, I thought I’d be efficient/lazy and deal with both of them in a single post.

At Tethics I presented a paper titled “Teaching AI Ethics to Engineering Students: Reflections on Syllabus Design and Teaching Methods”, written by myself and Anna Rohunen, who teaches the AI ethics course with me. As the title suggests, we reflect in the paper on what we took away from the course, addressing the two big questions of what to teach when teaching AI ethics and how to teach it. In the literature you can find plenty of ideas on both but no consensus, and in a sense we’re not really helping matters since our main contribution is that we’re throwing a few more ideas into the mix.

Perhaps the most important idea that we put forward in the paper is that the syllabus of a standalone AI ethics course should be balanced on two axes: the philosophy-technology axis and the practice-theory axis. The former means that it’s necessary to strike a balance between topics that furnish the students with ethical analysis and argumentation skills (the philosophy) and those that help them understand how ethics and values are relevant to the capabilities and applications of AI (the technology). The latter means that there should also be a balance between topics that are immediately applicable in the real world (the practice) and those that are harder to apply but more likely to remain relevant even as the world changes (the theory).

The paper goes on to define four categories of course topics based on the four quadrants of a coordinate system formed by combining the two axes. In the philosophy/theory quadrant we have a category called Timeless Foundations, comprising ethics topics that remain relatively stable over time, such as metaethics and the theories of normative ethics. In the philosophy/practice quadrant, the Practical Guidance category consists of applied ethics topics that AI researchers and practitioners can use, such as computer ethics, data ethics and AI ethics principles. In the technology/practice quadrant, the Here and Now category covers topics related to AI today, such as the history and nature of AI and the ethical issues that the AI community is currently dealing with. Finally, the technology/theory quadrant forms the category Beyond the Horizon, comprising more futuristic AI topics such as artificial general intelligence and superintelligence.

A way to apply this categorisation in practice is to collect possible course topics in each category, visualise them by drawing a figure with the two orthogonal axes and placing the topics in it, and drawing a bubble to represent the intended scope of the course. A reasonable way to start is a rough circle centered somewhere in the Here and Now quadrant, resulting in a practically oriented syllabus that you can stretch towards the corners of the figure if time allows and you want to include, say, a more comprehensive overview of general ethics. The paper discusses how you can use the overall shape of the bubble and the visualisation of affinities between topics to assess things such as whether the proposed syllabus is appropriately balanced and what additional topics you might consider including.

On teaching practices the paper offers some observations on what worked well for us and what didn’t. Solidly in the former category is using applications that are controversial and/or close to the students’ everyday lives as case studies; this we found to be a good way to engage the students’ interest and to introduce them to philosophical concepts by showing how they manifest themselves in real-world uses of AI. The discussion on Zoom chat during a lecture dedicated to controversial AI applications was particularly lively, but alas, our other attempts at inspiring debates among the students were not so successful. Online teaching in general we found to be a bit of a double-edged sword: a classroom environment probably would have been better for the student interaction aspect, but on the other hand, with online lectures it was no hassle at all to include presentations, demos and tutorials by guest experts in the course programme.

The other paper, titled “Ontology-based Framework for Integration of Time Series Data: Application in Predictive Analytics on Data Center Monitoring Metrics”, was written by myself and Jaakko Suutala and presented at KEOD 2021. The work was done in the ArctiqDC research project and came about as a spin-off of sorts, a sidetrack of an effort to develop machine learning models for forecasting and optimisation of data centre resource usage. I wasn’t the one working on the models, but I took care of the data engineering side of things, which wasn’t entirely trivial because the required data was kept in two different time series databases and for a limited time only, so the ML person needed an API that they could use to retrieve data from both databases in batches and store it locally to accumulate a dataset large enough to enable training of sufficiently accurate models.

Initially, I wrote separate APIs for each database, with some shortcut functions for queries that were the most likely to be needed a lot, but after that I started thinking that a more generic solution might be a reasonably interesting research question in itself. What inspired this thought was the observation that while there’s no universal query language like SQL for time series databases, semantically speaking there isn’t much of a difference in how the query APIs of different databases work, so I saw here an opportunity to dust off the old ontology editor and use it to capture the essential semantics. Basically I ended up creating a query language where each query is represented by an individual of an ontology class and the data to be retrieved is specified by setting the properties of this individual.

To implement the language, I wrote yet another Python API using a rather clever package called Owlready2. What I particularly like about it is that it treats ontology classes as Python classes and allows you to add methods to them, and this is used in the API to implement the logic of translating a semantic, system-independent representation of a query into the appropriate system-specific representation. The user of the API doesn’t need to be aware of the details: they just specify what data they want, and the API then determines which query processor should handle the query. The query processor outputs an object that can be sent to the REST API of the remote database as the payload of an HTTP request, and when the database server returns a response, the query processor again takes over, extracting the query result from the HTTP response and packaging it as an individual of another ontology class.

Another thing I love besides ontologies is software frameworks with abstract classes that you can write your own implementations of, and sure enough, there’s an element of that here as well, as the API is designed so that it’s possible to add support for another database system without touching any of the existing code, by implementing an interface provided by the API. It’s hardly a universal solution – it’s still pretty closely bound to a specific application domain – but that’s something I can hopefully work on in the future. The ArctiqDC project was wrapped up in November, but the framework feels like it could be something to build on, not just a one-off thing.

In other news, the choir I’m in is rehearsing Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil together with two other local choirs for a concert in April. It’s an interesting new experience for me, in more than one way – not only was I previously unfamiliar with the piece, I had also never sung in Church Slavonic before! It turns out that the hours and hours I spent learning Russian in my school years are finally paying off, albeit in a fairly small way: the text has quite a few familiar words in it, I can read it more or less fluently without relying on the transliteration, and the pronunciation comes to me pretty naturally even though my ability to form coherent Russian sentences is almost completely gone by now. It’s still a challenge, of course, but also a beautiful piece of music, and I’m already looking forward to performing it in concert – assuming, of course, that we do get to go ahead with the performance. Because of tightened COVID restrictions, we won’t be able to start our regular spring term until February at the earliest, so I’m not taking anything for granted at this point…

How many Greek letters are there anyway?

It’s my last workday of 2021, at least I very much hope so, and I feel like I should try to sum up the year somehow. The problem is, I can’t think of anything much to say about it! What was supposed to be a fresh start after the weirdness of 2020 turned out to be pretty much just more of the same. As a friend of mine remarked, this was not his preferred method of learning the Greek alphabet. Sure, there were some highlights – taking on new challenges and responsibilities with the launch of the AI ethics course, going to Turku for the Technology Ethics conference – but the fact is that I saw even less of the inside of my office this year than the year before. I haven’t even bothered to find out how to raise my desk, which is supposed to be adjustable but appears to be stuck at the lowest possible elevation, making me feel a little silly and awkward on those rare occasions when I’ve sat at it.

At least during the autumn term I’ve been going to the university campus on a regular basis, because the choir rehearses there in St Luke’s Chapel. As nice as it is that good things have happened at work, singing with Cassiopeia has been the real highlight of the year to be quite honest. If there was any shred of doubt left in my mind that these are my kind of people, it was well and truly dispelled by the Christmas party we had on Friday, easily the most fun I’ve had all year and a brilliant way to wrap up my first choir term. Our Christmas concerts were also a success, and you don’t need to just take my word for it: there’s a little taster available on YouTube, and if that gets you interested, you can buy access to a full concert recording on the choir website. Keep an eye on the YouTube channel of the tenor section too, there’s a very special Christmas treat coming there soon.

Well, that’s it for 2021 then I guess. Will we run out of Greek letters in 2022, and what will we start using instead? Stay tuned to find out, and in the meantime, have a very happy holiday season!

A welcome breather

Another month is coming to an end, and quite a month it has been. Yesterday I finished a streak of two conferences virtually back to back, with only a weekend in between. It’s not an experience I would particularly care to repeat anytime soon – too much stress compressed into such a tight space. At least I was able to attend the second one from the comfort of my home.

Not that I minded travelling to last week’s conference – on the contrary, I thoroughly enjoyed it, apart from the bit where I had to sit on a train for 6+ hours on Wednesday and again on Friday. Tethics 2021 was held at Turku School of Economics with online participation option; apparently about half of a total of 70 registered participants had signed up as in-person attendees. All of us who were physically there were Finnish, with the exception of one Greek professor working in Sweden. I was slightly disappointed that I didn’t get to meet Charles Ess, who was one of the keynote speakers and whom I’d previously met 15 years ago in Trondheim, but then, I very much doubt that he would have remembered me anyway.

The conference was small: four regular sessions with eleven papers altogether, a special session with a presentation by Don Gotterbarn, and two keynotes, Charles Ess on Thursday and Leena Romppainen, president of Electronic Frontier Finland, on Friday. Leena’s talk was a particular highlight for me, an entertaining journey through Effi’s 20-year history of defending digital rights and the “moments of despair and triumph” along the way, as promised by the subtitle of the presentation. Incidentally, yesterday and today the District Court of Helsinki has been hearing a case where Effi and some of its board members are accused of illegal fundraising, the latest episode in a saga almost as old as Effi itself. The contested issue seems to be whether the association was within its legal rights to publish a bank account number for donations on its website – hardly a heinous crime, but unfortunately a golden opportunity for less civil rights-minded actors to brand the defendants as scammers if they are convicted.

My own presentation went pretty well; I had a slight issue with presentation time, only it wasn’t the one I was expecting beforehand. Like all the other speakers in the regular sessions, I had a 30-minute slot, and when I was preparing my slides I genuinely wondered how I was going to fill it. I consoled myself with the thought that at an ethics conference there’s likely to be some real discussion at the end of the presentation, so perhaps even just 20 minutes of talking will do fine, but it turns out I had no problem at all using up my half hour and there was time for no more than one quick question at the end! Apparently there is a talker in me after all, when the topic’s right.

The social programme was great too, definitely reason enough to attend the conference in person. Besides coffee and lunch breaks, on Wednesday evening there was a welcoming event, basically ten-ish people sitting around a table in a meeting room sipping sparkling wine and chatting about random stuff, with dinner afterwards for those of us who were hungry. On Thursday there was another dinner, with drinks in pubs before and after. As I was sipping my last pint before bed, I listened to the Conference Chair and the aforementioned Greek professor having a passionate discussion on Heidegger – not something that tends to happen at more technical conferences, even after hours!

Indeed, the experience was very different this week when I participated in IC3K 2021. I chaired one session, presented my own paper in another and attended a third as a listener, and I think I heard a grand total of one audience question. There were the semi-obligatory courtesy questions by the session chairs, of course, but those don’t really count. I suppose these online conferences are not the most conducive to interaction, but even so, it’s certainly my experience that at philosophical conferences there’s a lot more actual discussion of the presented papers than at technical ones. Still, I have to hand it to the conference organisers, there was no shortage of available interaction channels: in addition to the conference sessions on Zoom, there was a Slack workspace, a discussion forum for each individual paper on PRIMORIS, plus whatever contact details (email addresses, Twitter handles, Skype names etc.) the delegates themselves had chosen to share.

Now, with the conferences done and the videos for my own Towards Data Mining lecture scripted, recorded and released, I suddenly find myself in a situation where there’s nothing to be particularly stressed about looming in the immediate future. I’m sure there’s something new around the corner, but perhaps I’ll have at least a week or so to savour the feeling. Also, it’s less than two months till Christmas – less than two months of work left in 2021, would you believe it. I’m really looking forward to the holiday season actually, because this year it means choir concerts again! Keep watching cassiopeia.fi for announcements.

Talking the talk

August is done and the autumn term is now well underway. I received my second vaccine jab about a month ago, and the nationwide figures are also starting to look fairly encouraging, so maybe, just maybe, we won’t still be working remotely when the term ends? So far, though, it’s business as usual at the home office, although last week I met up with a few colleagues for an actual face-to-face lunch, and I’ve also made a couple of visits to the campus recently.

The reason why I’ve been going to the campus is not entirely usual, though: I’ve been shooting new lecture videos for our Towards Data Mining course. All of the lectures are going to be presented by me, even though I’m in charge of only one of them; for the rest, I get a script from the person responsible and read it on camera in my best David Attenborough English. There’s a studio on the campus with a pretty professional set-up – green screen, teleprompter, the works – so it’s kind of like having my first ever acting job!

Apart from the videos, I’m already done with my lecturing for 2021, which is a pleasant feeling. Towards Data Mining is ongoing, but my lecture is the second one and I’ve already given it. There’s still a bunch of videos left to record, including two sections of my own lecture that I haven’t written yet, and there will also be quite a few exam answers to evaluate before the year is over. I’m going to do some studying of my own, too: I figured I’d probably benefit from some training as a teacher, so I applied for, and was accepted to, the course Introduction to University Pedagogy, which kicks off next week (and incidentally involves making a video as a preliminary assignment).

Meanwhile, the two conferences I’m attending this autumn are approaching fast: they’re almost back-to-back in late October, the first one (Tethics 2021) starting already on the 20th. This is the one I’m particularly excited about, since I’ve registered myself as an in-person participant! It’s all still very COVID-conscious – there won’t be a formal conference dinner, and it’s entirely possible that it will be just a bunch of us Finland residents showing up in Turku and the rest of the world joining in online – but from my point of view it’s definitely a step up from fully online conferences, as convenient as they are.

In any event, I’ll soon need to start working on my presentations for those conferences. My work sure seems to involve an awful lot of talking this year! I’m more used to writing being the thing that keeps me busy in September, but this time I decided to skip the usual (and, a more cynical person might add, ultimately pointless) hassle of pestering the Academy of Finland for money. Technically, the deadline hasn’t passed yet, but it’s less one and a half hours away as I’m posting this, so I’d have to be really determined to get everything done on time, even if I just wanted to resubmit last year’s application without any changes whatsoever.

Outside work, my life will soon involve quite a bit of singing: I’ve joined the Cassiopeia Choir! When I came back from Ireland, I was thinking it would be nice to find a choir in Oulu because I’d enjoyed my time with the DCU Campus Choir so much, but then of course COVID happened and I filed the plan under “things to do when it’s okay to be in a room with dozens of people again”. A while ago it came to my knowledge that the choir had auditions coming up, so I signed up, did the thing and got picked. Based on my audition, the choirmaster decided I should be a tenor, which is an interesting twist, but I was never the deepest of basses anyway, so I guess I’ll be fine. First rehearsal tonight!

I’m an ethicist, get me out of here

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…

Set sail for Idle City

Last day of June! Almost time to kick off my summer holiday, and boy have I ever been looking forward to it. In terms of things like papers submitted and Master’s theses supervised to completion, I’ve had a pretty productive spring term, but it’s basic physics that to get stuff done you need to expend energy, and I’m definitely due for a recharge. I’m particularly happy that I have a bit of travel planned – not international, but I am going to make a quick trip to the Åland Islands, which is, in a sense, the closest thing to being abroad without actually being abroad. I even started using Duolingo to brush up on my Swedish before going.

The big project of the spring was, of course, the AI ethics course, which we wrapped up a week ago after a fairly intense 3+ months of preparing materials, giving lectures and grading assignments. It turned out to be quite a learning experience for us teachers, and I hope that the students also learned an interesting and/or useful thing or two. At least the feedback from the students has been mostly encouraging, although you can’t please everyone and surely there are various things that we could have done better. The good news is that the course is happening again next year, so we’ll get our chance to make those improvements. That’s most definitely a job for later, though!

It’s now looking more and more strongly like we’ll finally see the inside of the university campus again when we come back from our holidays: the regional COVID coordination team announced yesterday that they’re dropping the recommendation to work from home, and the university soon followed suit. I already have a bunch of remote lectures and meetings in the calendar for August and I think I’ll prefer to do those from home anyway, but that still leaves plenty of time for seeing the people I work with in the flesh – funny how something so mundane now has the ring of a special occasion to it. It’s been ages since I last switched on my computer at work, so I expect I’ll be spending most of my first day back installing every Windows update since late Renaissance.

Despite all the hard work, there are a couple of things that I was hoping to get done by now but didn’t. The main one is the funding application I mentioned in my last post, which still isn’t quite finished and has to wait until August before we can submit it. I also had plans to write and submit one more journal manuscript this month, but in hindsight that was never going to happen and all I managed to do was come up with a concept for the paper. There is still the option of writing it sometime later and perhaps I will; it’s a state-of-the-art survey that would have been suitable for a special issue I received an email about, but there’s no particular reason why I couldn’t submit it later to some other journal, or perhaps even a regular issue of the same journal.

Even without the survey, I have three manuscripts currently under review, which is not too bad I’d say! As a matter of fact, I’m expecting the notification of acceptance/rejection for one of those manuscripts today; it’s for a conference in Finland, so there’s even a chance for a good old-fashioned conference trip if the paper gets accepted. Wouldn’t that be something! Another conference paper notification is due in mid-July and the camera-ready deadline is just two weeks later, which is rather inconvenient for me but can’t be helped. I’m certainly not hoping for a rejection, and an acceptance without any suggested revisions is probably too much to hope for, but can I please at least have a decision that doesn’t involve me converting the paper from regular to short during my holiday?

The time is now, the day is here

This month of Maying is coming to an end on an unexpected positive note: I’m getting my first shot of COVID vaccine this weekend! Unexpected in that not too long ago it was still estimated that in my city and for my age group the vaccinations would start in the week starting on the 7th of June, so we got there a couple of weeks early. I’m not complaining of course, although I can’t help wondering what’s behind this surprise schedule speed-up – I certainly hope it’s not that the people in age brackets above mine have suddenly turned into conspiracy theorists. Pretty much everyone I know in my bracket rushed to make their reservations right away and then complained about how badly the reservation system was working, which I’m going to optimistically intepret as a sign of the system being under exceptionally heavy load (as opposed to just being rubbish).

Another thing that’s coming to an end is the AI ethics course. Since the lectures were finished a few weeks ago, the work has consisted of grading assignments and doing miscellaneous admin – still a good deal of work, but it no longer feels like it’s hogging all of my available time and energy. It seems that many of the students have also found the course surprisingly laborious, so adjusting the workload could be something to consider in the future, but I guess a part of it may be that the students are not that used to the kind of work we had them do, with lots of writing assignments where they are expected to discuss non-engineery things like ethical principles and values. Presumably a more traditional course with an exam at the end would have been easier for both us and them, but to me that doesn’t seem like a very good way to teach a subject where, a lot of the time, there are no right answers. The time for proper stock-taking is later, but I feel like we were pretty successful in designing a course that challenges the students on their ability to build and defend arguments and not just on their ability to absorb information.

It’s just as well that the course isn’t eating up all of my hours anymore, because there definitely isn’t any shortage of other things to do. It’s not even the only teaching thing I’m working on at the moment: there’s another course where I need to do some grading of exam answers, plus an upcoming one on learning analytics where I’m committed to giving some lectures on ethics, plus there are always students with Bachelor’s/Master’s theses to supervise. On top of that, I’m somehow finding some time for research – I’ve not just one but two manuscripts due to be submitted soon, which is a very welcome development after all of 2020 zoomed by without me getting a single new paper out. On top of that, a big funding proposal that had been dormant for a while is now very much awake again, and pressure is high to get it done before July comes and everyone buggers off to their summer hols.

What happens after July is an interesting question. With the vaccinations progressing well – more than half of the adult population have had at least one jab already – it looks like there’s a good chance that the recommendation to work from home will be dropped and we’ll be going back to normal in August. The thing is, after close to a year and a half of working remotely, I’m not at all sure that going to the office is going to feel all that normal! I suppose we’ll get used to it, like we got used to the current situation, but it may take a while. There’s a lot to be said in favour of remote work, even when there isn’t a contagious disease to worry about, so I’m guessing there will be a period when everyone is figuring out the right balance between office days and remote days. In the end, perhaps work will be a bit better as a result of all this; I’m sure there are tons of academic papers to be written on the subject, but that’s a job for other people – I’ll stick with my diet of computer science and philosophy.

The new black

The new AI ethics course is now officially underway – actually, we’re close to the halfway mark already, with three out of eight lectures done. I’ve been chiefly responsible for all three, which has kept me thoroughly busy for pretty much all of March, and I’ve seldom felt as deserving of the upcoming long weekend as I do right now. Zoom lecturing, which I had my first taste of in the autumn term, still feels weird but I’m getting used to it. Typically none of the students will have their camera on, and it’s hopeless to try to gauge how an audience of black rectangles is receiving you unless they go to the bother of using reactions. Perhaps a year of online classes hasn’t been enough time for a new culture of interaction to emerge organically – or perhaps this is the new culture, but that sounds kind of bleak to me and I hope it’s not true.

I’m sure I could have done some things better to foster such a culture myself; I’m fully aware that I’m not the most interactive sort of teacher. On the other hand, I’m firmly of the opinion that teaching applied ethics without having any ethical debates would be missing the point, so we’ve been trying to come up with various ways to get the students sharing and discussing their views. We’ve had some success with supplementary sessions where a short presentation expanding on a minor topic of the main lecture seeds a discussion on related ethical issues, and there has also been some action on the Zoom chat, especially during last week’s lecture on controversial AI applications. It helps that there are many real-world controversies available for use as case studies: people will often have a gut reaction to these, and by analysing that it’s possible to gain some insight into ethics concepts and principles that might otherwise remain a bit abstract.

Although the course has been a lot of work, some of it in evenings and weekends, it’s also been quite enjoyable, not counting the talking-at-laptop-camera-hoping-someone-is-listening part. Ethics isn’t exactly my bread and butter, so preparing materials for the course has required me to learn a little bit about a lot of different things, which suits me perfectly – I’m a bit of a junkie for knowledge in general, and I’ve never been one to focus all my efforts on a single interest. My eagerness to dabble in everything has probably worked to my disadvantage in research, since we’re way past the days when one person could be an expert in every field of scholarship, but I think it serves me well here. On the other hand, the mental stimulation I’ve been getting from looking into all these diverse topics has also given me all sorts of ideas for new papers I could write. The most laborious part of the course for me is over now, with my co-lecturer plus some guests taking over for most of the remaining lectures, so I may even have time and energy to actually work on those papers after I’ve had a bit of R&R.

In my latest lecture I talked about the relationship between AI and data. Here I was very much on home ground, since pretty much my whole academic career has revolved around this theme, so it wasn’t hard to come up with a number of fruitful angles to look at it from. I ended up using the ever-popular “new oil” metaphor for data quite a lot; I actually kind of hate it, but it turns out that talking about the various ways in which data is or isn’t similar to oil makes a pretty nifty framing device for a lecture on data ethics. Data is like oil in that it’s a highly valuable resource in today’s economy, it powers a great many (figurative) engines, and it needs to be refined in order to be of any real value. On the other hand, data is not some naturally occurring resource that you pump or dig out of the ground: it’s created by people, and often it’s also about people and/or used to make decisions that affect people, which is where data ethics comes in.

None of these are very original observations I’m afraid, but perhaps it’s good to say them out loud all the same. If I do have a more novel contribution to add, it might be this: both oil and data have generated a lot of wealth, but over time we have come to regret using them so carelessly. With oil, we are working to reduce our dependence by adopting alternatives to petroleum-based energy sources and materials, but with data, I’m not sure that the idea of an alternative even makes sense, so it looks like we’re slated to keep using more and more of it. This makes it ever more important that we all learn to deal with it wisely – individuals, enterprises and governments alike. The economic value of data is well established by now, so maybe it’s time to pay more attention to other values?

Happy(?) anniversary

Two weeks ago I celebrated the one-year anniversary of my return to Finland. Well, I didn’t actually celebrate as such – it was a Tuesday like any other. Looking back to that day in 2020, I can’t help but find the contrast of expectation versus reality slightly amusing; I’d decided to travel home in style and booked a business-class ticket, so there I was, lounging in my comfy seat with a pleasant warmth spreading inside me from a nice hot breakfast, complimentary champagne, memories of Ireland and thoughts of all the good things ahead now that I was coming home for good. Little did I know!

I don’t know how many people would agree with me on this, but considering how quickly this first full year back in Finland has zoomed by (no online meetings pun intended), I have to conclude that time does actually fly even under the present circumstances. Finland, of course, has had it a good deal easier than a lot of other countries, and the summer was even verging on normal, although I did have to cancel my planned trip to the UK and I’m not hugely optimistic about the chances of it happening this year either. The end of the year, I’ll admit, was a bit rough, but then, it tends to be wearying even in the best of times so I can’t blame it all on the pandemic.

There was something satisfyingly symbolic about the way the year changed. I spent New Year’s Eve at home, accompanied by my pet rabbit, entertaining myself by watching a Jean-Michel Jarre concert that was virtual in more than one sense: besides being an online-only event, the video stream didn’t even show Jarre performing in a physical location but rather an avatar of him in a VR environment based on Notre-Dame de Paris. (Another Ireland memory there – one of the songs I rehearsed with the DCU Campus Choir was a short tribute piece written by an Irish composer after the April 2019 fire.) The weather, having been kind of iffy all December, took a wintry turn during the night and it began to snow heavily, as if to wipe the slate clean for the coming year. By noon the following day the world had turned so gloriously white that I felt compelled to go out on my bike and take some pictures.

For some reason – well, for a number of reasons I suppose – I’ve found it quite hard to get any kind of writing done in the past couple of months. I wanted to do some work on my rejected manuscript during the Christmas break, but I struggled to find the motivation and finally got it submitted to another journal just a couple of weeks ago. Last week I finished my share of the work for the latest run of our Towards Data Mining course, so with those two major items ticked off my to-do list and the kick-off of the new AI ethics course still a month away, I felt justified to turn my attention to the blog, which I’ve been neglecting (again).

Ah yes, the ethics course. I say “still a month away”, but in reality I’m already getting stressed about it. It’s coming up pretty well, but it’s still far from ready for launch, and I keep worrying that it’s going to fail spectacularly because of some rookie mistake. Feeling nervous about lecturing is one thing, but there’s a lot more to prepare than just an individual lecture or two. On top of that it’s all being created more or less from scratch, and this whole online teaching thing is also still kind of new and in the process of taking shape, so there are dozens of critically important things that we might get all wrong or just completely forget to do – in my mind at least, if not necessarily in reality.

I am very much enjoying preparing my lectures, though. Perhaps the biggest problem with the subject matter is that as much as I love philosophy, it can be a bit of a rabbit hole: once you get started with questioning your assumptions, and the assumptions behind those assumptions, you’ll soon find yourself questioning everything you believe in, which isn’t a great place to be when you’re supposed to be confidently imparting knowledge to others. On an applied ethics course it wouldn’t make sense to spend a lot of time exploring ethical theories that are of little relevance to the sort of issues the students can expect to encounter in the real world – and I wouldn’t be qualified to teach those anyway – but it also wouldn’t seem right to just handwave all the theory away and discuss the issues on an ad-hoc basis.

What’s needed here is a framework that makes it possible to make meaningful normative statements and have a productive debate about them without taking forever to set up. As I was thinking about this recently, I was struck by the realisation that it’s actually pretty amazing that we are, in fact, able to have meaningful discussions about ethics, considering that there are some very fundamental things about it that we can’t agree on. Put two random people together and they may hold radically different views on the foundations of ethics, yet the odds are that each of them uses ethical concepts in a way that’s perfectly recognisable to the other. Theoretically, you could argue that ethical statements are completely subjective or even essentially meaningless, but it’s hard to sustain such arguments when you look at how well, in reality, we are able to understand each other on matters of right and wrong.

Similarly, if you immerse yourself too deeply in metaethical nitpicking, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that despite all our differences and disagreements, ethics works. It may seem outright heretical to view ethics as an instrument, but if you do that, you have to conclude that it does a really good job of enabling people to live together as functional communities. It’s hardly a perfect system, and there will always be some unwanted things slipping through the cracks, but that doesn’t make the system useless, or meaningless, or nonexistent. Like many of the more abstract systems that human societies are built upon, it ultimately depends on enough people believing in it, but on the whole, we as a species seem to be pretty good at believing in such things.

Another thing we’re good at is developing technology, and that’s what makes technology ethics – including AI ethics – so important in my view. We do, of course, have laws to regulate technology and we keep making new ones, but the process of legislation tends to lag behind the process of technological change, and the social change that comes with it. As a technology researcher I believe that technology is primarily a force for good, but we need a frontline defence against harmful excesses, something capable of pre-empting them rather than just reacting to them: a strong ethical tradition involving all developers and appliers. If I can do my modest part in cultivating such a tradition among future AI engineers, then the new course will be something to feel at least a little bit proud of.

Good riddance to 2020

Christmas is very nearly here, and a very welcome thing it is, too. After a streak of mild and rainy days our snow is largely gone, and frankly it’s depressingly dark right now, so a bit of Christmas cheer is just the thing to wash away the dust and grime of this mess of a year. The December solstice was yesterday, so technically the days are growing longer already, but of course it’s going to take a good while before that becomes actually noticeable.

Things seem to be looking up on the COVID front as well, with new cases on the decline in Oulu and the start of vaccinations just around the corner. I’ve been voluntarily living under lockdown-like conditions for a few weeks now: no band rehearsals, no coworker lunches (except on Teams), no pints in pubs, only going out for exercise and shopping and keeping the latter to a minimum. I hope this is enough for me to spend Christmas with my parents relatively safely; it’s going to be a very small gathering, but at least I won’t have to eat my homemade Christmas pudding all by myself, which might just be the death of me.

This blog post will be the last work thing I do before I sign off for the year. I was going to do that yesterday, but decided to take care of a couple more teaching-related tasks today in order to have a slightly cleaner slate to start with when I return to work. There will still be plenty of carry-over from 2020 to keep me busy in January 2021; most urgently, there’s a funding application to finish and submit once we get the consortium negotiations wrapped up, as well as an article manuscript to revise and submit. I got the rejection notification a couple of weeks ago, but haven’t had the energy to do much about it apart from talking to my co-author about what our next target should be.

Improving the manuscript is a bit of a problem, because the biggest thing to improve would be the evaluation, but the KDD-CHASER project is well and truly over now and I’ve moved on to other things, so running another live experiment is not a feasible option. We will therefore just have to make do with the results we have and try to bolster the paper in other areas, maybe also change its angle and/or scope somewhat. I should at least be able to beef up the discussion of the data management and knowledge representation aspect of the system, although I haven’t made much tangible progress on the underlying ontology since leaving Dublin.

I have been working on a new domain ontology though, in the project that’s paying most of my salary at the moment. Ontologies are fun! There’s something deeply satisfying about designing the most elegant set of axioms you can come up with to describe the particular bit of the universe you’re looking at, and about the way new incontrovertible facts emerge when you feed those axioms into a reasoner. I enjoy the challenge of expressing as much logic as I can in OWL instead of, say, Python, and there’s still plenty of stuff for me to learn; I haven’t even touched SPARQL yet, for instance. Granted, I haven’t found a use case for it either, but I have indicated that I would be willing to design a new study course on ontologies and the semantic web, so I may soon have an excuse…

Another thing to be happy about is my new employment contract, which is a good deal longer than the ones I’m used to, although still for a fixed term. On the flip side, I guess this makes me less free to execute sudden career moves, but I’d say that’s more of a theoretical problem than a practical one, given that I’m not a big fan of drastic changes in my life and anyway these things tend to be negotiable. In any case, it’s a nice change to be able to make plans that extend beyond the end of next year!

Well, that’s all for 2020 then. Stay safe and have a happy holiday period – hope we’ll start to see a glimmer of normality again in 2021.