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.

I’ll join the Procrastinators’ Club, when I get round to it

The deadline of the September call of the Academy of Finland came and went – well, sort of. As per tradition, the submission system buckled under the stress of everyone, their grandma and their pet tortoise trying to upload or update their applications at the same time, and once again the deadline has been extended, this time by five days instead of the usual day or two. I guess I’ll use some of that extra time to put a few more finishing touches on my research plan, but because of the page limit I can’t add much to it without taking something away in exchange.

So yes, I did submit my application for Research Fellow funding, and I did exactly what I promised myself I wouldn’t do: I left it until too late to get started, finished my proposal just barely ahead of the deadline and submitted it without having anyone else read it first. Have I set myself up to be rejected? Yeah, probably. Does that bother me? Not really, not right now anyway. I’m just glad to be done with it, except of course I’m not quite done yet – I’m actually a little bit annoyed that they extended the deadline, even though it means that I can still improve my application, because that “can” almost feels like a “must” and frankly I’d rather just forget about the damn thing already.

Funding applications are curious things for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the psychological effect of the approaching deadline. Why is it that when the deadline is a month away, you feel like there isn’t a creative cell in your body and even an hour or two of writing is a gargantuan effort, but when there’s less than a week left, suddenly your head is full of ideas and working round the clock is no big deal? Just think of all the cool stuff I’d get done if I could be like that all the time! In all seriousness, though, I don’t think I’d take that bargain, because it would mean having precious few non-working hours and probably being too knackered to enjoy those most of the time.

I suppose a part of the answer to that riddle is that once you get close enough to the deadline, your inner critic slinks off to the background because you get so desperate for things to write down that you’ll take anything your inner crazy ideas guy can offer you. And that’s another curious thing, the mental rollercoaster ride you embark upon when the critic decides it’s time to intervene: you can go from celebrating something as the best idea you’ve ever had in the afternoon to condemning it as utter garbage late at night, trying in vain to get some sleep so you can replace it with something halfway-decent when you get up in the morning. If only you’d had those ideas sooner, you could have sorted the worthwhile ones from the ones best released back into whatever murky pool they crawled out of, but it’s as if your brain refuses to generate them until it’s too late to get too picky.

It’s also kind of strange how working on an application can get you so stressed that it starts to border on existential crisis. In a certain sense, you’re just applying for a job – but of course it would be more accurate to say that you’re proposing to create a job for yourself with someone else’s money, and therein lies the rub: a funding application is much more an expression of your identity and values than a simple job application could ever be. What is so important to you that you’d commit five years of your life to pursuing it, and so important to the world that you should be given hundreds of thousands of euros to do it? Why is it so important, and why are you the right person to get it done? These are questions that go well beyond what skills you have and into the realm of who you are, so it’s no wonder really that having your application rejected can sometimes feel quite personal.

With the application submitted, it’s time to move on to other things and wait patiently while the research councils and review panels do their worst. This year the Research Council for Natural Sciences and Engineering awarded funding to 22 new Academy Research Fellows, representing 11 percent of all applications and 24 percent of those with an overall rating of 5 or 6 out of 6 – so statistically, even if the review panel loves your application, the odds are still against you. The percentages vary between different funding sources and instruments, but generally you end up submitting a bunch of failed applications for every successful one, which of course isn’t terribly efficient and it’s tempting to dismiss all your hard work as a waste of time and energy.

Still, there are always some things you can take away from the rejected ones. It’s good to force yourself to ask those big philosophical questions from time to time; they may not lead to any major epiphanies, but it can’t hurt to remind yourself of why you are in research, whether it helps you to stay motivated or gets you to consider your other options. It’s also a great social bonding ritual to commiserate together with your colleagues over your rejections, not to mention how much sweeter all the failures make it when one of you succeeds and you get to have a celebration instead. Besides, there’s bound to be stuff in your rejected application that you can reuse when you start writing your next one – which you will definitely do well ahead of the deadline, no procrastination this time, no sir! Right?