Change is in the air

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teachers still matter, right?

Starting with music news this time, because the new choir term is really off to a flying start: we’ve had seven performances already, with another one coming up tomorrow. A particularly memorable occasion was the grand opening of Nokia’s new “Home of Radio” campus in Oulu, where we had the honour of both opening and concluding the proceedings as well as providing music for the ribbon-cutting ceremony with Christopher Tin’s beautiful and appropriately jubilant Sogno di Volare from the video game Civilization VI. Various luminaries were in attendance, including the President of the Republic of Finland himself, Alexander Stubb.

It’s also been confirmed now that I will be appearing in the chorus of Ovllá, the new opera composed by Cecilia Damström for Oulu’s year as a European Capital of Culture. One of the performance languages is Northern Sámi, which I have next to no familiarity with despite it being one of Finland’s national languages, but I’ll take it as a challenge and an opportunity to learn. Another challenge is the sheer amount of work I’ve committed myself to: from late November to late April I’m going to have one of the busiest six-month periods of my life, as rehearsals for the opera will run in parallel with rehearsals and performances of A Christmas Carol, and around the time of the last opera performances, rehearsals for MASS will begin. How much Cassiopeia stuff I’ll be able to fit in among all this remains to be seen, but the usual Christmas concerts at least should be perfectly doable.

On the academic front, I spent the first few work weeks after my summer vacation mostly preparing materials for a training module that I’m developing for a new thing the university’s graduate school is launching this year called the PhD Supervisors’ Academy. Among the things offered by the Academy is a set of short online courses on a range of topics that a PhD supervisor should know about, and I was invited to create one on AI. This being me, there will be a notable emphasis on critical thinking and responsible use, but I’m doing my best to avoid coming across as overly negative and highlight the opportunities as well.

At the end of August I had to take some time to work on a conference manuscript that got conditionally accepted for publication, so I had to submit a major revision of it before the final decision. The paper definitely isn’t my best work and I felt there was a genuine possibility it might still be rejected after the revision, but thankfully it wasn’t. The conference in question is Tethics 2025, so my streak of having a paper there continues and I’ll get to do my usual trip to go see some old familiar faces. Should be a more relaxed trip than last year, too, since this time the conference doesn’t clash with any of my artistic engagements, and as a bonus I’ll get to visit a new city.

My Title of Docent application is moving forward as well, with one (positive) reviewer statement in and another one hopefully coming soon. After that, I’ll need to arrange a date for my demonstration lecture, which does frankly feel a little bit pointless – I’m not all that convinced that one twenty-minute lecture can say anything decisive about me as an educator that my CV and teaching portfolio don’t – but then, it’s not like I’m suffering from any dearth of material from which to put together such a lecture. Besides, I’m due to give a guest presentation on the intersection of AI and ethics next week at Oulun Suomalainen Klubi and my plan is to make the demonstration lecture a compressed version of the presentation with some pedagogical interactions thrown in at strategic points, so I’m kind of killing two birds with one stone here.

Before my vacation, I was interviewed by a journalist working on an article on the use of AI for content moderation on online platforms, more specifically for the detection of hate speech. He contacted me at the suggestion of a colleague of mine and we had a Zoom meeting where I gave him my views on the subject as an AI ethicist. This was my first time appearing as an expert in the media, so quite an exciting experience for me, and I think I managed not to make a complete fool of myself in the process. The article was published in August and is available online, though only in Finnish.

Another (sort of) new thing in my professional life this academic year is that I’m serving as a teacher tutor for the new batch of students who’ve now begun their studies in the master’s programme in computer science and engineering. It’s only sort of new in the sense that I’ve already been tutoring some students since the beginning of the calendar year, but the new students are the first ones I’m shepherding right from day one. Technically, the most important part of the job is guiding the students in making their personal study plans, but if my experiences from the spring term are any indication, simply listening to the students’ worries and offering encouragement is also a big part of it.

This got me thinking about how the need for formal tertiary education in subjects such as computing is sometimes questioned on the grounds that there are loads of online resources available that you can use to learn just about any technical skill on your own. It’s even been suggested that AI tutors will make human teachers obsolete by being available 24/7 and adapting perfectly to the student’s learning style and goals. I can’t dismiss such arguments entirely, but I think they’re assuming some kind of “ideal” student who’s crystal clear on what they need to learn and perfectly self-directed in finding and using the required resources. For all those “non-ideal” students, a university provides a structure for your studies and a social environment designed to carry you through them and beyond.

As it happens, both these aspects – providing structure and presenting a human face – are part of the role of the teacher tutor, and before you ask: yes, I’m fully aware of how convenient this conclusion is for me personally. I don’t suppose anyone likes to think of themselves as easily replaceable, so maybe I’m just trying to rationalise the belief that the university and I matter and will continue to matter even as technology marches on. Or maybe I do have a genuine point here that isn’t just about me refusing to go gently into the good night of AI-induced obsolescence. Take your pick!

MASSive news

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bah, humbug!

November is done, and with that, the last of my speaking engagements for this year. The Tethics conference was once again highly enjoyable, although I have to say I would have preferred not to take the night train to get there; even the absolute best-case scenario was getting six hours of sleep that night, and the reality was probably closer to half of that amount. I could have taken a morning train instead and skipped the beginning of the conference, but there were several AI-related papers scheduled to be presented in the morning sessions and I didn’t want to miss those, so I decided to just bite the bullet and suffer a night of inadequate sleep to catch them.

As it turned out, one of those morning presentations got cancelled, and in its place, the organisers had decided to have an impromptu roundtable on the immediate and not-so-immediate future of the conference. Regarding the former, it was decided that next year’s conference will be hosted by the University of Vaasa – a city I’ve never visited as far as I can recall, so it should be a nice change of scenery. The more general conclusions were largely the same as those of a similar discussion last year: the conference growing bigger and more international is a good thing, as long as it remains true to its original ideals. There was also a consensus that different universities taking turns organising the conference is a good idea, and that a steering committee of Tethics veterans should be formed to provide guidance and support.

After the lunch break it was time for John Danaher’s keynote titled “Do technologies disrupt moral paradigms?”, in which he looked at societal transformations induced / catalysed by technological breakthroughs such as the invention of the cannon. I found the talk highly enjoyable, although the effects of sleep deprivation were starting to get to me, so I wasn’t able to concentrate as fully as I would have liked. My own talk was in the session immediately after the keynote and went smoothly, with the lively follow-up discussion that I’ve come to expect from ethics conferences. I’ll post a summary of the paper later, once the proceedings have been published, but in a nutshell, it looks at how the concept of security is viewed by the AI ethics community (as opposed to the traditional cybersecurity community) and carries out a survey of AI incidents to get an idea of the real-world impact of security vulnerabilities in AI systems.

On the second day of the conference, I decided to sleep in and skip the first session; one badly slept night I can take, but not two in a row if I can help it, and after the conference dinner followed by drinks in a pub the night was pretty much ruined to begin with, even though I didn’t stay out very late and kept my alcohol consumption very moderate. Therefore I took my time to get up and have breakfast at the hotel before hauling myself to the conference in time for Anna Metsäranta’s keynote on “Sustainable AI – from principles to practice”. It was good to have someone from industry to shed light on how things are being done out there in the real world, so this was another highlight for me.

In the last session before the closing of the conference, I participated in the running of a workshop with the lofty title “The current state and future of technology ethics education in Finland”. To be quite honest, most of the work was done by Ville Vakkuri and Kai-Kristian Kemell and my own contribution was rather modest, but nevertheless, it was interesting to have this opportunity to share thoughts on this topic and to get ideas for enhancing the computer science and engineering curriculum in Oulu from the perspective of ethics. The question of timing is a particularly interesting one: when should ethics education be offered? At the very beginning of their studies, the students are perhaps not yet ready to absorb that kind of knowledge, but if we wait until after they’ve finished their bachelor’s studies, it may be too late already. Not everyone needs to be an ethics expert, of course, but I do believe that everyone should be exposed to enough ethics content during their studies to normalise the idea that awareness of ethics is part of what makes a good engineer.

Fast-forward about three weeks and I’m in Helsinki, on the island of Santahamina, in the auditorium building of the Finnish National Defence University for the annual seminar on the art of cyber warfare. Instead of an auditorium, the seminar took place inside a small studio set up with a green screen and a webcasting rig; initially, it felt somewhat silly to have travelled all the way there just to stream my presentation, but in the interest of making sure everything runs smoothly, it made perfect sense. Besides, it made the whole thing look a great deal more professional than having each speaker join from their home / office / wherever. My colleague Kimmo Halunen served as moderator, introducing the speakers and relaying audience questions submitted via chat.

The theme of this year’s seminar was AI on the battlefield, and I had been invited to speak on this theme with my AI ethicist hat on. Since I spend a fair amount of time discussing the ethics of autonomous weapons in one of the lectures of my AI ethics course, I decided to build on that and it worked out quite nicely. Somebody told me that there were close to 500 people online for the stream during my talk, and the feedback I’ve heard seems to indicate that it was well received. I’ve already been invited to contribute in some capacity to a couple of dissertations on autonomous weapons, which I’m taking as a sign that I made a positive impression and managed to get some actual successful networking done. The entire seminar (in Finnish) is available to view on YouTube, with my talk starting about 44 minutes in.

Now that I’m apparently finished with the speaking circuit for 2024, it’s a good time to reflect a bit. Based on my experience, I would say that I’m actually quite adaptable and versatile, capable of dealing effectively with a variety of audiences, but where I’m at my best – and what I also enjoy the most – is academic seminars. It’s like taking the best of both worlds from lectures and conference presentations: instead of being limited to the scope of a single paper, I get to draw broadly on my expertise and interests to prepare my talk, but I still get to speak primarily as a researcher rather than a teacher, so I can be more relaxed when it comes to the pedagogical aspect. I feel like I can really express myself within those parameters, and it’s always a delight to discover new avenues for that.

Speaking of self-expression, A Christmas Carol has been running for about a month now and is off to a very strong start: the reviews I’ve seen have been highly positive, and all 2024 performances have been sold out for a good while now. 2025 is very much a different matter, and I suppose it’s not surprising that people are much keener to see the play before Christmas than after, but hopefully they won’t lose interest altogether if they didn’t manage to get tickets for before. It’s been great so far, but I suspect that we’re all going to be sick of carols by February, and it certainly won’t help if we’re singing them to an empty house. The demands of the play have been such that I’ve had to prioritise theatre over choir rather heavily, but I’ve managed to squeeze in just enough rehearsal time with Cassiopeia to sing in our Christmas concerts without embarrassing myself, so art-wise, it’s been quite a productive end of the year!

Christmas itself is just a couple of weeks away, so this is in all likelihood my last post of the year. As I’m writing this, I don’t yet have an employment contract for the coming year, but that’s hardly anything out of the ordinary and I expect it will be sorted out soon. If it’s not – well then, get in touch if you need someone to play some music or to give a talk on AI and I’ll get back to you with a quote, I guess?

Deck the halls

It’s been a weird couple of months since I came back from my summer vacation. I haven’t kept track of how my working time has been split among the tools I’ve used, but if I had, I’m pretty sure that number one on the list would be PowerPoint. So many lectures and presentations! I guess it’s good that I get to work on my communication skills, and I do even quite enjoy it when I get to give a well-prepared presentation on a topic I’m genuinely interested in and have something original to say about, but still, enough is enough. I’m hoping this is just a temporary state of affairs, but if not, I may need to work on my saying no to speaker invitations skills.

Indeed, 2024 is already a record year for me in terms of the number of various speaking engagements I’ve had. There are two major reasons for this, the first one being the Reboot Skills project, in which I designed and implemented a course titled Data Governance and Privacy. In addition to the course sessions – three main ones in Finnish, plus an additional one in English in collaboration with the University of Limerick – I’ve attended at least three industry events where I spoke on the subject and pitched the course before it began. Despite these efforts, the course attracted a disappointingly small number of participants, but even so, I’m quite happy to lay it to rest for now and focus on other things.

The other reason is my work on AI ethics, which has gotten me invited to a bunch of seminars recently. This semester I’ve already participated in two: in August, there was a university pedagogy seminar where I presented again the results of my pilot study on integrating AI tools into AI ethics teaching, and a week ago I spoke on responsible AI in research in a seminar organised by the university’s Ethics Working Group. Coming up next is the Tethics conference, where I will both present a paper and co-host a workshop on technology ethics education, and at the end of November comes a seminar at the Finnish National Defence University in Helsinki, where I’m slated to give my perspective as an AI ethicist on the topic of AI in the battlefield. Nothing yet scheduled for December, but there’s still time…

Tethics, for me, is going to be a somewhat more hurried affair this year. I will be there for the whole duration of the conference, but instead of traveling the day before as I normally would, I’m going to take a night train that arrives in Tampere in the morning of the first day. The reason for this is that I have commitments in Oulu that prevent me from leaving much earlier than midnight on the night between the 5th and 6th of November. More specifically, on the evening of the 5th is the first of three dress rehearsals for a stage adaptation of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol at Oulu City Theatre, and I won’t be in town for the other two so I can’t afford to skip it.

That’s right, I’m going to be back on stage, less than a year after the end of The Magic Flute! The director is the same, and when I heard she was looking for singers for this production, it didn’t take me too long to decide that I want in. The only reason why I needed any time at all to think about it was that the rehearsals clash with those of Cassiopeia, so I’ve been mostly absent from the choir since the beginning of September. However, it’s not that often that an opportunity like this turns up, and the only big choir thing remaining this year is the traditional Christmas concert, so I figured now’s not the worst time to take a little break.

Compared to the opera, working on the play is notably different in a few respects. For one thing, instead of a whole chorus of forty singers there’s only a quartet, and we also have significantly more time on stage, so I have a bigger role now, even though I’m not playing an actual named character. I even have a couple of spoken lines! I’m also officially employed by the theatre this time – the pay is hardly worth mentioning, but just the fact that I’m getting money for something I’m basically doing as a hobby is pretty cool.

Artistically speaking, the biggest difference is that we’re not on stage as singers, but rather as actors playing singers. This may seem like semantic quibbling but is actually a significant distinction, as everything we do on stage must be in service of the story. To some extent this was the case also with The Magic Flute, but surely it would have been too sacrilegious to touch Mozart’s music, no matter what the director’s vision is calling for. Here, on the other hand, it’s often the case that we don’t get to sing a song all the way through because the rhythm of the scene doesn’t allow it, and on a couple of occasions we get interrupted mid-verse by stage events. Apart from that, everything feels quite natural and I’m really happy and excited to be doing theatre again.

Another thing I’m very happy about is that with the Data Governance and Privacy course finished, I have some time to work on things that aren’t my next PowerPoint slideshow for a change. Like writing papers! There’s one I’ve been itching to get started on for a good while now, and it looks like now is finally the time. I’m also supposed to be working in a couple of projects besides Reboot Skills, and “no updates from me” is a phrase I’ve had to use a bit too frequently in meetings of late. Who knows – maybe there’ll be more papers to write once I’ve reminded myself what it is that I’m meant to be doing in those projects…

Mission accomplished

The mission being my university pedagogy studies. Yep, I’m now officially done – the final grade for the final part, the teaching practice, was awarded today. I know it’s just the basic studies, but it almost feels like I’ve completed a whole degree. In the concluding seminar four weeks ago, the first in-class assignment was to choose one from a set of cards with pictures of works of art on them and tell everyone else why that one; I went straight for The Garden of Death by Hugo Simberg because frankly, I was feeling pretty dead from basically being in high gear all spring, but there was also some more positive symbolism of planting and growth there. In any case, I’m not going to even consider the possibility of intermediate studies until I’ve taken a gap year.

The ethics course is more or less a wrap, although there are still a few students with some assignments missing. It’s another record year for the course, with 50 registrations and almost 30 completions, around ten more than last year. Partly because of the record numbers, I wasn’t able to keep to the formative assessment schedule I was aiming for, where each learning assignment would have been assessed before the next one is due. There were other issues with the assignments as well – the new format I tried this year was a step forward, but it’s clear that there’s still plenty of room for improvement in terms of reducing the potential gains from using generative AI as a substitute for thinking and learning.

Overall, however, I would say that the teaching practice was a success. The experiments I carried out produced useful data and experience on how to integrate AI tools in various ways into the teaching of AI ethics, and my debating chatbot experiment in particular yielded some very interesting research material. There’s a blog post coming out at some point where I discuss the teaching practice in more detail, and later hopefully also a peer-reviewed publication or two, once I’ve had the time to properly analyse the data and write up the results.

The spring in general has been a mixed bag, with some efforts successful, some not so much. I applied for two big things – a university lecturer position and a Research Council of Finland grant – neither of which I got. On the other hand, I’ve had a series of speaking engagements at various events that all went perfectly well as far as I can tell. I particularly enjoyed the most recent one, an online seminar titled Ethics of AI Hype, where I did my best to put the current generative AI boom into perspective. Truth be told, I’ll jump at any chance to talk gratuitously about the history of computing, but I do also believe that it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of the decades of AI research that took place before anyone had ever heard of such a thing as a large language model.

One event that I can describe with total confidence as a resounding success was the 45th anniversary concert of Cassiopeia. What a privilege it is to be in a choir that’s so skilled and versatile, and such a wonderful community to boot! In a single concert you may hear anything from pop hits to a Cree musical prayer to Mother Earth and from video game themes to a ten-minute-long modern composition commemorating the victims of the MS Estonia disaster. The cherry on top was that the anniversary celebrations coincided almost to the day with my own 45th birthday, so alongside the choir’s milestone, I got to celebrate a personal one in style.

The latest bit of good news (apart from the official conclusion of the pedagogy studies) came just a few days ago: a paper I submitted to this year’s Tethics conference got accepted! Should be a great experience once again; although the location has changed from Turku to Tampere, many of the same people are still involved in one way or another, so I’m looking forward to seeing plenty of familiar faces and catching up with their owners. Also accepted was a proposal for a workshop on tech ethics education, with Ville Vakkuri, Kai-Kristian Kemell, Tero Vartiainen and myself running the show, so I’ll be doing double duty this year, which I don’t mind at all. The reviewers’ suggestions for improving the paper were nothing major and the original camera-ready deadline of June 30 has been pushed back to August 11, so I think I’ll just let it be until after my vacation. The beginning of which, by the way, is barely more than a week away now!

Since when am I sought after?

Since I returned to Oulu from Dublin in 2020, I’ve been more or less systematically shifting my professional focus toward AI ethics and trying to establish a foothold in that community. Two months into 2024, it’s starting to look like those efforts are paying off in a measurable way. The following is a list of ethics-related things I’ve been invited to do since the year began:

Contribute to a workshop proposal for a technology ethics conference
Join the programme committee of another conference with a tech ethics track
Serve on the ethics board of a Horizon Europe project
Work as a researcher in another EU project with an ethics aspect
Give a talk on ethics and participate in a panel discussion at an AI-themed business event

On top of all that, a journal manuscript to which I contributed by writing an ethics section was finally accepted for publication, with very minor revisions. Starting the new year with a splash!

As for what I’ve been doing at work during these past two months, three things very much dominate. First, I finished and submitted my project proposal to the Research Council of Finland, which (as per usual) is unlikely to be granted funding but did at least earn me a glass of sparkling wine and a slice of cake, courtesy of the university. Then there’s my university pedagogy studies, with the preparation of a literature review for the seminar on research-based teacherhood and a plan for my teaching practice taking a fair amount of time. The planning of the OpinTori event, where the results of the teaching practice will be presented, was also recently kicked off.

The third thing was the selection of new students for the international master’s degree programme in computer science and engineering, to which I contributed as an evaluator now for the second time. The number of applicants doubled from last year, and although the evaluation process had been streamlined, it was again, to put it nicely, something of a cathartic experience – presumably even more so for the people in charge of the whole circus. I have to admit, though, that after combing through the slew of application documents assigned to me for evaluation, there was something genuinely rewarding about interviewing the most promising candidates and encountering many who were a real delight to talk to – young, bright, confident, enthusiastic. We’ve also been promised a debriefing party, but sadly, I don’t expect that there will be anything stronger than coffee served at this one.

The next big effort is putting that plan for teaching practice into action, as the AI ethics course kicks off again on Monday the 11th. The plan revolves around the theme of AI ethics education meeting real-world AI applications: I’m going to explore various ways of using generative and conversational AI tools to support the delivery of teaching on the course, while at the same time modifying the learning assignments with the aim of making it more difficult for students to use AI tools in a counterproductive manner. Happily, the university is currently piloting the use of both Copilot for M365 and Azure AI, and I have a bunch of ideas for how they could be of service here. If all goes well, I think there’s even an opportunity to get a scientific publication out of this.

In choir news, The Magic Flute is now well and truly over after a total of 26 performances (plus dress rehearsals), every single one of them sold out. During the week leading up to the final performance I was feeling pretty tired, and I thought it would be primarily a relief to finally say goodbye to the production, but when the curtain was closed on us for the last time, I felt curiously sad after all. The emotion was even more intense the following day, when I went back to the theatre to pick up something I’d left in the dressing room. Since this is so far the only opera, or indeed theatrical production of any kind, I’ve been involved in, I don’t have anything I could meaningfully compare it to, but I got a strong feeling, still lingering, that this was something extra special. You can have too much of a good thing, though, and in retrospect, stretching it out much further would not have been a good idea. Which is not to say that I’m now done with treading the boards, if it’s up to me; apparently the next opera production here will be in 2026, Oulu’s European Capital of Culture year, and if they need tenors for the chorus – well, you just try and stop me.

Pictures and sounds

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

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

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

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

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

Still alive

I am indeed! Barely, but still. Once again blogging has been forced to take a back seat, but I thought I should do one more post before my vacation – which, happily, is right around the corner. No big deadlines before that, just some exam marking plus a bunch of writing that I can pick up from where I left off when I come back to work in August. Next week will be more like a half week because of the faculty’s staff summer party and the Midsummer weekend, and after that there’s just one week of work left before I’m free. Seems too good to be true!

The AI ethics course is happily finished by now: lectures given, assignments evaluated, grades entered into Peppi. Again, it was a lot of work, but also rewarding and enjoyable. There are always at least a couple of students who really shine, turning in excellent assignment submission after another, and those alone are enough to make it all worthwhile. However, a big part of the enjoyment is also that I can use the course as a test lab of sorts, changing things a bit and trying something new each time, seeing what works and what doesn’t. This time I made some changes to the assessment criteria and practices, which seemed to work, so I think I’ll continue in the same direction next year with the teaching development project that I need to do as part of my university pedagogy studies.

Of course, there’s always new things happening in the world of AI, so the course contents also need some updating each year. This spring, for obvious reasons, the ethical implications of generative AI tools kept popping up under various course themes, and I also encouraged the students to try ChatGPT or some other such tool at least once to generate text for their assignment submissions. There were certain rules, of course: I told the students that they must document their use of AI, critically examine the AI outputs and take responsibility for everything they submit, including any factual errors or other flaws in AI-generated text. The results of the experiment were a bit of a mixed bag, but at any rate there were some lessons learned, for myself and hopefully for the students as well. If you won’t trust students to use AI ethically on an AI ethics course, where then?

The most recent big news related to AI ethics is that the European Parliament voted this week to adopt its position on the upcoming AI Act, so the regulation is moving forward and it may well be that on next year’s course we will be able to tell the students what it looks like in its final form. The parliament appears to have made some substantial changes to the bill, expanding the lists of prohibited and high-risk applications and specifying obligations for general-purpose AI systems while making exemptions for R&D so as not to stifle innovation. It will be extremely interesting to see what the impact of the act will be – on AI development and use, of course, but also on AI regulation elsewhere in the world, since this is very much a pioneering effort globally.

After my summer holiday I’ll need to hit the ground running, because I’m once again giving some AI ethics lectures as part of a learning analytics summer school. A new thing this year is that I’m also preparing an ethics module for a new Master’s programme in sustainable autonomous systems, a collaboration between my university and the University of Vaasa. I don’t mind the new challenge at all – I took it upon myself more or less voluntarily, after all – but it does mean that my job title is increasingly at odds with what I actually do. Still, I’ve managed to fit in some research as well, and starting in the autumn I’ll even be participating in a proper research project for a change.

One of the highlights of the spring is that I got a paper accepted to Tethics 2023 – or rather, I supervised a student who got a paper accepted, which feels at least as rewarding as if I’d done the research myself, if not more so. In any case, it looks like I’ll be visiting Turku for an ethics conference for the third year running, and I really wouldn’t mind if this became a tradition! I’m even looking forward to the networking aspect, which I’m usually pretty bad at. Somehow ethics conference are different and Tethics especially – partially because it’s so small, I suppose, but perhaps also because these people are my tribe?

Musically, the spring term was very successful. After The Magic Flute we appeared in two concerts with Oulu Sinfonia – one of them sold out – performing music by the late great Ennio Morricone. Sadly, we then parted ways with our musical director of many years, which forced some planned events to be cancelled / postponed / scaled down, but everyone seems determined to keep the motor running and overall I feel pretty good about the future of the choir. There will be some big things happening late this year and early the next, including (but not limited to) another run of the opera in January and February. Three out of eleven shows are sold out already, so if you missed it this year, get your ticket now!

The final curtain

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

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

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

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

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

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