Change is in the air

With December underway, I am now – at last! – officially a docent. Hooray, I guess! The most concrete way in which this affects me, in the short term anyway, is that I should soon see an increase in my salary, but I have to admit that the sense of validation I get from the title is a major perk as well. I have had, and continue to have, my occasional struggle with the impostor phenomenon, so it does feel rather nice to have been accepted by the scientific community as an “academically distinguished person” with “comprehensive knowledge of their own field, a capacity for independent research […] and good teaching skills”, as the criteria for the title are given in the diploma supplement.

To prove my good teaching skills, I had to give a demonstration lecture in front of the degree programme committee, which was a bit of a strange experience. I had exactly twenty minutes to present myself to the jury in the best possible light: how I structure my lessons, what sort of materials I use, how I talk, how I engage the audience, everything. Hardly the most authentic setting, but I did in fact rather enjoy the challenge posed by the time limit; after all, constraints are often good for creativity, and it was quite the balancing act fitting all the elements of an effective lesson in those twenty minutes in such a way that it wouldn’t feel at all forced or rushed. The short format also allowed me to rehearse the lecture multiple times to make sure I wouldn’t stumble in my delivery or go over time (which I was explicitly warned would be penalised in the evaluation).

All of that effort probably wasn’t strictly necessary, since I would have had to fail the demonstration pretty badly to not get at least the minimum required grade of 3 out of 5, and with my teaching experience that wasn’t likely to happen. Still, it’s hard not to feel nervous about a high-stakes situation where you are being judged, and I certainly wasn’t going to take my chances by aiming for the bare minimum. In the end, while I didn’t get any official feedback for the lecture, unofficially I was told that I got a very respectable 4, which I’m happy with – 3 would have been something of a disappointment, given the time I’d spent preparing.

Just one week after the docentship decision came another piece of good news: following a lengthy and somewhat confusing evaluation process, a decision had been reached on Infotech Oulu spearhead projects for the period 2026–2028, and among the proposals selected to be funded was “AIVuTeP – Open Source Artificial Intelligence Vulnerability Testing Platform” by Kimmo Halunen and myself. The grant will allow us to hire one doctoral researcher, bringing some much-needed continuity to our collaboration on the topic of AI vulnerabilities. As we observed in our 2024 paper, the concept of AI vulnerability is not very well understood, and meanwhile the AI incidents have been piling up, so there’s a serious need for research that would help detect safety and security weaknesses in AI systems before they are deployed in the real world.

An even more recent piece of news, and one that I’m much more ambivalent about, is the decision of the university’s Board of Directors to abandon the current main campus in Linnanmaa altogether in favour of a brand new one to be constructed in Kontinkangas, where the biomedical faculties are already located. This seems to be the final word in the long-running debate about the future of the university in terms of real estate. The previous plan, where the new campus would have been built in Raksila instead, was eventually stopped by the city council, and I suppose that’s still a possibility at least in theory, but in practice it sounds like this time the city is firmly on board with the decision.

There were three different scenarios in the running, out of which the one selected was apparently the most economical by a significant margin. The one where the university would have continued to use Linnanmaa alongside a smaller new campus was the costliest, which isn’t exactly intuitive but I haven’t seen the calculations, so I suppose I have to give them the benefit of the doubt. Not building a new campus at all was not even an option at this point, the contest was among three scenarios with one campus in Kontinkangas and possibly, but not necessarily, another one somewhere else.

Officially, the money saved in real estate expenses will enable the university to spend more on education and research, which of course sounds great. I can also see the logic of having everyone under the same roof, except we’re not really going to be; there’s going to be quite a big reduction in floor space, so I’m guessing the assumption is that a lot of people will be working remotely at any given time. Not an unreasonable assumption, but does that mean we’ll have hot desks instead of offices for those days when we’re working on campus? What about teaching spaces? Obviously nothing is going to happen overnight – the timeline for the move is something like ten years – but it’s likely enough that I’ll be around to see how it all pans out.

I do wonder what will happen to the Linnanmaa campus after the university has vacated the premises. The university of applied sciences has been inhabiting a part of it for some time now and hasn’t given any indication of planning to leave, but it’s hardly going to take over all of the empty space left behind. Sentimental considerations aside, the university holds a fairly big stake in the company managing and developing the campus, so whatever happens, it will have financial implications that I sure hope have been factored into the calculations somehow when the decision to ditch the old campus was made.

Meanwhile, much more imminent changes are happening within the Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering: as of the first of January, the faculty’s current research units will be demoted to research groups operating under four new, bigger research units, and at the same time, Professor Juha Röning, leader of the BISG research unit (soon to be research group), is retiring. The reorganisation isn’t the first one I’ve lived through during my time at the university, and I can’t find it in me to get worked up about it, but through all those years my line manager has always been Juha, so it does feel a bit weird to think that soon that won’t be the case anymore.

Even that’s not the end of the news this time – there’s some from the world of music as well: Earth Between Oceans, a new piece by American composer Ellen Reid, will be performed in October 2026 for the first time in Finland by Oulu Sinfonia and Cassiopeia. With that, the Finnish premiere of Bernstein’s MASS and the world premieres of Ovllá and Beyond the Sky, 2026 is really shaping up to be a year of premieres for me! I’ve also had preliminary talks about a couple of possible new projects, but those are still very much uncertain, not least because I want to make sure that all these other engagements don’t take too much of my time away from Cassiopeia. Even without those, it’s going to be quite a full year artistically, so I should be able to give some things a miss without feeling any massive FOMO about it.

My last academic output of the year came out this week with the official opening of the PhD Supervisors’ Academy, an internally developed collection of resources for university staff members who are supervising or starting to supervise doctoral candidates. One of these resources is an online training course, for which I created a module titled “AI and the PhD supervisor”, aiming for a discipline-agnostic package that would help supervisors both guide their students to use AI responsibly and find ways to benefit from AI themselves. The module is text-based, but last week I gave it the finishing touch by recording a short welcome video.

Having previously recorded a bunch of lecture videos for the Towards Data Mining course, I was already well familiar with the process, but somehow it still slipped my mind that the studio has a green screen, and so out of all the shirts I could have worn to work that day, I decided to go with the green one. Fortunately that didn’t ruin the video, nor did me being suddenly really self-conscious about what to do with my hands while speaking; apart from those two things, I was very professional, recording the whole thing in a single take. All that performing experience paying off I guess, both at work and on the theatre stage.

I had high hopes at some point of submitting a journal manuscript I’ve been working on before Christmas, but by now it’s abundantly clear that it’s not going to happen unless I get hit by a flash of divine inspiration, so writing will be the order of the day in January. How much energy I’ll have for that remains to be seen, because the first half of the month will involve very intense preparation for the premiere of Ovllá, with one last performance of A Christmas Carol thrown in for good measure. Even the Christmas break isn’t going to be all rest and relaxation, because I’ll probably have to take some time to start learning my parts for MASS; I picked up my copy of the chorus score about a month ago, but so far all I have is a rough idea of how much learning there is to do, and apparently we’re expected to know the material by late February when the rehearsals begin in earnest. Challenge accepted!

The world is a stage

Another November, another Tethics! This year, the conference was hosted by the University of Vaasa and co-chaired by Ville Vakkuri, who has appeared several times on my AI ethics course as a guest lecturer. As usual, there were a bunch of other familiar faces as well, so in terms of social interaction, the conference was a nice mix of catching up with old acquaintances and getting to know new ones. Vaasa itself was a new acquaintance for me and quite a lovely one at that, insofar as any Finnish city in November can be described as “lovely”. On and near the university campus there were some cool old red-brick industrial buildings, reminiscent of the Finlayson Area in Tampere.

The conference program had a couple of new elements this year. On the first morning, there was a workshop with three papers that the participants were invited to help improve, but I decided to skip it, because I had my own talk in the first regular session that afternoon and wanted to do some rehearsing. The other new thing was a poster session, which followed immediately after I’d given my presentation, and I ended up chatting for a good while with a doctoral candidate from the University of Turku who’s researching the ethics of autonomous weapons, a topic I’ve had some involvement with since my talk in the Seminar on the Art of Cyber Warfare a year ago.

I also touched upon the subject in my own paper, which had the somewhat provocative title “Death by AI: A Survey of the Literature and Known Incidents”. I’ll write about it in more detail once it’s been officially published – which may well be next year, the CEUR-WS process tends to take its time apparently – but in a nutshell, I searched for academic literature associating AI with death, did the same for fatal AI incidents recorded in public databases, analysed the search results to see what sort of themes emerge from them and put the analyses next to each other to see if there are any interesting observations to be made. Not the most rigorous piece of research out there, but it seemed to engage the audience, and it certainly gave me a lot of ideas for future work.

My session was preceded by a keynote speech by Rachael Garrett, which I have to admit went a bit over my head at times, but I did find her experiments with dancers improvising with robots rather cool. The last session of the day had two papers about AI in education, so that of course was right up my alley. On the second day there was some more interesting AI stuff, a particular highlight being a paper on the perpetuation of gender stereotypes by AI image generators; as a bonus, I got to witness the first-ever use (in my career at least, if not the entire history of academia) of the phrase “slay queen” to comment on a conference presentation. In the afternoon there was a town hall meeting, where it was decided that the next Tethics will be organised by LUT University in Lahti (yay!), and then it was time for Kai Kimppa to conclude the programme with his keynote on the past, present and future of IT ethics research in Finland. Kai’s speech made for a very enjoyable end to the conference, and not just because I got name-checked as one of the “new generation” of Finnish IT ethicists!

The week before the conference I got some exciting news: my docentship application received the rector’s seal of approval, so as of the first of December I’m officially a docent of AI ethics and data ethics in the Faculty or Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, University of Oulu. Feels pretty good! This came just in time for me to put the title in my CV for the winter call of the Research Council of Finland, which closed on the 12th. For a variety of reasons, I didn’t have a whole lot of time and energy to spend on my proposal, so I ended up submitting essentially the same one as last year, with some minor revisions to the research plan and a slightly fuller CV. I suppose I can view this as an experiment of sorts – will be interesting to see how the evaluator statements compare to the ones I received this year.

At work, things are now starting to calm down a bit towards the end-of-year holidays, but meanwhile, in the world of performing arts it’s getting busy. Last week we had the first proper rehearsals for the Ovllá opera: not just the chorus but director, soloists, conductor, rehearsal pianist, the works. This week there have been no rehearsals, but next week we’re bringing A Christmas Carol back to the stage, and the week after that the opera rehearsals will resume. I also recently got the notification that I’ve been selected into the choir for Beyond the Sky, so I’m three for three for the big 2026 productions I auditioned for back in May.

Working on the opera is an interesting experience, different from The Magic Flute in a couple of major respects. A rather obvious one is that instead of staging one of the most popular operas ever for the nth time, we are now creating something totally new, to be presented to the world for the very first time right here in Oulu. It’s an exciting thought, but at the same time, I’m very much aware that it’s hardly a safe bet. Will it bring in the crowds, not just the hardcore opera lovers? Not that I’ll have to answer to anyone if it doesn’t, but I do feel like I have my own tiny share of artistic ownership of the production and naturally I’m hoping that it will be a success.

The other big difference is in the level of cultural sensitivity constantly present at the rehearsals. The score brings together two very different musical traditions, and the libretto deals with some rather delicate themes; The Magic Flute has its own issues, sure, but at its heart it’s just a silly fairytale set in a fantasy world. With Ovllá, distancing ourselves from the story and dialogue is not an option, and it’s been clear from the get-go that the portrayal of the Sámi people and Sámi culture must be accurate and respectful. To that end, almost everyone in the design team is Sámi, as are the soloists playing Sámi characters.

That said, the rehearsals have been great fun as well as educational. I was already loving the music, and now that we’re starting to get an idea of what the opera is going to look like on stage, I’m getting properly stoked about it. I know already that there will be days when I’ll come home from work and dearly wish I could spend the evening on the couch instead of going to the theatre, but all things considered, a job in academia where the hours are very flexible is probably one of the easier ones to combine with a hobby like this. Besides, performing to an audience and working in a multicultural environment are surely skills that transfer both ways. Highly recommended!

MASSive news

Once again, it’s been several months since my last post, for the usual reason – there’s been way too much other, more urgent business to take care of for me to even think about what I might write about in the blog. Conveniently, though, I can now continue directly from where I ended the previous post, starting with some recent research news: the Research Council of Finland has decided not to award funding to my proposed project. I know, it’s a shocker, right? I sometimes wonder if this is even a serious attempt to secure funding anymore, or just a ritual that you participate in out of respect for tradition, but either way, more likely than not I’ll find myself trying again next winter.

I also mentioned a bunch of choir stuff last time. The concerts with Kipinät went well – I got to sing the very first scat solo of my life! – and the trip to NSSS 2025 in Linköping was even more fun than I expected, culminating in a gala concert with 1300 singers and a dinner party with good food, great company, top-notch entertainment and lots of singing and dancing. Just before the trip I had an audition, and a few days after returning I received a notification that I’ve been selected into the choir for Leonard Bernstein’s MASS, which is to have its first ever live performance in Finland as part of Oulu’s European Capital of Culture celebrations in April 2026. I wasn’t previously familiar with the work, but it seems to be totally unlike anything I’ve had a chance to do in my singing career so far, so I’m pretty stoked. In the same audition, they were also looking for singers for the new opera Ovllá as well as Beyond the Sky – combining a new composition by Lauri Porra with astrophotography by Oulu’s own J-P Metsävainio – but I’ve yet to hear back about those.

Right after the Linköping odyssey I kicked off the 2025 conference circuit with the 47th Association for Interdisciplinary Studies Conference, with the lofty title “Shaping the future in the era of polycrisis”, which was organised here in Oulu from the 4th to the 6th of June. I presented my abstract “Keep your enemies close: Embracing AI tools in AI ethics education” in the session “Assessing Interdisciplinary Learning in the Age of AI”, convened by Beverley McGuire, Erica Noles and Carol McNulty from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. I take a considerable amount of professional pride in the fact that I prepared my slides the previous day, had minimal time to rehearse and still gave a really good talk that got a really positive response. The session as a whole was really good too, with a long and lively discussion at the end on how we as educators should deal with AI when assessing students. I would have loved to attend some others, but I was in a rush to finish the grading of the AI ethics course by the end of the week, and also I had a sore throat, so I thought it best to work from home as much as possible in case I had picked up something contagious while traveling.

As it turned out, trying to finish the grading on time was a lost cause, because the sore throat soon developed into a fever that lasted three days and had me unable to do anything resembling work for most of that time. Not exactly surprising that germs have a field day when you have hundreds of people gathering in enclosed spaces and singing at each other for extended periods of time. I’m not sure what it was – our old friend COVID perhaps – but hardly the common cold anyway. After the fever passed, it took a good while to get my strength back and even longer for the sniffling and coughing to stop, but now it feels like things are finally back to normal. Overall, not an experience I’d care to repeat anytime soon, but then, reportedly there’s also been a stomach bug going around, so I guess I should count my blessings and be glad I haven’t caught that.

The spring term was, as it has been for a few years now, dominated initially by evaluations of the applicants to the international master’s programme, then by the AI ethics course. The IMP evaluations were less of an ordeal this year, a welcome change to me personally but perhaps not unequivocally so to the faculty, since this was largely because of a big drop in the number of applications received. There was an applying fee (re-)introduced, which presumably contributed to the drop, but the real kicker is coming next, as universities will be required by law to collect tuition fees that fully cover the costs of providing education for those students who are not eligible to study for free. In practice this means that offering scholarships by default is no longer an option and the price of studying here will go up for students coming from outside the EEA. The vast majority of the applicants have been non-EEA, so I expect there’ll be a significant change in how many applications we get next year and where from; I guess we’ll wait and see.

The AI ethics course was, for me, the most ambitious effort to date: not only did I deliver all the main lectures myself – this was a first – but I also had no teaching assistant this year to help with the learning assignments, so I assessed all of those myself as well. This turned out to be a strain, but still doable, and I was actually quite proud of my planning and execution of the final week’s teaching, which had previously been delivered by a guest. The number of students again increased from last year, and I was even looking at the possibility of forty or more students completing the course this time. The final number won’t be quite that high, but it’s still going to be close to forty and a new record.

Somewhere amid all these I’ve managed to find the time to write a couple of manuscripts and submit them for review, supervise a couple of M.Sc. theses to completion and review a couple of others, contribute to a few funding proposals and participate in the work of the university’s working group preparing guidelines for the use of generative AI in research. I also finally prepared and submitted my Title of Docent application; this was frankly way overdue, but I’d been struggling to find the motivation to get it done, and in the end it took a push from my line manager and an external incentive to give me the boost I needed. Now it’s just waiting until the referee statements come in.

There are a few more loose ends left to tie up before I start my vacation at the end of this week, the main one being a couple of conference papers waiting for peer review. Beyond those, anything else I get done during the rest of the week is a bonus, basically getting a head start on tasks that will be demanding my attention in August. It’s already clear enough that the autumn term is going to be a busy one right from the start, but before that, I should be able to take my usual four weeks off without unduly worrying about what’s ahead. Here’s to surviving yet another academic year!

What is an AI vulnerability anyway?

The proceedings of the Tethics 2024 conference have now been published in the CEUR-WS series, and with that, the paper “What Is an AI Vulnerability, and Why Should We Care? Unpacking the Relationship Between AI Security and AI Ethics” by myself and Kimmo Halunen. There was a bit of an emergency regarding the publication during the Christmas break, as CEUR-WS now requires all published papers to include a declaration of whether and how generative AI tools were used in the preparation of the manuscript, and one of the editors was in quite a hurry to collect this information from the authors. Luckily, I happened to see the editor’s email just a few hours after it came, and since we hadn’t used any AI tools to write the paper, the declaration was easy enough to complete.

As the title implies, the paper examines the concepts of AI vulnerability and security, looking at how they are understood in the context of AI ethics. As it turns out, they are rather vaguely defined, with no clear consensus within the AI ethics community on what counts as an AI vulnerability and what it means for an AI system to be secure against malicious activity. Collections of AI ethics principles generally recognise the importance of security, but do not agree on whether it should be considered a principle in its own right or rather a component of a more generic principle such as non-maleficence.

One thing that is quite clear is that the way security is viewed by the AI ethics community differs considerably from the view of the traditional cybersecurity community. For one thing, in the latter there is much less ambiguity on the definition of concepts such as vulnerability, but more fundamentally, the two communities have somewhat different ideas of what the role of security is in the first place. One could say that traditionally, security is about protecting the assets of the deployer of a given system, whereas for ethicists, it’s about protecting the rights of individuals affected by the system; an oversimplification, but one that sheds some light on why the concept of AI vulnerability seems so elusive.

One consequence of this elusive nature is that it’s difficult to accurately gauge the actual real-world impact of AI vulnerabilities as opposed to hypothetical worst-case scenarios. Much of the paper deals with this issue, discussing the results of a study where I looked for reports of AI vulnerabilities that satisfy four inclusion criteria: there must be a documented incident, it must involve deliberate exploitation of a weakness in an AI system, it must have resulted in demonstrable real-world harm, and the exploited vulnerability must be specifically in an AI component of the system. When I searched six different public databases for such reports, I found a grand total of about 40 entries that could be considered at least partially relevant and only six that were fully relevant.

This is hardly likely to be the whole picture, and the paper discusses a number of factors that may account for the poor yield to a varying degree. On the other hand, incomplete and biased as the results probably are, they may at least be taken to give a rough but realistic idea of the magnitude of the problem. Silver lining? Perhaps, but it’s only a matter of time before the problem grows from a curiosity into something more serious, and it doesn’t exactly help if we don’t have a decent database for collecting information about AI vulnerabilities, or even a clear enough definition of the concept to enable the development of such a database.

To be fair, the relationship between security and ethics is not as straightforward as it might seem, at least not when it comes to AI. Security is an important ethics requirement for sure, but it may also be at odds with AI ethics principles such as explainability. Another possible complication is conflicting stakeholder interests; an interesting example of this is the case of Nightshade, a method that artists can use to counter the unauthorised use of their works for the training of text-to-image generative AI models. Technically, this is a data poisoning attack exploiting a vulnerability in the training algorithm, but it’s hard to argue that the artist is doing anything legally or morally wrong here. This serves nicely as a demonstration of why we can’t talk about the security of AI systems without considering the sociotechnical context in which those systems exist in the real world.

In the category of things that gave me stress during the holidays, submitting the generative AI declaration for the paper was a trivial annoyance in comparison with the winter call of the Research Council of Finland, the submission deadline of which was set on the 8^th of January. My application was already looking pretty good when I signed off for Christmas, and for the parts I hadn’t yet completed I was able to reuse quite a lot of material from my previous application, but even so, I was so anxious about the deadline that I went back to work for a few hours already on New Year’s Day. In the end, I made the submission with a good 24 hours to spare, but I have a feeling that the Council will be getting a substantial amount of feedback on the call timetable this year.

On the performing arts front, I did two shows of A Christmas Carol last week, with two more to go in February. Several people who have seen me perform have remarked on how much I seem to be enjoying myself on stage – I really am, and I’m glad it shows! Meanwhile, Cassiopeia is busy rehearsing for a series of three concerts with the Kipinät choir from Jyväskylä in mid-March, and later in the spring we’ll be traveling to Linköping, Sweden for the Nordic Student Singers’ Summit. 2026 is also looking potentially very interesting already: Oulu will be one of the European Capitals of Culture, and one of the highlights of the year will be a brand-new opera composed and produced for the occasion. So far, there’s very little information available on who will be performing, but if there’s a call for chorus singers, I’ll definitely be putting my hand up.

All of the music, all of the magic

The conference proceedings of Tethics 2023 is out now, including the paper I co-authored – always a pleasant feeling to see your work in its final published form. Interestingly, this year the number of papers submitted for review was given in the preface, which I believe hadn’t been the case previously. Turns out the number was 26, so with 13 papers accepted for publication, the acceptance rate was exactly 50%. Nice to know that despite the small scale of the conference, getting accepted wasn’t a foregone conclusion!

The other papers I’ve had in the works recently have not, alas, been so well received. A journal manuscript to which I made a small contribution came back with a “major revision” verdict – with one of the reviewers being, frankly, rather vague and unhelpful – and another in which I’m the sole author got flat out rejected based on input from just one reviewer, which I wasn’t aware could even happen. Granted, the journal I submitted to is outside my usual field, so perhaps the culture is different there, but I would have thought that it would be standard practice in any field to get two reviews minimum. Maybe a second opinion wouldn’t have swayed the editor’s decision – the single reviewer’s criticisms were mostly fair, I suppose, although there were some misunderstandings – but at least I would have felt better about the process.

Oh well, no point in complaining, better divert that energy to figuring out what to do next with the manuscript. I’m leaning toward submitting it to another journal more or less as is, although maybe I’ll need to change the angle a bit, depending on the journal. I haven’t decided on a target yet or even made a shortlist of potential ones, but probably I’ll go with something closer to home this time. I suppose it’s always an issue when you do cross-disciplinary work that it may not be easy to find a publication channel where it fits in naturally.

Another question lacking a definitive answer is exactly when I’m going to be able to do whatever it is that I’ll end up doing with that manuscript. I’d love to have it revised and submitted before the holidays, but with the start of the Christmas break barely over a week away, I very much doubt the realism of that wish. In theory, it would be doable, given that the usual end-of-term flood of exam papers to be marked has dwindled to a trickle, but in practice, I’m too stressed about a couple of other things, namely my university pedagogy studies and my (so far notional) application to the Research Council of Finland.

That’s right, the Academy of Finland has made some changes recently: its official English name is now the Research Council of Finland, and the former September call for applications has been moved to January. Presumably the net impact of both of these on my life is approximately neutral, but I felt like I should mention them all the same. Anyway, I have my Academy Research Fellow application from last year that I should be able to repackage as an Academy Project application without revising the topic or approach in a fundamental way, so hopefully this round will be somewhat easier than some others I can think of.

Meanwhile, the choir had its traditional Christmas concert last Saturday – I got to sing my very first solo with Cassiopeia! – but that was by no means our final performance of the year. Tonight and tomorrow we are doing something rather special with Oulu Sinfonia: two screenings of Chris Columbus’s festive classic Home Alone with the musical score played live. There isn’t a whole lot of singing to do – all of it is in the second half of the film, and much of it is just for the sopranos and altos, who get to play the role of the children’s choir in the church scene – and initially I wasn’t terribly excited about the whole thing, but that changed on Tuesday when we had our first rehearsal with the conductor. Mr Gabriele turned out to be so full of enthusiasm and so good at working with singers that it was an absolute delight to rehearse with him and I’m now actually pretty hyped about the performances. Bring on the Wet Bandits!

I guess that wraps it up for the blog this year. Usually I have at least the days between Christmas and New Year as time off, but this year I’ll be back at “work” already on the 28th, when the process of getting ready for the new run of The Magic Flute kicks off for real. There are only seven rehearsals scheduled for the chorus before opening night, and that includes the dress rehearsal when we are already going to have an audience in the house, but after the two preliminary ones we had in November, I’m already quite confident. It’s frankly amazing how not just the music but also all the stage action had stuck with me through all the idle time since the last performance in February, but I guess that’s what repetition after repetition after repetition will eventually do to you. The one thing I’m not so sure about (for a number of reasons) is the opening scene choreography, but at least there’s something to keep me from getting cocky!

London calling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

Set sail for Idle City

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

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

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

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

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

The time is now, the day is here

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

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

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

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

Good riddance to 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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