“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?

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!

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?