London calling

Last week I submitted my application for an Academy Research Fellowship to the September call of the Academy of Finland, joining 1028 other hopefuls. That’s right, 1029 applications received according to the AoF Twitter account. I guess it’s safe to say that it’s going to be a tight sieve once again, and my expectations are at about the same level as always. (Not high, in case that was unclear.) I did come up with what I feel is a basically fundable research idea and plan, but the hard part is selling it, and yourself as the right person for the job, to the reviewers. Still, this is the last time I’m eligible for this funding instrument – technically the only time, since the new Research Fellowship has replaced the old Postdoctoral Researcher and Research Fellow instruments – so I figured I’d give it one last shot. Worst case scenario, the reviewers absolutely demolish my proposal but that still leaves me with a foundation to build on.

September tends to be one of the most taxing months of the year, and this year was no exception; if anything, this one was a whopper even by September standards. The AoF call was there as usual, as was the start of teaching with Towards Data Mining being lectured in the first period, but all sorts of other stuff had somehow piled up on top of those. Navigating this ocean of demands on my time and energy was quite an exercise in prioritisation. On the whole, I think I managed to handle it reasonably well, but I can’t entirely shake the feeling that there’s something I’ve neglected that will come and bite me in the bum later.

I have to admit that I probably made things worse for myself by going off gallivanting in and near London just before the start of September, but it was a brilliant trip that I’d been looking forward to for almost three years, so I have no regrets. This was my first time visiting London, so there were lots of things to see, and see things I most certainly did. After six nights in London I took a train to Aylesbury, where I saw my favourite band make a triumphant return to the stage after a series of setbacks, including an extremely traumatic one that could easily have ended their story altogether. The night after the concert I spent in Aylesbury, and the following day it was back to London, Heathrow and eventually home for me.

When I originally started planning the trip, I conceived it as a sort of science/technology-themed pilgrimage, and I managed to fit in several attractions related to that theme: the Natural History Museum, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley with its collection of vintage hardware going all the way back to (rebuilds of) the machines used by Allied codebreakers – among them a certain A. Turing – to decipher German messages during WW2. Westminster Abbey, with all the famous scientists buried or memorialised there, counts as well. Oxford I had to leave for another time, along with the Brunel Museum, which was a bit of a shame since the band I went to see has a connection with Isambard Kingdom Brunel through one of their songs, so a visit to the museum would have tied the trip neatly together. (For the music geeks out there: the song is called The Underfall Yard, the band is called Big Big Train – if you’re into prog rock and aren’t familiar with this group yet, do yourself a favour and check it out.)

Speaking of music, things have been pretty intense on the choral front as well. In barely more than a week we’re due to perform three concerts together with the Musta lammas choir from Helsinki, something we’ve been looking forward to for a long time since the two previous attempts got cancelled because of covid restrictions. We’ll be singing everything from memory, which must be fun for the new singers who auditioned in September and have been in the choir for about two weeks! Choir rehearsals for The Magic Flute started this week, so that’s more stuff to memorise for November when we start rehearsing what we’re going to do on stage. The latter is what I’m mainly nervous about – learning and singing music is entirely within my comfort zone, but I presume that in the opera production even the choir work will involve some acting, and that’s a new thing for me.

Another interesting new development is that I’m now a student at the university! Okay, that’s not exactly new as such, but it’s been a good while since I last was one officially, with a student number and everything. I’m not going for a whole new degree, but I’m continuing my university pedagogy studies from the previous academic year in a programme consisting of three courses for a total of 25 ECTS credits. It’s apparently a lot of work, but during the first year I get to skip some of the course meetings and assignments since I’ve done the introductory course. I intend to continue developing the AI ethics course, for which it looks like I’ll be assuming more responsibility in the future, and I also want to do more research on AI ethics education; hopefully the pedagogy studies will help in both these pursuits.

“It belongs in a museum!”

After a three-week summer holiday, I returned to work last Monday. I say “returned to work”, but what I actually did was hop on a train and travel to Turku to attend the Ethicomp 2022 conference at the School of Economics. After two and a half days of hard conferencing, I departed for Oulu on Thursday afternoon, leaving only Friday as a “normal” workday before the weekend. I can imagine, and have in fact experienced, much worse ways to come back after a vacation!

I felt more anxious than usual about my own presentation, scheduled for late afternoon on the first day. This was partially because I like to prepare and rehearse my presentations well in advance, but this time I hadn’t had time to finish my slides before my vacation nor an inclination to work on them during it, so I more or less put my deck together on the train and then rehearsed the talk in my hotel room. On Tuesday I skipped the session immediately before mine to flick through my slides a few more times and make some last-minute tweaks, and I eventually emerged from my mental cocoon reasonably confident that I would get through the whole thing without stumbling.

I still wasn’t that confident about how the presentation would be received, because the paper I was presenting is probably the strangest one I’ve written to date. Long story short, one day I was preparing materials for the introductory lecture of the AI ethics course and explaining the concepts of moral agency (the status of having moral obligations) and patiency (the status of being the subject of moral concerns). Artificial things are traditionally excluded from both categories, but there is an ongoing debate in philosophy of AI about whether a sufficiently advanced AI system could qualify as a moral agent and/or patient.

The idea that struck me was that if we let go of (organic) life as an analogy and view AI systems as cultural artifacts instead, we can sidestep the whole debate on whether AI can become sentient/conscious/whatever and make the moral patiency question a good deal more relevant to practical AI ethics in the here and now. After all, many people feel sad when an artifact of great cultural significance is destroyed (think Notre-Dame de Paris), and downright outraged if the destruction is wilful (think the Buddhas of Bamiyan), so it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to argue that such artifacts have at least something closely related to moral patiency. Could an AI system also qualify as such an artifact? I filed the question in my brain under “ideas to come back to at an opportune moment”.

The moment came in January: I wasn’t terribly busy with anything else right after the holidays, Ethicomp had a call for papers open and I only needed to write a 1500-word extended abstract to pitch my idea. I did wonder if it might be a bit too outlandish, which in retrospect was silly of me, I suppose – philosophers love outlandish ideas! The reviews were in fact fairly enthusiastic, and in the end my presentation at the conference was also well received. I was able to have some fun with it even, which is not something I often manage with my conference talks, and I soon got over my nagging feeling of being an impostor, a lowly computer scientist who arrogantly thinks he’s qualified to talk philosophy.

In retrospect, I also have to say I did manage to turn that extended abstract into a pretty well written full paper! It’s not officially published yet, but it argues that 1) yes, AI systems can be artifacts of considerable cultural significance and therefore intrinsically worthy of preservation, 2) they constitute a category of artifact that cannot be subsumed under a broader category without losing essential information about their special nature, and 3) this special nature should be taken into account when deciding how to preserve them. The argumentation is fairly informal, relying largely on intuition and analogy, but I’m quite proud of the way it’s built and presented nonetheless. Sure, the paper is only tangentially related to my daily work and is likely to be a total one-off, but even the one-offs can sometimes have a bigger impact than you’d expect – there’s another one of mine, also an ethics paper, that was published 15 years ago but is still getting citations.

Apart from surviving my own presentation, for me the highlight of the first day, and indeed the whole conference, was the keynote Scaling Responsible Innovation by Johnny Søraker. I’d met Johnny before on a couple of occasions, originally at the ECAP 2006 conference in Trondheim where he was one of the organisers, but hadn’t seen him for ages. Turns out he’s now working as an AI ethicist for Google, which the more cynically minded among us might remark sounds like a contradiction in terms, but be that as it may, he gave an insightful and entertaining talk on the challenges faced by SMEs wanting to do responsible innovation and how they can address those challenges. I particularly liked the idea of having an “interrupt”: someone who is kept informed of everything going on in the company and has been trained to spot potential ethics issues. The obvious advantage is that it doesn’t matter how convoluted or ad-hoc the innovation process is – as long as there is this one node through which everything passes at some point, risks can be identified at that point and brought to the attention of someone qualified to make decisions on how to mitigate them.

Among the regular presentations there were several AI-related ones that I found very interesting. The one that resonated with me the most was Sara Blanco’s talk, in which she criticised what might be called a naive, “one-size-fits-all” conception of AI explainability and argued for a more nuanced one that acknowledges the need to account for differences in background knowledge and prior beliefs in the formulation of explanations. In light of my recent exposure to constructivist theories of learning, which likewise emphasise the effect of the learner’s existing knowledge structures on the process of integrating new knowledge into those structures, this made a great deal of sense to me. Outside the realm of AI, I very much enjoyed Reuben Kirkham’s talk on the impact on academic freedom of the unusual relationship between academia and industry in computer science, as well as Michael Kirkpatrick’s on the problematic nature of direct-to-consumer genomic testing services such as 23andMe, something I’ve brought up myself in my data ethics lectures.

The social programme was top notch too. On Wednesday evening we were first treated to a glass of sparkling and some live classical music at the Sibelius Museum, where we had about an hour to roam and explore the collections, which even included some instruments for visitors to try out – I couldn’t resist having a go on the Hammond organ, of course. After this we enjoyed a very tasty three-course dinner, with more live music, at restaurant Grädda next door. From the restaurant we proceeded to a pub for more drinks and chats, and when the pub closed, some of my fellow delegates went to find another one to have a nightcap in, but by that point I was quite ready for bed myself so I headed straight to my hotel.

This was my first Ethicomp conference, but I certainly hope it wasn’t my last. I’ve always found philosophy conferences highly stimulating, as well as welcoming to people of diverse academic backgrounds, so despite my anxieties, me not being a “proper” philosopher has never been a real issue. After CEPE 2009 I more or less lost touch with the tech ethics community for a whole decade, but recently I’ve been sort of working my way back in: first there was the special session at IEEE CEC 2019, then Tethics 2021, and now this. Ethicomp in particular is apparently the one that everyone in the ethics of computing community wants to go to, and having now been there myself, I can see why. The next one will be in 2024, so I guess I have about a year and a half to come up with another weird-but-compelling idea?

A storm of swords

The 11th Doctoral Conferment Ceremony of the University of Oulu was celebrated over the past weekend with all the traditional festivities: the sword-whetting on Friday, the ceremony proper on Saturday followed by a procession through city centre, an ecumenical service in Oulu Cathedral and the conferment banquet and ball, and finally the “sailing trip” (which, I am given to understand, involves rowing but no actual sailing) on Sunday. This is a special year for the University of Oulu in that it’s been exactly 50 years since the university’s first conferment ceremony in 1972, which means that its very first Jubilee Doctors were now celebrated in addition to the usual young doctors and honorary doctors. I had my own doctorate conferred on me in the previous ceremony in 2017, so I have quite a lot of living to do before I get to be a Jubilee Doctor, but in this day and age, with the wonders of modern healthcare, there’s a decent chance that I’ll make it.

Helsingin Sanomat ran a column about the Finnish conferment tradition a couple of weeks ago; the piece is in Finnish only, but the gist of it is that although the whole spectacle is a pretty incomprehensible ritual, we need rituals like that in our lives. Indeed, the conferment ceremony is just that, a ritual: you’re every bit as much a doctor regardless of whether you’ve attended the celebrations. The tradition traces its roots back to Medieval times, and I presume that originally the conferment ceremony would have been where you officially received your degree, but these days graduation and conferment are two distinct events and the latter doesn’t really serve any official function. Technically it’s only after conferment that you’re entitled to carry the symbols of the doctoral degree – the hat and the sword – but there are relatively few occasions where you get to wear the hat, extremely few where you get to wear the sword, and anyway, it’s not like you’re going to get arrested for wearing them “without permission”.

Ah yes, the hat and the sword. This particular bit of Finnish academic tradition tends to arouse a fair deal of curiosity in non-Finns, especially the sword part. Surprisingly many people I’ve met abroad have known about it, although there is a common misconception that “in Finland, when you get your PhD, you get a sword”, which I have disappointingly had to correct by telling them that 1) you have to wait until conferment, and 2) you have to pay for the hat and the sword yourself. The two together cost upwards of a thousand euros, and on top of that come the costs of attending the celebrations. You can choose to participate in only some of them – I skipped the sailing trip myself – or even none of them, but even just having your degree conferred in absentia costs a nontrivial amount of money.

Despite the required expenditure and the seemingly absurd nature of the conferment ceremony, it remains a popular event among new doctors and I certainly have no regrets about splurging on mine five years ago. This year I participated in a different role, singing with the choir in the ceremony proper and the church service. The ceremony was a somewhat strange experience in that we were providing background music and therefore trying to attract as little attention as possible to ourselves, the opposite of what we would normally aim for when performing to an audience. We were instructed beforehand that we should not at any point sing louder than mezzo-piano, which is not that easy to achieve with high notes – you can do those quietly, or you can do them well, but you can’t have it both ways.

In the cathedral we did not have to restrain ourselves and could use the acoustics to full effect. We sang two choral songs by Oulu-born composer Leevi Madetoja and joined the congregation in singing two hymns, including the much-loved Suvivirsi. A staple of Finnish end-of-school-year celebrations, I’ve sung it many times, but never quite the way we did it this time: each of the three verses was in a different language, the first one in Finnish, the second in Swedish and the third in Northern Sami. This brings the total number of languages I’ve sung in during my first year in the choir to eleven! The Orthodox cathedral choir also performed, sounding appropriately angelic, but to me the real star of the show was the organist, who had to keep playing music while the procession of academics walked into the church and then again while they walked out. Both operations took quite a while to complete, but the organist delivered, and we had the best seats in the house, with the massive organ pipes right behind us and the man himself in front of us. We had to suppress our desire to applaud and cheer him, but we did our best to express in other ways how much we loved his playing, and he was clearly delighted to have such an appreciative audience with him in the organ loft.

Today I have an appointment with the costume department of Oulu Theatre to have my measures taken for The Magic Flute; incidentally, this will be the first time I’m having clothes tailor-made for me, apart from my doctoral hat! The last rehearsal of the choir term is this week, the end-of-term party in mid-June, and then we’re off to summer hols as far as choir business is concerned. My actual summer holiday is not that far away either: five weeks of work – a time that somehow manages to feel both excruciatingly long and panic-inducingly short – and then three weeks off. Normally I’d take four, but I’m saving one week for a bit later to finally take a trip to the UK that I originally planned for the summer of 2020. So far everything looks good and I’ve made all the essential reservations, but they’re all refundable just in case. Fingers crossed I won’t be needing those refunds…

That’s a wrap, folks

A paper I wrote with Alan Smeaton, titled “Privacy-aware sharing and collaborative analysis of personal wellness data: Process model, domain ontology, software system and user trial”, is now published in PLOS ONE. In all likelihood, this will be the last scientific publication to come out of the results of my MSCA fellowship in Dublin, so I’m going to take the risk of sounding overly dramatic and say it kind of feels like the end of an era. It took a while to get the thing published, but with all the more reason it feels good to be finally able to put a bow on that project and move on to other things.

So what’s next? More papers, of course – always more papers. As a matter of fact, the same week that I got the notification of acceptance for the PLOS ONE paper, I also got one for my submission to Ethicomp 2022. As seems to be the procedure in many ethics conferences, the paper was accepted based on an extended abstract and the full paper won’t be peer-reviewed, so as a research merit, this isn’t exactly in the same league as a refereed journal paper. However, since the conference is in Finland, I figured that the expenditure would be justifiable and decided to take this opportunity to pitch an idea I’d been toying with in my head for some time.

To be quite honest, this was probably the only way I was ever going to write a paper on that idea, since what I have right now is just that: an idea, not the outcome of a serious research effort but simply something I thought might spark an interesting discussion. Since I only needed to write an extended abstract for review purposes, I could propose the idea without a big initial investment of time and effort, so it wouldn’t have been a huge loss if the reviewers had rejected it as altogether too silly, which I was half expecting to happen. However, the reviewers turned out to agree that the idea would be worth discussing, so Turku, here I come again! That’s the beauty of philosophy conferences in my experience – they’re genuinely a forum for discussion, and I’ve never felt excluded despite being more of a computer scientist/engineer myself, which I presume has a lot to do with the fact that philosophers love to get fresh perspectives on things.

The idea itself is basically an out-of-the-box take on the notion of moral patiency of AI systems, and I will talk about it in more detail in another post, probably after the conference. Meanwhile, a follow-up to our Tethics 2021 paper on teaching AI ethics is at the planning stage, and I have the idea for yet another AI ethics paper brewing in my head. Since I returned to Finland and especially since I started working on the AI ethics course, I’ve been trying to raise my profile in this area, and I have to say I’m fairly pleased at how this is turning out. Recently I had a preliminary discussion with my supervisor about applying for a Title of Docent with AI and data ethics as my field of specialisation, although I haven’t actually started preparing my application yet.

The AI ethics course is now past the halfway point in terms of lecturing, and my own lectures are all done. I started this year’s course with my head full of new ideas from the university pedagogy course I recently completed, and some of them I’ve been able to put to good use, while others have not been so successful. I’ve been trying to encourage the students to participate more during lectures instead of just passively listening, and low-threshold activities such as quick polls seem to work pretty well, but my grand idea of devoting an entire teaching session to a formal debate met with a disappointing response. I don’t very much like the idea of forcing the students to do things they’re not motivated to do or don’t feel comfortable with, but I also don’t have a magic trick for enticing the students out of their comfort zone, so I’m not sure what to do here. I suppose I could settle for the small victories I did manage to win, but I still think that the students would really benefit from an exercise where they have to interact with one another and possibly adopt a position they don’t agree with. Oh well, I have another year now to come up with new ideas for them to shoot down.

Meanwhile, in the choir things are getting fairly intense, with three rehearsal weekends over the past four weeks, two for the whole choir and one for just the tenor section – although to be quite honest, during the latter we sang a grand total of one of the songs included in the set of the spring concert. We also have performances coming up on May Day and in the university’s Doctoral Conferment Ceremonies on the 28th of May, so there’s a lot of material to go through over the next month and a half. Immediately after the March reheasal weekend I tested positive in a COVID home test, so the dreaded bug finally caught up with me, something I’d been expecting for a while actually. It was a mild case, but still unpleasant enough that I wouldn’t fancy finding out what sort of experience it would be without the vaccine.

While on the subject of music, I can’t resist mentioning that I signed up to sing in the chorus in a production of The Magic Flute in January-February next year! That’s a first for me – I’ve been in the audience for plenty of operas, but never on the stage. I’m slightly dreading the amount of time and effort this will require, but in the end I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity. There is still the caveat that if there are more people eager to sing than there are open positions, we may have to audition, but an oversupply of tenors is not a problem that frequently occurs in the choral world. The rehearsal period won’t start until much later in the year, but I’m already a little bit excited at the prospect!

Слава Україні

…yeah. So. This post is going to be rather different from what I usually write about. I certainly didn’t expect when I started the blog that I’d end up covering stuff like this one day, but the plight of Ukraine is making it hard to concentrate on other things, so I may as well try and channel that anxiety into something productive.

I won’t pretend to be even remotely qualified to make sense of all the information going around about how the Russian invasion is progressing, so what I can say with reasonable confidence basically amounts to “things are bad, but not as bad as they could be”. Among the more qualified, there seems to be a consensus that whatever the attackers have gained so far, it’s not as much as they expected and has cost them more than they expected. I can’t say I’m terribly optimistic about the eventual outcome of the war – Russia has plenty more resources to throw at Ukraine I’m sure – but it is heartening to see the Ukrainians fight back with such grim determination and the rest of Europe rally to the cause with such enthusiasm. Big protests everywhere, even in Russia where participating in one is a good way to land in jail.

There were two pro-Ukraine demonstrations here in Oulu during the past weekend, a smaller one with a few dozen participants on Saturday and a bigger one with several hundred on Sunday. I attended both, although I left the Saturday one pretty soon after arriving because I wasn’t really dressed for it and started to freeze my toes off. Even without the physical discomfort, the pleas of the local Ukrainian community weren’t easy to listen to as the speakers struggled to make words come out instead of sobs. As I walked away, I was very much aware of how privileged I was to be able to go to a cosy pub to get my feet warm and enjoy a pint without being in constant fear of news that a family member or friend has been killed.

It’s not just protests either, but imposing huge economic sanctions on the aggressors and supplying the defenders with weapons and intel. It’s frankly amazing how easy it ultimately was to get the entire European Union behind the package; even if you don’t factor in Russian efforts to sow discord among the member states, normally you’d expect it to take ages to get everyone to agree on something of this magnitude, but somehow we went from “endless internal bickering” to “united against a common enemy” in a matter of days. Even Switzerland has broken with its tradition of neutrality, and my own country decided yesterday to go against an established policy of not exporting weapons to conflict zones. Call me naïve, but I doubt this is something the Kremlin was counting on to happen when the invasion was launched.

To continue my layman speculation, while I fear that Ukraine may eventually be forced to capitulate, I’m not so sure that this will be more than a Pyrrhic victory for Putin. If the objectives of the “special military operation” are taken, what does that achieve in the long run? Is this supposed to persuade Ukraine to return to the fold of Mother Russia like a prodigal son, as the propaganda suggests? Good luck trying, with a crippled economy, to control a nation of 40+ million people who 1) are evidently full of fighting spirit, and 2) hate your guts for what you’ve done to them.

The list of responses to the invasion goes on and on; one of the more creative ones I’ve heard of is dog walkers in Helsinki picking up their pets’ waste and chucking it onto the grounds of the Russian embassy. Boycotts and condemnations have been announced in various fields of business, sports, culture… Academia, too: I’m pleased to report that my university has joined all other Finnish universities in supporting Ukraine and condemning Russia’s actions. The open letter signed by thousands of Russian scientists and science journalists opposed to the invasion is also very welcome, but even so, I don’t see how I could, under the circumstances, have any involvement in a scientific conference taking place in Russia or Belarus, for example.

Meanwhile, I do need to do also the part of my job that involves talking about things I actually know about. The second ever implementation of the AI ethics course is about to start in two weeks, and although planning it is not such a huge effort now compared to last year when we were creating everything from scratch, there’s still a fair bit of work to do. The university pedagogy course I’ve been taking has given me a few new ideas to try – I hope I can get them to work the way I’m envisioning. We’ve again managed to recruit a great line-up of visiting experts, too, so on the whole I have a pretty good feeling about this.

The choir has been operating more or less normally since the beginning of February, although last week we had to change some plans, once again because of COVID. A small group of singers, myself included, even got to do a gig at a private function, which was extremely refreshing. All of the big concerts we had planned for the spring term have been postponed, but instead we’re now rehearsing songs for a concert in May, the overarching theme of which happens to be death. When the choirmaster first told us about this idea, I found it quite amusing because of a rather dark inside joke running among some past and present colleagues of mine; it seems less funny now, but I really love the music, and hopefully by the date of the concert it won’t be quite so topical anymore.

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…