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!

Pictures and sounds

A new cinema club kicked off at the university yesterday with a screening of the 2014 film Ex Machina, written and directed by Alex Garland. Domhnall Gleeson stars as Caleb, a programmer working for a company called Blue Book – basically a stand-in for Google – who wins a competition and gets invited to spend a week with Nathan (Oscar Isaac), the company CEO, at his place in the mountains. Soon after Caleb’s arrival, it turns out that the real reason for him being there is Ava (Alicia Vikander), a revolutionary humanoid robot Nathan’s been developing in secrecy. Nathan wants Caleb to subject Ava to the ultimate version of the Turing Test: interact with her to determine if she’s truly intelligent, sentient and self-aware on a human level.

I was initially a little bit annoyed at how the film exaggerates the significance of the Turing Test, as if there is some kind of fundamental qualitative distinction between an entity that beats the test and one that doesn’t, but that soon stopped bothering me after the film moved on to more interesting things. The usual annoyances related to the representation of technology in mainstream cinema are also there – empty technobabble, Hollywood hacking – but these are kept to a minimum and equally easy to forgive. At one point Nathan stops Caleb when the latter is trying to ask technical questions about Ava’s AI, which I felt was the author speaking to the audience as much as Nathan to Caleb: never mind how it’s supposed to work, we’re here to talk philosophy.

Such petty complaints were certainly not enough to prevent me from thoroughly enjoying the movie, and I must say I’m rather surprised I hadn’t seen it before or even been aware it existed. The discussion afterward was highly stimulating as well; because of my interest in AI ethics, I’d been invited to join it in the capacity of moderator, but this was more of a nominal role and what I really did was give my views on a couple of questions from the organisers to get the conversation started. All the big philosophical issues related to AI came up – the nature of consciousness, rights of artificial entities, AI alignment, the singularity, AI as an existential threat. Time well spent! The club nights are always on a Thursday, which I ordinarily keep reserved for band rehearsal, but I like the concept and there are interesting films coming up (including one I haven’t seen before), so I’m tempted to go again.

Meanwhile in the world of non-fictional AI, I’ve managed to keep myself appropriately busy for the past few weeks that I’ve been back at work, largely thanks to my AI ethics course and various things derived from it: analysing the course feedback from last spring, giving some lectures for a summer school in learning analytics, finishing two online courses due to be launched soon. The feedback was particularly nice this time – every student who answered the survey gave the course the highest possible overall grade, and in general there was a clear shift towards more favourable answers from last year. Granted, there were only six responses, but that’s still a third of all the students who completed the course this year, and both the completion rate and the absolute number of students who completed were the highest so far. Combined with my personal experience, it all makes me quite confident that I’m headed in the right direction with the course.

The choir is also back from its summer break, with a new musical director. We had our first rehearsal of the new term last week, and there are several small performances coming up already in the next couple of weeks, although I’m going to miss most of them because I’ll be away on a trip. During the summer some of us (myself included) participated in the creation of Owla, a new installation by sound artist Jaakko Autio, and a most interesting and rewarding experience it was. First we rehearsed and recorded a piece of music composed specifically for this occasion by a friend of the artist, and during the process Jaakko captured not just the music but also all the chatter in between takes. Once we were happy with the song, we sat down, still mic’d up, and Jaakko asked us some interview questions, had us introduce each other and finally just breathe for a few minutes. All of this audio became raw material for the installation, which opened at the Oulu Museum of Art on Wednesday, so go check it out if you’re in town!

The final curtain

Happy 2023, I guess? I know it’s a bit ridiculous to be wishing that when we’re more than halfway into February already, but it is my first blog post of the year – I checked. In my defence, the beginning of the year has been pretty much exactly as intense as I feared it would be, with me trying my best to balance between my commitments to the university and the theatre. The first week of January was the absolute worst: I returned to work immediately after New Year, and that week we had rehearsals every night from Monday to Thursday. I was still suffering from the problem of sleeping badly after them, so the inevitable result was me being utterly knackered by Friday, which fortunately was a bank holiday, giving me a chance to recover before two more rehearsals on Saturday.

The following week we had dress rehearsals from Monday to Wednesday, Thursday night off and then the first two performances on Friday and Saturday. In terms of effort, it was hardly any easier than the previous week, but the thrill of the opening night more than made up for it all. After the first show we celebrated with some bubbly and they even gave flowers to all of us chorus members; sadly, mine suffered rather heavy damage on the way home, which involved a pit stop in a crowded bar that I ended up leaving before I even had a chance to order myself a drink, but I was able to salvage the essential part of the poor abused plant and keep it looking nice for a good week.

After opening week, things got considerably less hectic, since there were no more rehearsals, just performances – first three per week, then down to two for the last couple of weeks. This weekend’s the final one, so around 4pm on Saturday the curtain will close on our production of The Magic Flute for the last time. All 15 performances sold out, and all the reviews I’ve seen have been very positive, so I guess it’s safe to say we’ve had a successful run! It’s been a wonderful experience for me personally as well, but I can’t deny that toward the end it has begun to feel more and more like work that I’m not getting paid for and that has made me put my other hobbies (not to mention my social life) largely on hold for quite a while. I’m very much looking forward to next Friday and my first commitment-free weekend of the year.

The big thing at work right now is evaluating applications to international M.Sc. degree programmes. This is the first time I’m involved in the process, and boy is it a trudge and a half. Sure, it’s interesting to get a sneak peek at some of the new students who may be joining us from around the world next autumn, but the work itself is first tedious, crawling through the mass of application documents to identify the most promising candidates, and then stress-inducing, doing interviews with each of them. I recently had a chat about this with a friend of mine who’s been in the IT consulting business for many years and interviewed his share of job applicants, and he said he finds interviews stressful because he can tell that the other person is nervous, so then he empathises with them and starts to feel their discomfort. Me being me, I get stressed about talking to new people even without that extra factor, so I’m going to be extremely glad once I’m done with my share of the interviews.

Something that’s turned out to be a blessing here is the Bookings app in Microsoft 365. This has been very helpful in scheduling the interviews: you just specify the times when you are available, make sure your calendar is up to date with your other appointments so you don’t get double bookings, and then send a link to the booking page to the people you want to invite and let them pick a time that works for them. Apparently in the past this has been done by tentatively selecting a date and time for each candidate, emailing it to them and asking them to email back with suggestions if the proposed time doesn’t suit them; I certainly don’t relish the idea of having that kind of administrative overhead on top of the actual evaluation work, even though it might have helped get the interviews spaced out more evenly and efficiently.

As usual, there’s no need to worry about running out of work to do in the spring either: the start of period IV is just three full weeks away, and with that comes the start of another run of the AI ethics course. I’ll count myself lucky if it doesn’t take up even more of my time than before; I’m the sole responsible teacher now, but on the other hand I will have a teaching assistant, and I also have some ideas for streamlining the evaluation of course assignments to make it less of a burden. Another thing to think about is my stance on ChatGPT and its ilk; certainly I’m going to discuss the technology and its implications in my lectures, but I’ll also need to decide what to do about the possibility of students using it to generate text for their assignment submissions. I’m leaning toward embracing it rather than discouraging or outright banning it – I don’t know how I’d enforce such a ban anyway – but if I go there, it’s not exactly trivial to come up with assignments that give everyone an equal opportunity to exploit the technology and demonstrate their learning to me.

Here be dragons

Well what do you know – it’s December already! A year of returning to a normal of sorts, at least as far as COVID is concerned, coming to an end. For me, “normal” now means working on campus a couple of days a week on average, generally on days when I don’t have any online meetings, since I find it the most convenient to do those at home. We also coordinate within the research group so that there will usually be a few of us there at the same time so we can have lunch and coffee together. The most “old normal” thing I’ve done this year was giving a gool old-fashioned lecture in a lecture hall, the first one since 2019 – and that was in Dublin, so the last pre-pandemic one I gave in Oulu must have been in 2017. I went to the auditorium half an hour in advance just to be sure to avoid any delays due to me being out of touch with the latest presentation technology, but the hardest part turned out to be finding the light switch!

The end of the year has been heavily dominated by teaching-related tasks. There’s the usual avalanche of exams to be marked – a routine that never seems to get any less tedious, but at least it’s something useful to do when I’m not feeling creative enough for anything else. On top of that I’m currently involved in not one but two adult education projects where the university is offering companies training on AI-related topics. One of the topics covered is AI ethics, and recently I’ve been working on creating a new fully automated online course based on the syllabus of the lecture course, which is an interesting challenge, since it’s not exactly trivial to come up with genuinely meaningful ethics assignments where the answer can be checked by an algorithm. Making the course content relevant to the target audience is another challenge, and I’m hoping that people from a variety of companies will not only complete the course but leave some feedback as well.

Meanwhile in the world of music, rehearsals for The Magic Flute kicked off for real last week, and this week we already did a run-through of the first act in its entirety. I have no idea how these things usually work, but I feel like it went quite well, given how quickly we got to that point. From my point of view, the bit that needs the most work is what happens during the overture and the first scene; without giving away too much of what’s to come, I can say that there’s a dragon terrorising the hero, which involves most of the male chorus (myself included) executing a choreographed routine that, for a bunch of untrained amateurs, is certainly enough of a challenge to learn alongside the parts we actually signed up for. One of us hadn’t even had a chance to see the choreography in action before the run-through, so it was inevitably a mess, but we have time booked later for sorting it out.

So far the experience has been slightly bewildering, but above all interesting and rewarding. I guess I was expecting – rather naively, in retrospect – that the details of the production would be all figured out before the start of rehearsals and we’d be told exactly what to do on stage, but that’s not how it works at all. The director gives us the broad strokes, but the finer points are largely made up as we go along, and it often involves a fair bit of improv, also from us extras. It feels great to be included in the creative process like that, and somehow quite natural too, there’s hardly any of the self-consciousness that I’d normally expect to feel when thrown into a situation like that. Although the “characters” that I get to play are essentially just part of the background, I’m doing my best to come up with little things of my own that I can do to breathe life into them. Singing, dancing and acting – I’m a regular triple threat, me!

Another curious thing is that rather than tired, I’ve been feeling strangely invigorated after the rehearsals, presumably because of the mental stimulation. The downside is that it takes a while afterward to wind down properly, and since the rehearsals are in the evening, I’ve found it completely impossible to fall asleep until well after midnight. With daytime length down to four and a half hours and still diminishing, this time of year is exhausting enough without sleep deprivation, so I hope the novelty will wear off soon and I’ll start feeling ready to hit the sack as soon as I get home from the theatre. If not, at least we’ll break for Christmas and New Year before things get seriously hectic in preparation for the opening night.

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.

A storm of swords

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s a wrap, folks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Слава Україні

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Words and music

The proceedings of Tethics 2021 are now available for your viewing pleasure at ceur-ws.org. This means that both of the papers I presented during my two-conference streak in October are now (finally!) officially published! Although I’ve mentioned the papers in my blog posts a few times, I don’t think I’ve really talked about what’s in them in any detail. Since they were published at more or less the same time, I thought I’d be efficient/lazy and deal with both of them in a single post.

At Tethics I presented a paper titled “Teaching AI Ethics to Engineering Students: Reflections on Syllabus Design and Teaching Methods”, written by myself and Anna Rohunen, who teaches the AI ethics course with me. As the title suggests, we reflect in the paper on what we took away from the course, addressing the two big questions of what to teach when teaching AI ethics and how to teach it. In the literature you can find plenty of ideas on both but no consensus, and in a sense we’re not really helping matters since our main contribution is that we’re throwing a few more ideas into the mix.

Perhaps the most important idea that we put forward in the paper is that the syllabus of a standalone AI ethics course should be balanced on two axes: the philosophy-technology axis and the practice-theory axis. The former means that it’s necessary to strike a balance between topics that furnish the students with ethical analysis and argumentation skills (the philosophy) and those that help them understand how ethics and values are relevant to the capabilities and applications of AI (the technology). The latter means that there should also be a balance between topics that are immediately applicable in the real world (the practice) and those that are harder to apply but more likely to remain relevant even as the world changes (the theory).

The paper goes on to define four categories of course topics based on the four quadrants of a coordinate system formed by combining the two axes. In the philosophy/theory quadrant we have a category called Timeless Foundations, comprising ethics topics that remain relatively stable over time, such as metaethics and the theories of normative ethics. In the philosophy/practice quadrant, the Practical Guidance category consists of applied ethics topics that AI researchers and practitioners can use, such as computer ethics, data ethics and AI ethics principles. In the technology/practice quadrant, the Here and Now category covers topics related to AI today, such as the history and nature of AI and the ethical issues that the AI community is currently dealing with. Finally, the technology/theory quadrant forms the category Beyond the Horizon, comprising more futuristic AI topics such as artificial general intelligence and superintelligence.

A way to apply this categorisation in practice is to collect possible course topics in each category, visualise them by drawing a figure with the two orthogonal axes and placing the topics in it, and drawing a bubble to represent the intended scope of the course. A reasonable way to start is a rough circle centered somewhere in the Here and Now quadrant, resulting in a practically oriented syllabus that you can stretch towards the corners of the figure if time allows and you want to include, say, a more comprehensive overview of general ethics. The paper discusses how you can use the overall shape of the bubble and the visualisation of affinities between topics to assess things such as whether the proposed syllabus is appropriately balanced and what additional topics you might consider including.

On teaching practices the paper offers some observations on what worked well for us and what didn’t. Solidly in the former category is using applications that are controversial and/or close to the students’ everyday lives as case studies; this we found to be a good way to engage the students’ interest and to introduce them to philosophical concepts by showing how they manifest themselves in real-world uses of AI. The discussion on Zoom chat during a lecture dedicated to controversial AI applications was particularly lively, but alas, our other attempts at inspiring debates among the students were not so successful. Online teaching in general we found to be a bit of a double-edged sword: a classroom environment probably would have been better for the student interaction aspect, but on the other hand, with online lectures it was no hassle at all to include presentations, demos and tutorials by guest experts in the course programme.

The other paper, titled “Ontology-based Framework for Integration of Time Series Data: Application in Predictive Analytics on Data Center Monitoring Metrics”, was written by myself and Jaakko Suutala and presented at KEOD 2021. The work was done in the ArctiqDC research project and came about as a spin-off of sorts, a sidetrack of an effort to develop machine learning models for forecasting and optimisation of data centre resource usage. I wasn’t the one working on the models, but I took care of the data engineering side of things, which wasn’t entirely trivial because the required data was kept in two different time series databases and for a limited time only, so the ML person needed an API that they could use to retrieve data from both databases in batches and store it locally to accumulate a dataset large enough to enable training of sufficiently accurate models.

Initially, I wrote separate APIs for each database, with some shortcut functions for queries that were the most likely to be needed a lot, but after that I started thinking that a more generic solution might be a reasonably interesting research question in itself. What inspired this thought was the observation that while there’s no universal query language like SQL for time series databases, semantically speaking there isn’t much of a difference in how the query APIs of different databases work, so I saw here an opportunity to dust off the old ontology editor and use it to capture the essential semantics. Basically I ended up creating a query language where each query is represented by an individual of an ontology class and the data to be retrieved is specified by setting the properties of this individual.

To implement the language, I wrote yet another Python API using a rather clever package called Owlready2. What I particularly like about it is that it treats ontology classes as Python classes and allows you to add methods to them, and this is used in the API to implement the logic of translating a semantic, system-independent representation of a query into the appropriate system-specific representation. The user of the API doesn’t need to be aware of the details: they just specify what data they want, and the API then determines which query processor should handle the query. The query processor outputs an object that can be sent to the REST API of the remote database as the payload of an HTTP request, and when the database server returns a response, the query processor again takes over, extracting the query result from the HTTP response and packaging it as an individual of another ontology class.

Another thing I love besides ontologies is software frameworks with abstract classes that you can write your own implementations of, and sure enough, there’s an element of that here as well, as the API is designed so that it’s possible to add support for another database system without touching any of the existing code, by implementing an interface provided by the API. It’s hardly a universal solution – it’s still pretty closely bound to a specific application domain – but that’s something I can hopefully work on in the future. The ArctiqDC project was wrapped up in November, but the framework feels like it could be something to build on, not just a one-off thing.

In other news, the choir I’m in is rehearsing Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil together with two other local choirs for a concert in April. It’s an interesting new experience for me, in more than one way – not only was I previously unfamiliar with the piece, I had also never sung in Church Slavonic before! It turns out that the hours and hours I spent learning Russian in my school years are finally paying off, albeit in a fairly small way: the text has quite a few familiar words in it, I can read it more or less fluently without relying on the transliteration, and the pronunciation comes to me pretty naturally even though my ability to form coherent Russian sentences is almost completely gone by now. It’s still a challenge, of course, but also a beautiful piece of music, and I’m already looking forward to performing it in concert – assuming, of course, that we do get to go ahead with the performance. Because of tightened COVID restrictions, we won’t be able to start our regular spring term until February at the earliest, so I’m not taking anything for granted at this point…

How many Greek letters are there anyway?

It’s my last workday of 2021, at least I very much hope so, and I feel like I should try to sum up the year somehow. The problem is, I can’t think of anything much to say about it! What was supposed to be a fresh start after the weirdness of 2020 turned out to be pretty much just more of the same. As a friend of mine remarked, this was not his preferred method of learning the Greek alphabet. Sure, there were some highlights – taking on new challenges and responsibilities with the launch of the AI ethics course, going to Turku for the Technology Ethics conference – but the fact is that I saw even less of the inside of my office this year than the year before. I haven’t even bothered to find out how to raise my desk, which is supposed to be adjustable but appears to be stuck at the lowest possible elevation, making me feel a little silly and awkward on those rare occasions when I’ve sat at it.

At least during the autumn term I’ve been going to the university campus on a regular basis, because the choir rehearses there in St Luke’s Chapel. As nice as it is that good things have happened at work, singing with Cassiopeia has been the real highlight of the year to be quite honest. If there was any shred of doubt left in my mind that these are my kind of people, it was well and truly dispelled by the Christmas party we had on Friday, easily the most fun I’ve had all year and a brilliant way to wrap up my first choir term. Our Christmas concerts were also a success, and you don’t need to just take my word for it: there’s a little taster available on YouTube, and if that gets you interested, you can buy access to a full concert recording on the choir website. Keep an eye on the YouTube channel of the tenor section too, there’s a very special Christmas treat coming there soon.

Well, that’s it for 2021 then I guess. Will we run out of Greek letters in 2022, and what will we start using instead? Stay tuned to find out, and in the meantime, have a very happy holiday season!