I’m an ethicist, get me out of here

Summer seems to have an impeccable timing this year: on Friday I came back from my vacation and immediately the temperature dropped by about ten degrees and it started raining. Certainly helped me feel less bad about spending the day indoors! Until then, July had been so consistently hot and sunny that it was almost enough to make you forget what a more typical Finnish summer looks like. Today in Oulu it’s +15°C and raining again, but the weather should get nicer toward the weekend, which is fortunate since I have some tickets booked for outdoor concerts.

“Officially”, I was still on vacation all week last week – not that it makes much of a difference, since for now I’m still working from home; the university is currently not explicitly recommending remote work, but the city of Oulu is, and anyway all of my closest colleagues are still on vacation, so there doesn’t seem to be much point in going to the campus since I wouldn’t find anyone there to socialise with. Besides, given the most recent news about the development of the COVID situation, it may be best to wait until after the university’s response team has convened to see if there’s any update to the instructions currently in effect.

The reason why I worked on Friday – I could get used to a one-day work week, by the way – is a happy one: a paper of mine got accepted to the 13th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development, and the camera-ready version of the manuscript was due on July 30. The version submitted for review was ten pages long and was accepted as a short paper, which technically meant that the final version should have been two pages shorter, but I used the loophole of paying extra page charges and ended up adding a page so I could meaningfully address some of the reviewers’ suggestions.

Already at the very beginning of my vacation I had received the pleasant news that another paper had been accepted to the Conference on Technology Ethics, so that’s a double whammy for the month of July! In fact, not only was the manuscript accepted – it received all “strong accept” ratings from the reviewers, which is surely a career first for me. What’s particularly exciting is that while all of the details are still TBA, it looks like the conference is going to be organised as an actual physical event in the city of Turku, which means that I may get to go on my first conference trip since 2019! I would certainly appreciate the opportunity to visit Turku, since it’s a city I’m way too unfamiliar with, having been there only once for a couple of days for work.

I’m giving my next lecture on AI ethics already on Thursday, with two more to follow later in August, as part of a 10 ECTS set of courses in learning analytics. There seems to be no escaping the topic for me anymore, but I don’t exactly mind; it’s actually kind of cool that I’ve managed to carve myself a cosy little niche as a local go-to guy for things related to computing and ethics. Really the only problem is that I don’t always get to spend as much time thinking about ethics as I’d like to, since there are always other things vying for my attention. Generally those other things represent where the bulk of my salary is coming from, so then I feel guilty about neglecting them – but at the same time I’m increasingly feeling that the ethics stuff may be more significant in the long run than my contributions to more “profitable” areas of research.

Last spring term, during the AI ethics course, I was unhappy about it eating up so much of my time, and indeed for a while I barely had time for anything else. It didn’t help matters that the course kept spilling into what should have been my free time, but if you look at the big picture, you could say with some justification that it’s not the ethics eating up time from everything else but the other way around. Now I just need to find someone who’s willing to pay me a full salary for philosophising all day long…

Set sail for Idle City

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

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

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

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

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

The time is now, the day is here

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

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

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

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

Good riddance to 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The end of conferences? Perhaps not

After some internal debate, I eventually went on ahead and submitted a manuscript to CIKM 2020. Although it’s a short paper and therefore more or less by definition not supposed to be anything groundbreaking, I still had some fairly serious doubts about it and might well have abandoned it if the submission deadline had not been extended. The extra thinking time was very welcome, since it allowed me to make a submission I believe in and also to think about what the scope of my journal paper should be – the alternative would have been to include the subject matter of the conference paper in the journal paper, but I think the latter will benefit from a tighter focus.

The conference was originally supposed to be in Galway, Ireland, and the plan was that our paper, if accepted, would be presented by my co-author Alan, who was the supervisor of my MSCA fellowship in Dublin – not that I would mind another visit to Ireland, but obviously travelling there would be a good deal more convenient (not to mention cheaper) for him that for me. Besides, since I no longer have my own funding to spend, I can’t even be sure if the university would cover my expenses. Alan, on the other hand, figured he’ll probably go to the conference in any case, paper or no paper.

The question of who will travel to Galway and on whose money was rendered moot when it was announced that the conference is going to be a virtual one this year, with pre-recorded video presentations and online discussions. It’s not uncommon for conferences to have the occasional video presentation, but that’s still very much the exception rather than the rule – fully online conferences are a rare thing. CIKM would be the first one for me, and while I certainly understand and support the organisers’ decision, I do feel ambivalent about the idea of virtual conferences in general.

Clearly when there’s a pandemic to be brought under control, hosting an international conference is not the greatest idea: you’ll have people coming in from around the world, shaking each other’s hands and generally spending a lot of time together for a few days, then going back to their respective countries to pass on whatever bugs they picked up from each other. However, even if we ignore the matter of contagious disease, there’s a lot to be said in favour of meeting your fellow researchers virtually rather than physically. As much as I enjoyed my trip to New Zealand last year, I can’t in all honesty claim that it was the most efficient use of my budget, and it certainly wasn’t very ecological.

A lot of people are saying that COVID-19 has changed some things permanently, that we won’t be going back to all of our old ways even if and when the pandemic is stopped. With regard to remote work in particular, numerous organisations have had it thrust upon them wholesale and have discovered that it’s actually a viable and sometimes preferable alternative to making everyone haul themselves to the office every day. Since we’re all now routinely doing online meetings, and since a conference session is really just a special sort of meeting, it’s natural to ask if there’s really any need for all the hassle traditionally involved in organising a conference. Will such gatherings soon be a thing of the past, now that we’ve been forced by exceptional circumstances to make the transition?

Personally, I wouldn’t bet on the imminent demise of the non-virtual conference just yet, at least not until we have more experience of how virtual conferences actually work. Online presentations may not be a problem, but there’s more to a conference than presentations, and much of it is bound to be lost when the delegates are not all gathered in the same place. The social aspect will suffer, obviously, which means there’s probably a lot of networking potential lost as well – and I’m saying this as someone who’s definitely not the most sociable and networking-oriented person in the academic world. At a traditional conference the starting of informal conversations and making of new acquaintances happen organically in a way that’s hard to recreate using tools designed for more formal meetings.

Something that may be even more difficult to recreate in a virtual conference is the level of commitment that comes from travelling to the conference location and staying there for the duration of the conference: being there physically translates quite naturally into being there mentally as well. Sure, you’ll continue to do your emails, and you’ll skip some sessions that are not so interesting and use the time to do a bit of sightseeing, but still, at least I find that it’s easy to make the conference my number one priority when I’ve travelled to another country to attend it. I very much suspect that in a virtual conference it would be much harder to get into that mental state and that I would only attend my own session plus one or two carefully selected others, which I think would be kind of sad and antithetical to the spirit of the event.

Speaking of sightseeing, I can’t deny that I enjoy travelling to new places and that I would miss the lost opportunities to do so if conference travel were to end altogether. I’m certainly not too old to remember that when you’re a junior (or perhaps even not so junior) member of academia, the prospect of a trip can be a pretty good incentive to get that manuscript finished in time for the conference deadline. How are we going to motivate future generations of researchers if not with tales of exotic conference locations and lavish banquets?

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?

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!

Far side of the world

Things are getting quite busy again, as the project has come to a stage where I need to be producing some publications on early results while also doing implementation work to get more solid results, not to mention thinking seriously about where my next slice of funding is going to come from. Any one of these could consume all of my available time if I allowed it to, and it’s not always easy to motivate yourself to keep pushing when the potential returns are months away at best. What is all too easy, however, is to neglect things that are not strictly necessary – blogging, for example, but I’m determined to write at least one new post each month, even if it’s only because it makes for a welcome respite from the more “serious” work.

One thing that can help a great deal in maintaining motivation is if you have something nice in the not-too-distant future to look forward to, and as it happens, I have quite a biggie: the paper I submitted in January got accepted to the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, which will be held in Wellington, New Zealand. It’s a bit of a strange event for me to attend; while I do find the field very interesting, my professional experience of it, not counting some courses I took years ago when I was a doctoral student in need of credits, is limited to having been a reviewer for CEC once. However, there is a special session there on the theme of “Ethics and Social Implications of Computational Intelligence”, and this is something I have done actual published work on. It’s also one of the themes I wanted to address in my current project, so that’s that box ticked I guess. Besides, visiting NZ has been on my bucket list for quite a while, so I could hardly pass up the opportunity.

So, a small fraction of my time this month has been spent at the very pleasant task of making travel plans. Wellington lies pretty much literally on the opposite side of the globe from Dublin, so even in this day and age travelling there is something of an operation. It’s not cheap, obviously, but that’s not really a problem, thanks to my rather generous MSCA fellowship budget. The main issue is time: the trip takes a minimum of 27 hours one way, and the “quick” option leaves you with precious little time to stretch your legs between flights. I didn’t exactly relish this idea, so I ended up choosing an itinerary that includes a 12-hour stopover in Sydney on the outbound journey. This should give me a chance to take a shower, reset my internal clock and yes, also go have a look at that funny-looking building where they do all the opera.

It would make little sense to go all that way just for a four-day conference, so after CEC I’m going to take some personal time and spend part of my summer holiday travelling around NZ (even though it will be actually winter there). I still want to spend a couple of weeks in Finland as well, so I have to be frugal with my leave days and efficient in how I use my limited time. Therefore I’m going to be mostly confined to the North Island, although I am planning to take a ferry across Cook Strait to Picton and back – the scenery of the Marlborough Sounds is supposed to be pretty epic. On the North Island I’m going to stop in Auckland and Rotorua before coming back to Wellington; between Auckland and Rotorua, the Hobbiton movie set is a must-see for a Tolkien reader and Lord of the Rings film fan such as myself.

As for the conference, I’m very much looking forward to the plenary talk by my countryman Prof. Risto Miikkulainen on “Creative AI through Evolutionary Computation”. The idea of machines being creative is philosophically challenging, which is part of why this talk interests me, but I’m also intrigued by the practical potential. The abstract mentions techy applications such as neural network architecture design, but personally, I’m particularly interested in artistic creativity – in fact, when I was doing those evolutionary computation courses at my alma mater, I toyed with the idea of a genetic algorithm that would serve as a songwriting aid by generating novel chord progressions. Apart from the plenaries, the conference programme is still TBA, but it’s always good to have a chance to meet and exchange views with people from different cultural and professional backgrounds, and since Wellington is apparently the undisputed craft beer capital of NZ, I’m expecting some very pleasant scholarly discussions over pints of the nation’s finest brews.

First blood

Time to look at the first results from my project! Well, not quite – the first results are in a literature survey I did immediately after starting the project and made into a journal manuscript. I’m currently waiting for the first round of reviews to come in, but in the meantime I’ve been busy developing my ideas about collaborative knowledge discovery into something a bit more concrete. In particular, I’ve been thinking about one of the potential obstacles to effective collaboration from the data owner’s perspective: privacy.

In the aftermath of the much publicised Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal, one would at least hope that people are becoming more wary about sharing their personal data online. On the other hand, with the General Data Protection Regulation in full effect since 25 May, a huge number of people are now covered by a piece of legislation that grants them an extensive set of personal data control rights and has the power to hurt even really big players (like Facebook) if they don’t respect those rights. Of course, it’s still up to the people to actually exercise their rights, which may or may not happen, but after all the GDPR news, emails and “we use cookies” notices on websites, they should be at least vaguely aware that they have them.

The increased awareness of threats to privacy online and the assertion of individuals, rather than corporations, as the owners of their personal data are welcome developments, and I like to think that what I’m trying to accomplish is well aligned with these themes. After all, the collaborative knowledge discovery platform I’m building is intended to empower individual data owners: to help them extract knowledge from their own data for their own benefit. This does not make the privacy issue a trivial one, however – in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that people are more uneasy about sharing a small portion their data with an individual analyst focusing on their case specifically than about using an online service that grabs and mines all the data it can but does so in a completely impersonal manner. The platform will need to address this issue somehow lest it end up defeating its own purpose.

The angle from which I decided to approach the problem involves using a domain ontology and a semantic reasoner, which are technologies that I had been interested in for quite some time but hadn’t really done anything with. As I was doing the literature survey, I became increasingly convinced that an underlying ontology would be one of the key building blocks of the new platform, but it was also clear to me that I would need to start by modelling some individual aspect of collaboration as a proof of concept, so that I would fail fast if it came to that. If I started working top-down to produce a comprehensive representation of the entire domain, in the worst case I might take ages to discover nothing but that it wasn’t a very viable approach after all.

All this came together somewhat serendipitously when I found out that the 2nd International Workshop on Personal Analytics and Privacy (PAP 2018), held in conjunction with the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML-PKDD 2018) in Dublin, had an open call for papers. The submission deadline was coming up in a month – enough time to put together some tentative results, though nothing hugely impressive – and coincided rather nicely with the date when I was planning to fly to Finland for my summer holidays. In about two weeks I had the first version of the manuscript ready, with another two left over for revisions.

The ontology I designed is based on the idea of a data owner and a data analyst (or possibly any number of either) using the collaborative knowledge discovery platform to negotiate the terms of their collaboration. Each uses the platform to specify requirements, but from opposing perspectives: the data analyst specifies analysis tasks, which require certain data items as input, while the data owner specifies privacy constraints, which prevent certain data items from being released to the data analyst. The data owners, data analysts, data items, analysis tasks and privacy constraints are all registered as individuals in the ontology and linked with one another such that a reasoner is able to use this information to detect conflicts, that is, situations where a data item is required for a data analysis task but not released by the data owner.

To resolve such conflicts, the data owner and the data analyst may, for example, agree that the analyst receives a version of the dataset from which the most sensitive information has been removed. Removing information reduces the utility of the data, but does not necessarily make it completely useless; finding a balance where the data owner’s privacy preferences are satisfied while the data analyst still gets enough material to work with is the essence of the negotiation process. The ontology is meant to support this process by not just pointing out conflicts, but by suggesting possible resolutions based on recorded knowledge about the utility effects of different methods of transforming data to make it less sensitive.

For the PAP workshop paper, I only had time to design the logic of conflict detection in any detail, and there also was no time to test the ontology in a real-world scenario or even a plausible approximation of one. It therefore hardly seems unfair that although the paper was accepted for a short oral presentation at the workshop, it was not accepted for inclusion in the post-proceedings. Obviously it would have been nicer to get a proper publication out of it, but I decided to go ahead and give the presentation anyway – ECML-PKDD is the sort of conference I might have gone to even if I didn’t have anything to present, and since the venue is a 25-minute walk away from my house, the only cost was the registration fee, which I could easily afford from the rather generous allowance for sundry expenses that came with the MSCA fellowship.

Croke Park may seem like an unlikely place to have a conference, but it is in fact a conference centre as well as a stadium, and seems to work perfectly well as a venue for an academic event – meeting spaces, catering and all. Besides Croke Park, we had Mansion House for the welcome reception and Taylor’s Three Rock for the conference banquet, so can’t complain about the locations. The regular programme was quite heavy on algorithms, which isn’t really my number one area of interest, but I did manage to catch some interesting application-oriented papers and software demos. What I enjoyed the most, however, were the keynote talks by Corinna Cortes, Misha Bilenko and Aris Gionis; there were two others that I’m sure I also would have found very interesting but was unable to attend, because there was a rather important deadline coming up and so I had to zig-zag between Croke Park and DCU to make sure I got everything finished on time.

My own talk went reasonably well I felt, with an audience of about twenty and some useful discussion afterwards on how I might go about modelling and quantifying the concept of utility reduction. On the last day of the conference, which was today, I went to another workshop, the 3rd Workshop on Data Science for Social Good (SoGood 2018), with presentations on how machine learning and data mining techniques can be used to address societal issues such as homelessness and corruption. I especially enjoyed the last one, if enjoy is the right word – it dealt with efforts to combat human trafficking by means of data science, certainly a worthy cause if ever there was one, but also rife with difficulties from the scarcity of good input data to the nigh-impossibility of devising an ethically justifiable experiment when there are literally lives at stake. Plenty of food for thought there, and a fine way to finish off this week of conference activities; on Monday it’s back to business as usual.