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…

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?

Summing up the AI summit

The end of the year is approaching fast, with Christmas now barely two weeks away, but I managed to fit in one more virtual event to top off this year of virtual events: the Tortoise Global AI Summit. To be quite honest, I wasn’t actually planning to attend – didn’t even know it was happening – but a colleague messaged me the previous day, suggesting that it might be relevant to my interests and also that the top brass would appreciate some kind of executive summary for the benefit of the Faculty. Despite the short notice I had most of the day free from other engagements, and since the agenda did indeed look interesting, I decided to register and check it out – hope this blog post is close enough to what the Dean had in mind!

I liked the format of the event, a series of panel discussions rather than a series of presentations. Even the opening keynote with Oxford’s Sir Nigel Shadbolt was organised as a one-on-one chat between Sir Nigel and Tortoise’s James Harding, which felt more natural in an online environment than the traditional “one person speaks, everyone else listens, Q&A afterward” style. Something that worked particularly well was the parallel discussion on the chat, to which anyone attending the event could contribute and from which the moderators would from time to time pick questions or comments to be discussed with the main speakers. Overall, I was left with the feeling that this is the way forward with virtual events: design the format around the strengths of online instead of trying to replicate the format of an offline event using tools that are not (yet) all that great for such a purpose.

The keynote set the tone for the rest of the event, bringing up a number of themes that would be discussed further in the upcoming sessions: the hype around AI versus the reality, transparency of AI algorithms and AI-based decision making, AI education – fostering AI talent in potential future professionals and data/algorithm literacy in the general populace – and the need for data architectures designed to respect the ethical rights of data subjects. Unhealthy power concentrations and how to avoid them was a topic that resonated with the audience, and it shouldn’t be too hard to think of a few examples of such concentrations. The carbon footprint of running AI software was brought up on the chat. Perhaps my favourite bit of the session was Sir Nigel’s point that there is a need for institutional and regulatory innovations, which he illustrated by way of analogy by mentioning the limited company as a historical example of an institutional innovation. Such innovations are perhaps more easily overlooked than scientific and technological ones, but one can hardly deny that they, too, have changed the world and will continue to do so.

The world according to Tortoise

The second session was about the new edition of the Tortoise Global AI Index, which ranks 62 countries of the world on their strength in AI capacity, defined as comprising the three pillars of implementation, innovation and investment. These are further divided into the seven sub-pillars of talent, infrastructure, operating environment, research, development, government strategy and commercial, and the overall score of each country is based on a total of 143 individual indicators. The scores are normalised such that the top country gets an overall score of 100, and it’s no big surprise that said country is the United States, as it was last year when the index was launched. China and the United Kingdom similarly retain their places as no. 2 and no. 3, respectively. China has closed some of the gap with the US but is still quite far behind with a score of 62, while the UK, sitting at around 40, has lost some of its edge over the challengers. Canada, Israel, Germany, the Netherlands, South Korea, France and Singapore complete the top 10.

Finland is just out of the top 10 but rising, up three places from 14th to 11th. According to the index, Finland’s particular forte is government strategy, comprising indicators such as the existence of a national AI strategy signed by a senior member of government and the amount of dedicated spending aimed at building AI capacity. In this particular category Finland is ranked 5th in the world. Research (9th) and operating environment (11th) can also be counted among Finland’s strengths, and all of its other subrankings (talent – 16th, commercial – 19th, infrastructure – 21st, development – 22nd) are solidly above the median as well. Interestingly, the US, while being ranked 1st in four categories and in the top 10 for all but one, is only 44th on operating environment. The most heavily weighted indicator here is the level of data protection legislation, giving countries covered by the GDPR a bit of an edge; 7 of the top 10 in this category are indeed EU countries, but there is also, for instance, China in 6th place, so commitment to privacy is clearly not the whole story.

There was some good discussion on the methodology of the AI index, such as the selection of indicators. For example, one could question the rather heavy bias toward LinkedIn as a source of indicators for AI talent. Another interesting point raised was that while we tend to consider academics mainly in terms of their affiliation, it might also be instructive to look at their nationality. Indeed, the hows and whys of the compilation of the index would easily make for a dedicated blog post, or even a series of posts, but I’ll leave it for others to produce a proper critique. For those who are interested, a methodology report is available online.

From the Global AI Index the conversation transitioned smoothly into the next session on the geopolitics of AI, where one of the themes discussed was if countries should be viewed as competing against one another in AI, or if AI should rather be seen as an area of international collaboration for the benefit of citizens everywhere. Is there an AI race, like there once was a space race? Is mastery of AI a strategic consideration? Benedict Evans advocated the position that to talk about AI strategy is to adopt a wrong level of abstraction, and that AI (or rather machine learning) is just a particular way of creating software that in about ten years’ time will be like relational databases are today: so ubiquitous and mundane that we hardly pay any attention to it. This was in stark contrast to the view put forward in the beginning of the session that AI is a general-purpose technology akin to electricity, with comparable potential to revolutionise society. The session was largely dominated by this dialectic, but there was still time for other themes as well, such as the nature of AI clusters in a world where geographically limited technology clusters are becoming an outdated concept, and the role of so-called digital plumbing in providing the essential foundation for the success of today’s corporate AI power players.

Winners and losers

The next session, titled “AI’s ugly underbelly”, started by taking a look at an oft-forgotten part of the AI workforce, the people who label data so that it can be used to train machine learning models. It’s been estimated that data labelling accounts for 25% of the total project time in an ML project, but the labellers are, from the perspective of the company running the project, an anonymous mass employed through crowdsourcing platforms such as MTurk. In academic research the labellers are often found closer to home – the job is likely to be done by your students and/or yourself, and when crowdsourcing is used, people may well be willing to volunteer for the sake of contributing to science, such as in the case of the Zooniverse projects. In business it’s a different story, and there is some money to be made by labelling data for companies, but not a lot; it’s an unskilled job that obeys the logic of the gig economy, where the individual worker must buy their own equipment and has very little in the way of job security or career prospects.

The subtitle of this session was “winners and losers of the workforce”, the winners of course being the highly skilled professionals who are in increasingly high demand and therefore increasingly highly paid. There was a good deal of discussion on the gender imbalance among such people, reflecting a similar imbalance in the distribution of the sort of hard (STEM) skills usually associated with tech jobs. In labelling the gap is apparently much narrower, in some countries even nonexistent. It was argued that relevant soft skills and potential AI talent are distributed considerably more evenly, and that companies trying to find people for AI-related roles may want to look beyond the traditional recruiting pathways for such roles. A minor point that I found thought-provoking was that recruiting is one of the application domains of AI, so the AI of today is involved in selecting the people who will build the AI of tomorrow – and we know, of course, that AI can be biased. One of the speakers brought up the analogy that training an AI is like training a dog in that the training may appear to be a success, but you cannot be sure of what it is that you’ve actually trained it to respond to.

There was more talk about AI bias in the “AI you can trust” session, starting with what we mean by the term in the first place. We can all surely agree that AI should be fair, but can we agree on what kind of fairness we want – does it involve positive discrimination, for example? Bias in datasets is a relatively straightforward concept, but beyond that things get less tidy and more ambiguous. There is also the question of how we can trust that an AI is not biased, provided that we can agree on the definition; a suggested solution is to have algorithms audited by a third party, which could provide a way to strike a balance between the right of individuals to know what kind of decision-making processes they are being subjected to and the right of organisations to keep their algorithms confidential. An idea that I found particularly interesting, put forth by Carissa Véliz of the Institute for Ethics in AI, was that algorithms should be made to undergo a randomised controlled trial before they are allowed to make decisions that have a serious, potentially even ruinous, effect on people’s lives.

Data protection was, of course, another big topic in this session. That personal data should be handled responsibly is again something we can all agree on, but there was a good deal of debate on what is the proper way to regulate companies to ensure that they are willing and able to shoulder that responsibility. Should they be told how to behave in a top-down manner, or is it better to adopt a bottom-up strategy and empower individuals to look after their own interests when it comes to privacy? Is self-regulation an option? The data subject rights guaranteed by the GDPR represent the bottom-up approach and are, in my opinion, a major step in the right direction, but it’s also a matter of having effective means to enforce those rights, and here, I feel, there is still a lot of work to be done. The GDPR, of course, only covers the countries of the EU and the EEA, and it was suggested that perhaps we need an international organisation for the harmonisation of data protection, a “UN of data” – a tall order for sure, but one worth considering.

Grand finale

The final session, titled “AI: the breakthroughs that will shape your life”, included several callbacks to themes discussed in previous sessions, such as the growth of the carbon footprint of AI as the computational cost of new breakthroughs continues to increase – doubling almost every 3 months according to an OpenAI statistic. The summit took place just days after the announcement of a great advance achieved by DeepMind’s AlphaFold AI in solving the protein folding problem in computational biochemistry, mentioned already in the beginning of the first session and discussed further here. While it was pointed out that the DeepMind solution is not necessarily the end-all it has been hailed as, it certainly serves to demonstrate that the technology is good for tackling serious scientific problems and not just for mastering board games. The subject of crowdsourcing came up again in this context, as the approach has been applied to the folding problem with some success in the form of Folding@home, where the home computers of volunteers are used to run distributed computations, as well as Foldit, a puzzle video game that essentially harnesses the volunteers’ brains to do the computations.

There was some debate on the place of humans in a society increasingly permeated by AI systems, particularly on where we want to draw the line on AI autonomy and whether new jobs created by AI will be enough to compensate for old ones replaced by AI. Somewhat ironically, data labeller is a job created by AI that may already be on its way to being made obsolete by advances in AI techniques that do not require large quantities of labelled data for training. One of the speakers, Connecterra founder Yasir Khokhar, talked about the role of AI in solving the problem of feeding the world, reminding me of Risto Miikkulainen’s keynote talk at CEC 2019, in which he presented agriculture as one of the application domains of creative AI through evolutionary computation. OpenAI’s GPT-3 was then brought up as another example of a recent breakthrough, leading to a discussion on how we tend to anthropomorphise our Siris and Alexas and to ascribe human thought processes to entities that merely exhibit some semblance of them. There was a callback to AI ethics here when someone asked whether we have the right to know when we are interacting with an AI – if we’re concerned about AI transparency, then arguably being aware that there is an AI is the most basic level of it. Of things that are still in the future, the impact of quantum computing on AI was discussed, as were the age-old themes of artificial general intelligence and rogue AI as existential risk, but in the time available it wasn’t feasible to come to any real conclusions.

Inevitably, it got harder to stay alert and focused as the afternoon wore on, and I also missed the beginning of one session because I had to attend another (albeit very brief) meeting, but even so, I managed to gather a good amount of interesting ideas and information over the course of the day. I’m particularly happy that I got a lot of material on the social implications of AI that we should be able to use when developing our upcoming AI ethics course, since so far I haven’t been too clear about specific topics related to this aspect of AI that we could discuss in the lectures. This wasn’t a week too soon, I might add – we’re due to start teaching that course in March, so it’s time to get cracking on the preparations!

Heart of darkness

The news came in yesterday that the university is extending its current policy of remote work and teaching, previously effective until the end of 2020, to the end of May, 2021. Not a huge shock, frankly; it’s what my money would have been on, and I wrote as much yesterday when I was drafting this post, before the announcement came. It doesn’t really change any plans either, since we’ve been assuming from the get-go that our AI ethics course, due to be lectured in the second period of the spring term, will be taught remotely. Still, it’s strange to think that by the end of this latest extension, we’ll have been working from home for more than a year without interruption – and of course there’s no guarantee that things will be back to normal even then, although one may hope that at least some of us will have been vaccinated already. In the meantime, I’ll be getting my flu shot for the coming winter, courtesy of occupational healthcare.

Speaking of winter, it’s almost November, and as the days grow shorter, I’m reminded of the one redeeming feature of the dreary Irish winter in comparison with the Finnish one: more daylight. Last year and the year before, I “cheated” and only came to Finland for the end-of-year holidays, not long enough to really feel the effects of prolonged darkness – especially since I wasn’t working during the time I spent here and therefore could sleep for as long as I wished. Now, however, I’ve already noticed that it’s getting more laborious to get myself up and running in the morning, and while the turning of the clocks on Sunday brought some temporary relief by making mornings somewhat brighter, it’s not going to last long.

Fortunately, working from home has rendered the concept of office hours even less relevant than it was before the pandemic. I was free to choose my own hours before, but there was still a fairly strong preference to be at the office at more or less the same times as my colleagues, for the social aspect if not for anything else. Now that there’s basically nothing to be gained from being together at the “office” (i.e. at our computers in our respective homes), I’ve gone to sleeping according to what I presume is my natural rhythm, which I suppose cannot be a bad thing healthwise. There are still the meetings, of course, but I’ve mostly managed to avoid having them so early in the morning that I couldn’t trust myself to wake up for them without setting an alarm, although I’m not sure how that’s going to work out when we get to winter proper and there’s barely any daylight at all.

Before the all-staff email yesterday, I was already thinking that if we do go back to working on campus after New Year, I may well continue to take remote days more frequently than I used to, at least during the winter and especially when it’s very cold. As much as I love a good northern winter with lots of snow, I don’t particularly relish temperatures closer to minus twenty than minus ten, and when you combine that with pitch darkness in the morning, the thought of staying in bed is very tempting. So, once in a while, why not just do that, get up when you actually feel up for it and work from home, since that’s now officially sanctioned by university policy?

I participated in my very first virtual conference last week, the one-day Conference on Technology Ethics (formerly Seminar on Technology Ethics) organised by the Future Ethics research group at the University of Turku. I didn’t present anything, but the event was free of charge and I figured I might come away with some fresh ideas for the AI ethics course and perhaps even for my research. The conference did not disappoint – particularly the keynote talks by Maija-Riitta Ollila and Bernd Carsten Stahl were very much the sort of thing I was hoping for, and I think I’ll be referring back to them when I get to the work of creating my lecture materials. Everything went reasonably smoothly too, although there were some technical issues with screen sharing on Zoom. There was even a virtual conference dinner in the evening, but I didn’t participate so I don’t know how that worked out in practice.

The next online event I’m looking forward to is a cultural one: the Virtual Irish Festival of Oulu! As the organisers put it, it’s the first, and optimistically also the last, of its kind: under normal circumstances the festival would have been in the beginning of October and very much non-virtual, taking place in various venues around town and offering music, dance, theatre, cinema, storytelling and workshops over a period of five days. I’m rather annoyed that there’s no proper live festival this year, since I missed the last two – this may seem like a silly thing to complain about, considering the reason I missed them is that I was in actual Ireland, but it’s not like they have trad festivals there all the time. Still, a virtual festival is surely better than no festival at all, and the programme looks very promising, so I’ll definitely be tuning in, and I think I’ll buy the €5 optional virtual ticket as well, to support the cause.

The end of conferences? Perhaps not

After some internal debate, I eventually went on ahead and submitted a manuscript to CIKM 2020. Although it’s a short paper and therefore more or less by definition not supposed to be anything groundbreaking, I still had some fairly serious doubts about it and might well have abandoned it if the submission deadline had not been extended. The extra thinking time was very welcome, since it allowed me to make a submission I believe in and also to think about what the scope of my journal paper should be – the alternative would have been to include the subject matter of the conference paper in the journal paper, but I think the latter will benefit from a tighter focus.

The conference was originally supposed to be in Galway, Ireland, and the plan was that our paper, if accepted, would be presented by my co-author Alan, who was the supervisor of my MSCA fellowship in Dublin – not that I would mind another visit to Ireland, but obviously travelling there would be a good deal more convenient (not to mention cheaper) for him that for me. Besides, since I no longer have my own funding to spend, I can’t even be sure if the university would cover my expenses. Alan, on the other hand, figured he’ll probably go to the conference in any case, paper or no paper.

The question of who will travel to Galway and on whose money was rendered moot when it was announced that the conference is going to be a virtual one this year, with pre-recorded video presentations and online discussions. It’s not uncommon for conferences to have the occasional video presentation, but that’s still very much the exception rather than the rule – fully online conferences are a rare thing. CIKM would be the first one for me, and while I certainly understand and support the organisers’ decision, I do feel ambivalent about the idea of virtual conferences in general.

Clearly when there’s a pandemic to be brought under control, hosting an international conference is not the greatest idea: you’ll have people coming in from around the world, shaking each other’s hands and generally spending a lot of time together for a few days, then going back to their respective countries to pass on whatever bugs they picked up from each other. However, even if we ignore the matter of contagious disease, there’s a lot to be said in favour of meeting your fellow researchers virtually rather than physically. As much as I enjoyed my trip to New Zealand last year, I can’t in all honesty claim that it was the most efficient use of my budget, and it certainly wasn’t very ecological.

A lot of people are saying that COVID-19 has changed some things permanently, that we won’t be going back to all of our old ways even if and when the pandemic is stopped. With regard to remote work in particular, numerous organisations have had it thrust upon them wholesale and have discovered that it’s actually a viable and sometimes preferable alternative to making everyone haul themselves to the office every day. Since we’re all now routinely doing online meetings, and since a conference session is really just a special sort of meeting, it’s natural to ask if there’s really any need for all the hassle traditionally involved in organising a conference. Will such gatherings soon be a thing of the past, now that we’ve been forced by exceptional circumstances to make the transition?

Personally, I wouldn’t bet on the imminent demise of the non-virtual conference just yet, at least not until we have more experience of how virtual conferences actually work. Online presentations may not be a problem, but there’s more to a conference than presentations, and much of it is bound to be lost when the delegates are not all gathered in the same place. The social aspect will suffer, obviously, which means there’s probably a lot of networking potential lost as well – and I’m saying this as someone who’s definitely not the most sociable and networking-oriented person in the academic world. At a traditional conference the starting of informal conversations and making of new acquaintances happen organically in a way that’s hard to recreate using tools designed for more formal meetings.

Something that may be even more difficult to recreate in a virtual conference is the level of commitment that comes from travelling to the conference location and staying there for the duration of the conference: being there physically translates quite naturally into being there mentally as well. Sure, you’ll continue to do your emails, and you’ll skip some sessions that are not so interesting and use the time to do a bit of sightseeing, but still, at least I find that it’s easy to make the conference my number one priority when I’ve travelled to another country to attend it. I very much suspect that in a virtual conference it would be much harder to get into that mental state and that I would only attend my own session plus one or two carefully selected others, which I think would be kind of sad and antithetical to the spirit of the event.

Speaking of sightseeing, I can’t deny that I enjoy travelling to new places and that I would miss the lost opportunities to do so if conference travel were to end altogether. I’m certainly not too old to remember that when you’re a junior (or perhaps even not so junior) member of academia, the prospect of a trip can be a pretty good incentive to get that manuscript finished in time for the conference deadline. How are we going to motivate future generations of researchers if not with tales of exotic conference locations and lavish banquets?

A FRUCTful journey

So, the FRUCT25 conference is done, and with that, presumably my last appearance at an international conference during my MSCA fellowship. My itinerary for the remaining time is pretty straightforward: a month in Dublin, then to Finland again to celebrate Christmas and New Year, then back to Dublin for another month and then it’s a wrap. No more conference papers, time to turn my attention to writing journal articles and final reports.

Considering how many times I’ve landed at Helsinki airport in the recent past, it was a little bit strange to realise that it had been over a year since I last visited the actual city. Despite this being November, hardly a time when anywhere in Finland is at its best, it felt nice to be walking the streets of my country’s capital again. I’ve never lived there, but I’ve spent plenty of time there and it feels very familiar to me, almost like a second home – or perhaps a third one, now that Dublin has been my second home in a very real sense for the past couple of years.

The main reason why I like to visit Helsinki regularly is that quite a few of my friends have ended up living there over the years, and I made sure to reserve plenty of time for seeing them. Normally on a conference trip I would do some touristy things, but in this particular case I felt little need to go sightseeing, although I did scout out some bars and restaurants in advance so I could go check out some interesting ones that I hadn’t tried before. On the flip side of having such easy access to my usual social circles, I also didn’t feel much of an urge to socialise with my fellow conference delegates, although I did have a pleasant chat with a few of them over some wine and snacks at the combined social event and poster/demo session.

The conference itself was a rather low-key and low-budget affair in comparison with the lavish IEEE CEC, but the scientific programme was solid enough, the proceedings will be available on IEEE Xplore and the event is recognised by various national rating systems as a perfectly respectable one. The full title of the conference is “Conference of Open Innovations Association FRUCT”, and it doesn’t really have an easy-to-define theme apart from innovation involving information and communication technologies. FRUCT itself stands for “Finnish-Russian University Cooperation in Telecommunications”, and there is a certain degree of geographical theming in the sense that the events normally alternate between Finnish and Russian locations and most of the participants tend to come from these two countries. However, at least in Helsinki there were delegates also from various other parts of Europe and Asia; according to the official facts and figures, the total number of countries represented by the authors of accepted papers between them was 28.

Shortly before travelling to Finland I sent out an ad looking for volunteers to join the trial I’m running to test the results of the work I’ve done in Dublin. This resulted in a rather busy period as quite a few people were eager to sign up and I needed to get everyone to give their informed consent and start collecting data before I went away. Now that I’m back I find myself in a bit of a lull, since the data collection phase doesn’t require much active involvement from me. This gives me time to do things that are not so central to the success of my project, such as writing this blog and reviewing papers for a 2020 conference I’m in the programme committee of. I also reprised my guest lecturer role from last year, since I was invited to do so by a colleague and I only needed to make some very slight revisions to the slides I used in my previous lecture.

This relatively quiet period won’t last forever, of course. When the data from the trial starts to roll in I’m surely going to have my hands full, so I have no doubt that when I start my end-of-year break, I will do so with a feeling that I really deserve it. Meanwhile, things are already getting busy with my main extracurricular activity, the DCU Campus Choir. Our Christmas concert is approaching fast, with only three regular rehearsals left before it, so we have some extra ones booked and there’s also a fair amount of homework to do. The concert will be in All Hallows Chapel on Monday the 9th of December starting at 19:30, with ~~free admission~~tickets just €5 and followed by a mulled wine and mince pie reception. Do join us if you’re in Dublin!

Rule of three

I recently got a paper accepted to the 25th FRUCT conference in Helsinki, around the same time that another one was published at the 16th CDVE conference in Mallorca, presented by my co-author and co-PI Alan. With the one I presented in Wellington in June, that makes three, not counting the one I gave a talk on in the PAP workshop at last year’s ECML-PKDD in Dublin. The latter didn’t appear in the workshop post-proceedings because of the preliminary nature of the results discussed in it, so it doesn’t really count as a proper publication.

There’s something pleasing about that number three; it makes me feel like I’ve crossed some kind of threshold here. It is, of course, traditionally a very special number, appearing over and over in the stories we tell, the speeches we give, the designs we create… That list right there is a case in point – giving just two examples wouldn’t have been enough, whereas adding a fourth would have been superfluous. There seems to be something inherently satisfying about it when significant things come in threes.

For me, the special significance of this particular three is that it’s been quite a while since I was last able to concentrate on a single research topic long enough to produce several publications on it. In the years following my doctoral graduation, and to some extent even before it, I had a few false starts, working on projects that were good learning experiences for me but in all honesty would probably have been better handled by someone with less learning to do. Sometimes these efforts resulted in one-off papers, sometimes not even that, and none of this was giving me a real sense of advancing either my own career or my field of research.

Against this background, when I started my current project it was potentially yet another false start for me, another new research topic to eventually file under “well, it was worth a shot”. There was a key difference though – this time I had won the funding for the research in my own name and with my own idea. I therefore felt more acutely than usual the need to prove that I’m worthy of such an investment, both to myself and to the funder. This, together with the knowledge that for the next two years I would be working on my own project and nothing else, helped me achieve a depth of commitment that had mostly eluded me between finishing my dissertation and being awarded the MSCA fellowship.

So, the reason for this sense of accomplishment is that while a paper or two can easily be dismissed as a fluke, three has the makings of a pattern: looks like I really am onto something here. It’s not that three papers is enough to make me happy about the results of the project, and I’m certainly not going to have much time for resting on laurels during these last few months, but it’s a welcome boost of confidence, telling me that there probably will be more publications and, further down the line, perhaps more funding as well. I’m no stranger to the impostor syndrome, so especially after a prolonged unproductive period it’s good to get some evidence that maybe I actually am sort of competent at what I do.

There is also another, rather more banal reason why I’m happy that the latest paper got accepted to this particular conference. Had it been rejected, I presume that eventually it would have been accepted somewhere else, but my project will end on 31 January and almost certainly the next opportunity to publish would have been sometime after that date. FRUCT is thus pretty much my last chance to spend the money in my expense budget, and even after that there’s going to be a fairly hefty surplus. Besides, while Helsinki in November may not be the most exotic or enticing travel destination, I have lots of friends there that I very much look forward to catching up with, and I’m also going to take a short holiday to visit home for a few days.

As my time in Ireland approaches its inevitable end, I’m determined to make the best of what’s left of it by exploring places near me, relatively speaking. Last weekend I visited Limerick city, and for the upcoming bank holiday weekend I’m hopping over to Edinburgh to see one of my favourite bands live at Queen’s Hall. Once I’m back from Scotland, I’m away to Finland almost immediately, and once I’m back from there we’ll be well into November already. I’ll probably want to take a little break from travelling after that, but I’d still like to make at least one more weekend trip before I go home for Christmas. I haven’t been to the northwest of the island yet – Sligo might be nice?