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!

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.

Sweet freedom

The Midsummer celebrations are over, and the main holiday season is upon us. This is the first time since 2017 that I’m spending the whole summer in Finland, and I have to say it feels pretty sweet so far – they call Ireland the Emerald Isle, but we have plenty of shades of green of our own here, and the weather in June has been mostly gorgeous. Somewhat annoyingly, it looks like we’re due for the return of more traditional Finnish summer weather just as I’m about to start my vacation, but I’ll take it; I certainly prefer it to the sweaty +30°C days I had to endure toward the end of my summer holiday last year. Having access to my bike again has been a great joy, although I do kind of miss taking a commuter train to a random town or village and going exploring like I used to do in Dublin. I have been expanding my territory by trying out new routes and going further afield than before, but it doesn’t quite have the same sense of adventure to it.

I was actually planning to travel to England this July; a band I became a big fan of during my tour of duty in Ireland was going to play a concert in Aylesbury near London and I bought myself a ticket pretty much as soon as they became available. Since I’ve never been to London, I thought I’d spend some time there, and I was also planning to visit Oxford as well as Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes, the place where Allied codebreakers (among them one Alan Turing) worked during WW2 – a sort of science and technology-themed pilgrimage, if you will. However, because of the pandemic the event has been postponed until an as yet unspecified date in 2021, and besides I don’t think going gallivanting around the UK would be very favourably looked upon anyway, so it’s just as well that I wasn’t an early bird with my travel arrangements. Better luck next year, I hope!

In Finland the COVID situation seems to be pretty much under control for now, with only a couple dozen people receiving hospital care in the whole country; the figure peaked at just shy of 250 in early April. Life is steadily becoming less restricted, and the nationwide official recommendation to work remotely is being lifted as of the 1st of August. There’s no word yet on how this will affect university policy, but perhaps when July is over, we’ll be going back to the office. Strange thought – working from home really does feel like the new normal already! Of course the pandemic is far from over and there’s no telling when we’re going to be hit by another wave, so better keep that sourdough starter alive for lockdown part two.

The biggest thing I wanted to tick off my to-do list before switching into vacation mode was finishing and submitting the journal paper manuscript that will probably be the last thing I publish on the results of the KDD-CHASER project. With so much else going on, the paper took a while to get into shape for submission, but it’s now in the care of the good people of ACM Transactions on Social Computing, so there’s one thing I (presumably) won’t have to think about until autumn. The notification for my CIKM paper is due on July 17th, but the camera-ready submission deadline is a whole month after that, so if the paper does get accepted, I shouldn’t need to do anything about it while I’m on leave.

Something that was only very recently set in motion but that I’m quite excited about is a new study course on AI ethics that I’ve started developing with a couple of colleagues after one of them suggested it, knowing that I’m interested in the subject and have some research background in it. I’ll admit I’m slightly worried about exactly how much extra work I’m taking upon myself, but I have a lot of ideas already, and it should make a nice merit to put in my academic CV. The main thing to keep in mind is that we teach engineering, not philosophy, so we want to keep the scope of the course relatively narrow and down-to-earth: we’ll leave debating AI rights to the more qualified and stick to issues that are relevant to today’s practitioners. After two weeks and three meetings we have a pretty good tentative plan already and will get back to the task of fleshing it out in August.

On the matter of the Academy of Finland September call I’m still undecided. Should I have another go at the Research Fellow grant? I’m not ruling it out yet, but I’m not going to simply rehash the same basic idea, that much seems clear by now. Last year my proposal in a nutshell was “do what I did in Dublin, scaled up”; that made it relatively easy to write, but in retrospect, and other weaknesses aside, it wasn’t a very novel or ambitious plan from the reviewers’ perspective nor even all that exciting from my own perspective. Of course it still makes sense that I’d build on the results of my MSCA fellowship, but I’ll need to do better than follow it up with more of the same. Currently I only have some fairly vague ideas about what that would mean in terms of writing an actual proposal, but there’s still time to find that inspiration, and I’m pretty sure that the upcoming time off is not going to hurt.

So long, farewell

So, the day has come – after two years, it’s time for me to say goodbye to Dublin! I almost added the word “finally”, but decided against it, because it really feels like this came sooner than I thought it would. They say that time seems to pass more quickly when you’re older because relative to how long you’ve already lived, the years are getting shorter and shorter; I guess there may be something to that idea, but even so, five percent is an appreciable fraction and that’s roughly the portion of my life so far that I’ve spent in the Fair City.

My January, as I expected, has been anything but uneventful, with loads of wrapping-up to do before I can board the plane home with a clear conscience. Finishing the trial has been a big part of it, obviously – just a couple of weeks ago I had to spend a panicky afternoon fixing a bug that was seriously threatening to make a mess of the experiment in the most crucial phase of it. Admittedly, that bug was only there because of some shoddy design on my part and could easily have been avoided with a bit of forward thinking, but still, I take a certain amount of pride in how quickly and effectively I dealt with the problem once I realised that it was happening and couldn’t be eliminated or circumvented in any way other than developing and deploying a new version of the server.

To be honest, I almost welcomed the unforeseen coding job, since that at least was something that was entirely in my own power to do. What I found far more stressful was the waiting – waiting for the study participants to do their part, hoping that they won’t take too much time to do it when your time is running out, knowing that you can plead with them but you can’t actually make them do anything. It turns out that one of the many transferable skills you develop as a researcher is a form of diplomacy: composing emails that convey a definite sense of urgency while avoiding any overt attempts to make the recipients feel guilty.

I have to admit that finishing the trial came rather too close to the deadline for comfort; even as the last week of January arrived, I was still missing several responses to the feedback survey that I really needed everyone to complete because in a small-scale study like mine was, every participant’s contribution really counts. I also can’t say that the results were everything I hoped for, but then, if I’d known exactly what to do and how to do it right from the beginning, it wouldn’t have been research. Looking back at all the stuff I managed to get done over these past two years, I guess on the whole I can feel pretty good about myself.

Although the fact that I’m leaving DCU and going back to Finland set a hard deadline by which certain things needed to be finished, the project isn’t really coming to an end yet, not in the sense of me not doing any more work on it. The Commission will be expecting a final report within 60 days of the end of the project period, and I’m already working on a journal manuscript that will be largely based on the results of the trial and will hopefully become the capstone publication of the project. Another conference paper or two wouldn’t hurt either, but that’s going to require some research work that goes substantially beyond what I achieved in Dublin, and I don’t know yet how much time I’m going to have for that in Oulu.

Outside of work, my time has been mainly occupied by packing my bags and saying my farewells – to the people I met here, to the places I liked to go and to the things I enjoyed doing. I’ve had no more time to go travelling further afield, but I’ve done my best to tick a few more items off my list of things to see and do in the greater Dublin area, such as interesting walks I hadn’t done yet; I’m particularly glad that I had the chance to check out Dublin’s cool new tiki bar that opened just a couple of weeks before my departure. Last week I joined the DCU Campus Choir for one more session and brought with me a box Finnish chocolates, which seemed to go down very well. A new bass joined the choir and a new tenor as well, so I trust that the male voices will continue to hold their own without me.

Although I’m happy to return home, inevitably there’s some sadness as well, because it’s a good period of my life that I’m leaving behind. I’m fairly sure that Ireland hasn’t seen the last of me yet, but I’m not sure when my next visit will be, and I don’t know if all of the same people will still be here then. Even leaving my Dublin apartment makes me more wistful than I would have expected, considering that it’s barely big enough to even call an apartment, but it was my home for long enough for me to get settled and there are many good memories associated with it. May the next tenant be equally well served by it.

P.S. The Science with Arctic Attitude blog of the University of Oulu recently published a post I wrote about my time in Dublin. If you didn’t see it yet, you can check it out here.

Almost there

Today marks the anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence by the Finnish parliament, celebrated in my country as Independence Day. In Finland it’s a public holiday of hallowed status, and if I were home I might be uncorking a bottle of wine right about now to treat myself to a glass while preparing something special for dinner. However, in Ireland it’s of course just a regular Friday, so instead I’m sitting at my desk at DCU; it’s the second year running that I’m working on this day, and only the third time in my life. Really the only thing distinguishing this from a normal working day is that my playlist has consisted exclusively of works by Finnish classical composers.

Even though the date enjoys no special significance here, I felt that this would be an apt time to reflect a bit on my upcoming return to Finland – there really isn’t very much time left now, less than two months from now I’ll be starting at my old university again. My trial is proceeding roughly according to plan; some gentle nudging of the participants has been required, as well as emergency repairs of the classic “turn it off, then on again” variety, but there seems to be no imminent danger of everything falling apart. The first big batch of sleep data uploads should be completed well before Christmas, and after that there shouldn’t be anything much happening until January, so I should be able to get some good rest and relaxation in between.

I’m definitely going to need that rest and relaxation, because January is likely to be pretty much a constant flurry of activity. Not only do I have the project to wrap up, but also my life in Dublin in general, and when you stay somewhere long enough to make it your home, you tend to accumulate stuff that you then have to decide what to do with when you move again. I’ve tried to keep mine to a minimum – the minuscule size of my apartment has helped me there – but living out of my suitcase for two years would have been a bit too extreme, so there are various items that I’ll need to get rid of, one way or another, before I leave. Anyone interested in free household stuff put your hand up!

Looking back, it’s a little bit hard to believe that it actually has been two years since I moved to Dublin; the time seems to have passed much more quickly than I anticipated. Of course, in the beginning there was a lot of uncertainty about everything and a lot of new stuff to come to terms with, but after a while I got used to the idea that this is my life now and settled into my new routines. Perhaps I even managed to make myself too much at home, because I was slightly taken by surprise by the realisation that if I’m going to do some more exploring before my return, now would be the time. These past few weeks I’ve been putting my Leap Card and tramping shoes to good use in various small coastal towns near Dublin, and I have a weekend in Sligo booked for next week.

So then, what will happen when I do go back to Finland? It looks like I’m going to have a job there at least for the rest of the year, which is what I was cautiously expecting, so I’ll have a nice soft landing and can get settled without immediately having to worry about finances. I don’t know yet what exactly I’ll be doing to earn my salary – presumably there is some ongoing research project to which I’ll be expected to contribute, and also some lecturing, but hopefully I will also have time to keep the ball rolling and work on my own ideas. Ideally, I’ll get one more KDD-CHASER paper submitted for review by end of January, but at some point it’s going to need revisions, and there are others that I want to write once the trial is done.

After the end of KDD-CHASER, I guess the next big milestone is coming up in April/May when I get the decision on my Academy of Finland Research Fellow application. As I wrote before, the most likely outcome is that I won’t get the grant, and assuming that I don’t, I’ll have to do some fairly serious thinking about my options. I came to Ireland with the thought that I wasn’t quite done with academia yet, but what about now? The MSCA fellowship was an opportunity to build something of my own, and of course it would be a shame to just forget about it, but do I necessarily need to be in an academic environment if I want to keep building on it? Going international was perhaps an overdue career move – is it time to make another one sometime soon?

Whatever happens, I think I’m going to be happy to be back home. It was always the plan to come back after these two years, and while there have been some changes during this time, one thing that hasn’t changed is that Finland is still where I consider my home to be. I do find, however, that going through with all this has expanded my comfort zone quite a lot: I still vividly remember the mixture of excitement and panic I felt when I got the notification that the MSCA fellowship had been awarded, but now I’m entirely open to the idea of working abroad again at some stage. I don’t think it’s something that I’ll actively pursue in the near future, but hey, who knows?

A FRUCTful journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rule of three

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now what?

The September call of the Academy of Finland closed this week; I submitted my application for the Research Fellow grant, and I must admit I’m having mixed feelings about it. Obviously, I’m relieved to have finished the proposal on time and happy to have a work-free weekend ahead of me for a change, but beneath the pleasure of a well-earned rest there are definite undertones of “meh”. Considering the next stage of my career, getting the fellowship would be quite a big deal – the prospect of €5k per month for my own salary for five years plus up to €400k for research expenses is certainly nothing to sneer at – so why doesn’t it feel that way to me?

I guess part of the reason is that you always tend to feel a bit empty after finishing an effort like this, in a dull, “now what?” sort of way. There’s also the fact that I’m simply tired from the final push: it’s not easy to get excited about anything when you feel like you’ve done a week’s worth of work in half the time and then worked another half-week on top of that. Anyway, the funding decisions aren’t due until sometime next spring, so there’s hardly much point in getting excited now – not to mention that statistically, it’s not very likely that I’ll get the grant, so it’s not exactly a rock-solid foundation to base my plans for the future upon.

The slim odds are a big part of why, for quite a long time, I found it hard to drum up any sort of enthusiasm in myself for getting to work on the proposal. Of course, by putting it off I probably just managed to make my chances even slimmer – there was no time to have my application looked at by anyone else, and very little time even for myself to do any substantial rewrites. As a result of this, I don’t know if I can honestly say that I did my best, but I guess I did what I could in the time I gave myself to do it, and of course it’s always the case that you have to strike a balance between such things and everything else going on in your life.

So yeah, it all comes down to priorities ultimately: sure, the fellowship would be a really nice thing to get and I’m sure I’ll be enormously excited if I do get it, but I find that I don’t want it badly enough to have everything else I care about take a back seat for weeks on end. After all, there’s always next year, and then I’ll have a draft proposal to build on, presumably some useful feedback from the review panel, and also plenty of time to get further feedback from the people at the university whose job it is to help researchers prepare applications. Refereeing is always a bit of a crapshoot anyway, sometimes you get lucky with who’s assigned the task of judging your worthiness and sometimes you don’t.

Besides, the quality of the proposal isn’t even the most important criterion in this call – it’s the qualifications of the applicant, so there’s only so much I could have accomplished by putting more hours into perfecting the proposal. By the next call I’ll have wrapped up KDD-CHASER, which means I’ll have more preliminary results and hopefully more publications as well, so that will help with both the proposal and the qualifications. As a matter of fact I just submitted another manuscript last week, so if all goes well, I’ll get to make one more conference trip before the project is over.

Speaking of other things going on in my life, there is some interesting stuff afoot both on and off duty. In KDD-CHASER, the live trial of our software platform is now underway; deploying the platform has involved working with AWS EC2 virtual servers, which is pretty cool, since I always enjoy a chance to get my hands on technologies I haven’t previously used. Meanwhile, the DCU Campus Choir has started its autumn term, and boy, does it feel great to be singing again! This term we’re apparently doing Vivaldi’s Gloria RV 589 in its entirety, which I’m particularly excited about – it’s a beautiful piece, and also a bit of a challenge that I’m more than happy to accept. Stay tuned for concert dates!

Beyond the blue horizon

I’m currently in an in-between state of sorts, waiting to start part two of my summer holiday. One might think that after my action-packed New Zealand adventure the prospect of spending two weeks in Finland would seem rather dull, but as a matter of fact I welcome it wholeheartedly and would gladly extend my stay by another week. However, I also want to spend a decent amount of time back home around Christmas and New Year, so it all comes down to priorities again. At least I’m fairly sure that unlike last summer, this time my vacation won’t be interrupted by a panic involving overdue deliverables, since there are none left to submit until the very end of the project.

When I return to Dublin, it will mark the beginning of the last six months of my two-year fellowship, which I must admit is a slightly terrifying thought. However, the way things are going at the moment is fairly encouraging, with one paper published and the camera-ready version of another one submitted during the past month. Still, I can’t afford to have any illusions regarding the amount of effort it’s going to take to wrap this thing up neatly by the end of January 2020 – I still have the most critical part of the research ahead of me, and I expect it’s not going to be smooth sailing all the way even if there are no actual major setbacks.

Of course I can’t just set the horizon at the end of the fellowship and pretend that there’s nothing beyond it; as tempting as the idea may sometimes seem, there’s no realistic scenario where I’m going to retire at the age of 40, so I need to think about continuity. The basic plan is the same that it’s been all this time – go back to my old research group, at least for a while, assuming that they’re still willing to have me – but the big question, as always, is where the money for my salary is going to come from. In the best case there will be enough short-term funding to see me through to the end of next year, which would provide a nice soft landing but still wouldn’t move the horizon a whole lot further away.

One opportunity I guess I’ll have to take a stab at is the September call of the Academy of Finland, specifically the Academy Research Fellow funding instrument. This would keep me going for another five years, which sounds almost too good to be true, and indeed it more or less is, considering how fierce the competition is. The success rate for these proposals is around ten percent, making the instrument even more competitive than the MSCA Individual Fellowship, where the percentage is around fifteen. It is, of course, encouraging that I did manage to get the MSCA IF, but my past experiences with the AoF have not been so uplifting, so I’m not sure how much I ought to fancy my chances here.

Still, on the whole it looks like this is worth a shot, because I do have a number of things I can build upon as a result of the time I’ve spent here at DCU. These include the concrete results of my research, of course, but also the new skills I’ve learned and the new connections I’ve made. The experience I now have of what makes a successful proposal should also prove valuable, as should the experience of working abroad – in fact, had I stayed at my alma mater, I wouldn’t even be eligible to apply, but thanks to the fellowship, I now pass the Academy’s mobility criterion with flying colours, which is a big part of why I came to Ireland in the first place.

None of this matters, of course, unless I can put together a convincing research plan, and to do that, I first of all need to decide what it is that I want to do research on. Obviously it will be connected to what I’ve been working on in Dublin, but it’s a broad area and there are many different angles from which I could approach it in my future work, so I need to ask myself a couple of questions. One of these is, what would I be really, really interested in doing? Five years is quite a long time to be working on something that you find you’re not that into after all, and it’s hardly a recipe for success in a job that’s pretty much built on the assumption that you’re doing it because you enjoy the challenge and are genuinely curious about what you’re going to discover.

Thankfully, by this point in my life I think I can say I know myself pretty well and have a good idea of the sorts of challenges that will keep me from getting bored. That leaves the other question: what can I successfully argue to the reviewers of my proposal that I am the right guy to attempt? If I’m very lucky, when I draw that Venn diagram it will turn out that the intersection of those two sets contains enough substance to shape a funding-worthy proposal out of, but it’s not exactly a rock solid foundation for my future plans, so I’m going to have to do some hedging of bets. If you have or know a company that could use a creative and computationally minded individual for cool R&D projects, I’d love to hear about it!

New Zealand story

I’m back in Dublin from my two-week expedition to New Zealand, the main reason for which was (ostensibly) to attend the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation in Wellington. I’ve been back since Saturday actually, so by now the worst of the jet lag is behind me and it’s time to do a write-up of my doings and dealings down under. Besides NZ, I had the opportunity to pay a quick visit to Australia as well, since I had a stopover in Sydney that lasted from 6am to 6pm – plenty of time to catch a train from the airport to Circular Quay and snap some smug selfies with the famous opera house prominently in the background.

Having the long break between flights in Sydney proved a good decision, because even though the final hop from Sydney to Wellington was a relatively short one, by this point I had already flown seven and a half hours from Dublin to Dubai, followed by a two-hour stopover before the connecting flight to Sydney, which was just shy of fourteen hours. As a result of all this I wasn’t in much of a mood to do any more flying until I was well and truly rid of the stiffness of body and mind that comes from spending 20-plus hours seated inside a cramped aluminium tube in the sky, and a few hours of sightseeing on foot on what turned out to be a pleasantly warm and sunny day helped a great deal in achieving that. Another move I thanked myself for was having purchased access to the Qantas business lounge at Sydney airport, allowing me to enjoy such welcome luxuries as a comfy chair, a barista-made espresso and a nice shower before facing the world outside.

With the combined effect of the flight and transfer times and the 11-hour time difference, I arrived in Wellington near midnight on the evening of Sunday the 9th, having departed from Dublin on Friday evening. Monday the 10th was the first day of the conference, but it was all tutorials and workshops, none of which were particularly relevant to my own research, so I gave myself permission to sleep in and recharge before attempting anything resembling work. In fact the only “conference sessions” I attended on that first day were lunch and afternoon coffee; the rest of the time I spent at the venue I just wandered around Te Papa, exploring the national museum’s fascinating exhibitions on the nature, culture and history of New Zealand.

On the second day I began to feel the effects of jet lag for real, but I thought it was time to be a good soldier and check out some presentations. Although I don’t really do evolutionary computation myself, it has various applications that interest me professionally or personally, so it wasn’t too hard to find potentially interesting sessions in the programme. The highlight of the day for me was a session on games where there was, among others, a paper on evolving an AI to play a partially observable variant of Ms. Pac-Man; being a bit of a retrogaming geek, I found it quite heartwarming that this is an actual topic of serious academic research!

On the third day I forced myself to get up early enough to hear the plenary talk of Prof. Risto Miikkulainen, titled “Creative AI through Evolutionary Computation”. I was especially looking forward to this talk, and I was not disappointed: Prof. Miikkulainen built a good case for machine creativity as the next big step in AI and for the crucial role of evolutionary computation in it, with a variety of interesting supporting examples of successful applications. I am inclined to agree with the audience member who remarked that the conclusions of the talk were rather optimistic – it’s quite a leap from optimising website designs to optimising the governance of entire societies – but even so, a highly enjoyable presentation. Later that day there was a special session on music, art and creativity, which I also attended, but my enjoyment of it was hampered by my being in acute need of a nap at this point.

The fourth and final day of the conference I mostly spent preparing for my own presentation, which was in the special session on ethics and social implications of computational intelligence. This took place in the late afternoon, so the conference was almost over and attendance in the session was predictably unimpressive: I counted ten people, including myself and the session chair. Fortunately, numbers aren’t everything, and there was some good discussion with the audience after my talk, which dealt with wearable self-tracking devices and the problems that arise from the non-transparency of the information they generate and the limited ability of users to control their own data. I also talked about the problems and potential social impact of analysing self-tracking data collaboratively, tying the paper up with the work I’m doing in the KDD-CHASER project.

After the conference I proceeded to have a week’s vacation in NZ, which of course was the real reason I went to all the trouble of getting myself over there. While it’s not a huge country – somewhat smaller than my native Finland in terms of both area and population – I still had to make some tough choices when deciding what to see and do there, and I came to the conclusion that it was best to focus on what the North Island has to offer. I rode the Northern Explorer train service to Auckland and spent three nights there before working my way back to Wellington by bus, stopping along the way to spend two nights in Rotorua. From Wellington I did a day trip by ferry to Picton, a small town in the Marlborough Region (of Sauvignon blanc fame) of the South Island.

On Friday, two weeks after my departure from Dublin, I started my return journey, this time via Melbourne and with no time to go dilly-dallying outside the airport between flights. I boarded my flight in Wellington feeling a little sad to be leaving NZ so soon, but also satisfied that I’d made the most of my time there. I might have been able to fit in some additional activities if I’d travelled by air instead of overland, perhaps even another city, but I like to be able to view the scenery when I’m travelling, and there was no shortage of pretty sights along the train and bus routes. The conference also left a positive feeling: the programme was interesting, the catering was great and the choice of venue just brilliant. Above all, I’m happy to be done with all the flying!