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.

Text, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll: Tethics 2023 and beyond

Well, that’s it for Tethics 2023! I find myself struggling to accept that this was only the second “proper” one I’ve attended: my first one, in 2020, was an all-online event (for obvious reasons), and in 2022 there was no Tethics because Turku was hosting Ethicomp instead. Despite all that, I want to say that I’ve been going to the conference for years, because it just feels right somehow. I suppose you could take it as a testament to the cosy and welcoming atmosphere of the conference that I feel so at home there.

Certainly there’s something to be said for a conference where you can realistically exchange at least a few words with every fellow delegate over the course of a couple of days. (Not that I ever actually do, mingling not being my strongest suit, but in principle I could have.) I’m pretty sure I’ve commented before on the cultural differences I’ve observed between technical and philosophical conferences, but it’s worth reiterating how much more rewarding it is to attend a conference when there’s a genuine and lively discussion about every presentation. Out of all the conferences I’ve ever been to, Tethics is actually a strong candidate for being closest to ideal in that besides having that culture of debate, it’s small enough that you can fit everyone in a regular-sized classroom, and there are people there representing different disciplines and sectors so you get a nice range of diverse viewpoints in the discussion.

The keynote address of the conference was delivered by Olivia Gambelin, founder and CEO of an AI ethics consulting company called Ethical Intelligence. I very much enjoyed her talk, which dealt with the differences between risk-oriented and innovation-oriented approaches to AI ethics and how it’s not about choosing one or the other but about finding the right balance between the two. I particularly liked her characterisation of the traits of ethical AI systems – fairness, transparency etc. – as AI virtues, and the idea that good AI (or indeed any good technology) should, above all, boost human virtues as opposed to capitalising on our vices. My inner cynic can’t help but wonder if there’s enough money in that for virtuous AI to become mainstream, but I’m not ready to give up on humanity just yet.

Among the regular presentations, there were also several that were somehow related to AI ethics, which I of course appreciated, since I’m always on the lookout for new ideas and perspectives in that area. However, the two that most caught my attention were actually both in the category of “now for something completely different”. On the first day, Ville Malinen spoke on the sustainability and public image of sim racing, which occupies its own little niche in the world of sports, related to but distinct from both real-world motor racing and other esports. On the second day, in the last session I was able to attend before I had to go catch my train home, J. Tuomas Harviainen presented a fascinating – as well as rather surprising – case where he and his colleagues had received a dataset of some three million posts from a dark web drug marketplace and faced the problem of how to anonymise it so that it could be safely archived in a research data repository.

Another highlight was my own paper – and I can say this with at least some degree of objectivity, since my own involvement in both the writing and the presentation was relatively small. Taylor Richmond, who was my master’s student and also worked as my assistant for a while, wrote the manuscript at my suggestion, based on the research she did for her M.Sc. thesis. She then got and accepted a job offer from industry, and I figured that it would be up to me to present the paper at the conference, but to my delight and surprise, she insisted on going there to present it herself, even at her own expense. I offered some advice on how to prepare the presentation and some feedback on her slides, but all of the real work was done by her, leaving me free to enjoy the most low-stress conference I’ve ever attended.

The paper itself explores content feed swapping as a potential way of mitigating the harmful effects of filter bubbles on social media platforms. Taylor proposed a concept where a user can click a button to temporarily switch to seeing the feed of the user with the least similar preferences to theirs, exposing them to a radically different view of the world. To test the concept, she carried out an experiment where ten volunteers spent some time browsing a simulated social media platform and answered a survey. The results showed that the feed swap increased the users’ awareness of bias without having a negative impact on their engagement, the latter being a rather crucial consideration if real-world social media companies are to even consider adding such a functionality to their applications. Despite some obvious limitations, it was a seriously impressive effort, as noted by several conference delegates besides me: she designed the experiment, created the social media simulation and analysed the data all by herself, and she did a fine job with the presentation as well. My own contribution, apart from my supervisory role, was basically that I wrote some framing text to help sell the subject matter of the paper to the tech ethics crowd.

Also on the agenda this year was a special session on the future of the Tethics conference. The Future Ethics research group at the Turku School of Economics, which has organised every event so far, is apparently not in a position to commit to doing it again next year, so there was a discussion on finding an alternative host, with Tampere University emerging as the most likely candidate. As much as I’ve enjoyed all of my visits to Turku, I’d certainly appreciate the two hours that this would slice off my one-way travel time! There was also some talk about possibly going more international – attracting more participants from outside the Nordic countries, perhaps hosting the conference outside Finland at some point in the future – but there was a general consensus that in any case the event should remain relatively small and affordable to retain its essence. Personally, I quite like the idea that Oulu could be the host some year, although I don’t know how many others there are here who’d be on board with that.

In the meantime, my top two professional priorities right now are getting more focused on research (with a whole bunch of distractions now happily out of the way) and finishing my university pedagogy studies. It might seem like these are more or less diametrically opposed to one another, but thankfully that’s not the case: I can see potential in both of the remaining courses – teaching practice and research-based teacherhood – for advancing my research interests as well as my pedagogical knowledge. I have a couple of journal manuscripts in the works, one recently submitted and the other undergoing revisions, and I’m involved in a cybersecurity-themed research project where I’ve been looking into AI vulnerabilities from an AI ethics perspective. I’m sure the next distraction is waiting to pounce on me just around the corner, but until it does, I’m going to indulge myself and pretend that I have no work duties other than thinking deep thoughts and making sense of the world.

As usual, there are things happening on the music front as well. The choir currently has its sights set firmly on two big Christmastime projects, but there’s been time for a variety of smaller performances too; a particularly memorable occasion was singing Sogno di Volare, the theme song of the video game Civilization VI, as the recessional music at the wedding ceremony of two choir members. Next year we’ll have the choir’s own 45^th anniversary celebrations – and, of course, the new run of The Magic Flute! The first music rehearsal for the latter is scheduled to take place just a couple of weeks from now. Will be interesting to see how much of the music we can still remember, although the real challenge will come in December when we start relearning the choreographies…

London calling

Last week I submitted my application for an Academy Research Fellowship to the September call of the Academy of Finland, joining 1028 other hopefuls. That’s right, 1029 applications received according to the AoF Twitter account. I guess it’s safe to say that it’s going to be a tight sieve once again, and my expectations are at about the same level as always. (Not high, in case that was unclear.) I did come up with what I feel is a basically fundable research idea and plan, but the hard part is selling it, and yourself as the right person for the job, to the reviewers. Still, this is the last time I’m eligible for this funding instrument – technically the only time, since the new Research Fellowship has replaced the old Postdoctoral Researcher and Research Fellow instruments – so I figured I’d give it one last shot. Worst case scenario, the reviewers absolutely demolish my proposal but that still leaves me with a foundation to build on.

September tends to be one of the most taxing months of the year, and this year was no exception; if anything, this one was a whopper even by September standards. The AoF call was there as usual, as was the start of teaching with Towards Data Mining being lectured in the first period, but all sorts of other stuff had somehow piled up on top of those. Navigating this ocean of demands on my time and energy was quite an exercise in prioritisation. On the whole, I think I managed to handle it reasonably well, but I can’t entirely shake the feeling that there’s something I’ve neglected that will come and bite me in the bum later.

I have to admit that I probably made things worse for myself by going off gallivanting in and near London just before the start of September, but it was a brilliant trip that I’d been looking forward to for almost three years, so I have no regrets. This was my first time visiting London, so there were lots of things to see, and see things I most certainly did. After six nights in London I took a train to Aylesbury, where I saw my favourite band make a triumphant return to the stage after a series of setbacks, including an extremely traumatic one that could easily have ended their story altogether. The night after the concert I spent in Aylesbury, and the following day it was back to London, Heathrow and eventually home for me.

When I originally started planning the trip, I conceived it as a sort of science/technology-themed pilgrimage, and I managed to fit in several attractions related to that theme: the Natural History Museum, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley with its collection of vintage hardware going all the way back to (rebuilds of) the machines used by Allied codebreakers – among them a certain A. Turing – to decipher German messages during WW2. Westminster Abbey, with all the famous scientists buried or memorialised there, counts as well. Oxford I had to leave for another time, along with the Brunel Museum, which was a bit of a shame since the band I went to see has a connection with Isambard Kingdom Brunel through one of their songs, so a visit to the museum would have tied the trip neatly together. (For the music geeks out there: the song is called The Underfall Yard, the band is called Big Big Train – if you’re into prog rock and aren’t familiar with this group yet, do yourself a favour and check it out.)

Speaking of music, things have been pretty intense on the choral front as well. In barely more than a week we’re due to perform three concerts together with the Musta lammas choir from Helsinki, something we’ve been looking forward to for a long time since the two previous attempts got cancelled because of covid restrictions. We’ll be singing everything from memory, which must be fun for the new singers who auditioned in September and have been in the choir for about two weeks! Choir rehearsals for The Magic Flute started this week, so that’s more stuff to memorise for November when we start rehearsing what we’re going to do on stage. The latter is what I’m mainly nervous about – learning and singing music is entirely within my comfort zone, but I presume that in the opera production even the choir work will involve some acting, and that’s a new thing for me.

Another interesting new development is that I’m now a student at the university! Okay, that’s not exactly new as such, but it’s been a good while since I last was one officially, with a student number and everything. I’m not going for a whole new degree, but I’m continuing my university pedagogy studies from the previous academic year in a programme consisting of three courses for a total of 25 ECTS credits. It’s apparently a lot of work, but during the first year I get to skip some of the course meetings and assignments since I’ve done the introductory course. I intend to continue developing the AI ethics course, for which it looks like I’ll be assuming more responsibility in the future, and I also want to do more research on AI ethics education; hopefully the pedagogy studies will help in both these pursuits.

Talking the talk

August is done and the autumn term is now well underway. I received my second vaccine jab about a month ago, and the nationwide figures are also starting to look fairly encouraging, so maybe, just maybe, we won’t still be working remotely when the term ends? So far, though, it’s business as usual at the home office, although last week I met up with a few colleagues for an actual face-to-face lunch, and I’ve also made a couple of visits to the campus recently.

The reason why I’ve been going to the campus is not entirely usual, though: I’ve been shooting new lecture videos for our Towards Data Mining course. All of the lectures are going to be presented by me, even though I’m in charge of only one of them; for the rest, I get a script from the person responsible and read it on camera in my best David Attenborough English. There’s a studio on the campus with a pretty professional set-up – green screen, teleprompter, the works – so it’s kind of like having my first ever acting job!

Apart from the videos, I’m already done with my lecturing for 2021, which is a pleasant feeling. Towards Data Mining is ongoing, but my lecture is the second one and I’ve already given it. There’s still a bunch of videos left to record, including two sections of my own lecture that I haven’t written yet, and there will also be quite a few exam answers to evaluate before the year is over. I’m going to do some studying of my own, too: I figured I’d probably benefit from some training as a teacher, so I applied for, and was accepted to, the course Introduction to University Pedagogy, which kicks off next week (and incidentally involves making a video as a preliminary assignment).

Meanwhile, the two conferences I’m attending this autumn are approaching fast: they’re almost back-to-back in late October, the first one (Tethics 2021) starting already on the 20th. This is the one I’m particularly excited about, since I’ve registered myself as an in-person participant! It’s all still very COVID-conscious – there won’t be a formal conference dinner, and it’s entirely possible that it will be just a bunch of us Finland residents showing up in Turku and the rest of the world joining in online – but from my point of view it’s definitely a step up from fully online conferences, as convenient as they are.

In any event, I’ll soon need to start working on my presentations for those conferences. My work sure seems to involve an awful lot of talking this year! I’m more used to writing being the thing that keeps me busy in September, but this time I decided to skip the usual (and, a more cynical person might add, ultimately pointless) hassle of pestering the Academy of Finland for money. Technically, the deadline hasn’t passed yet, but it’s less one and a half hours away as I’m posting this, so I’d have to be really determined to get everything done on time, even if I just wanted to resubmit last year’s application without any changes whatsoever.

Outside work, my life will soon involve quite a bit of singing: I’ve joined the Cassiopeia Choir! When I came back from Ireland, I was thinking it would be nice to find a choir in Oulu because I’d enjoyed my time with the DCU Campus Choir so much, but then of course COVID happened and I filed the plan under “things to do when it’s okay to be in a room with dozens of people again”. A while ago it came to my knowledge that the choir had auditions coming up, so I signed up, did the thing and got picked. Based on my audition, the choirmaster decided I should be a tenor, which is an interesting twist, but I was never the deepest of basses anyway, so I guess I’ll be fine. First rehearsal tonight!

Getting engaged

Besides research, one of the things I’m supposed to be doing as a Marie Curie research fellow is learning new things. Of course, that’s a good thing to be doing regardless of what other things you do, but in the case of the fellowship, it’s expected of me by the funder that I spend my time in Dublin doing things that will help me develop myself and my career prospects. I’ve already learned quite a few useful new things through my research work here, but I’ve also attended a number of training courses and workshops on various topics, and last week I had the opportunity to go to a particularly interesting one dealing with engaged research.

I learned about the workshop from the education and public engagement manager of the Insight Centre, who sent me an email about it and recommended that I sign up. I wasn’t previously familiar with the concept of engaged research, but as I was reading the description of the workshop, it soon became clear that it applies to quite a few, perhaps most, of the research projects I’ve been involved in over the course of my career so far. The gist of how this concept is defined is that it describes research where the individuals or organisations for whom the research is relevant are engaged to be involved in it, not merely as recipients of the eventual results but as co-creators of them. In my case the engaged partners have mostly come from industry, but they could also represent the public sector, civil society or the general public.

The workshop was facilitated by people from Campus Engage, a network that aims to “promote civic and community engagement as a core function of Higher Education on the island or Ireland”. Since Finnish universities have had social influence as their so-called third mission (research and education being the first two) for quite a years now, this statement also rings very familiar. A few days before the workshop, we were requested to fill out a survey with questions about our background and what sort of lessons we were particularly hoping to take home, which the facilitators then used to tailor the content to the interests of those attending the training.

A whole day of training can get very boring if it’s not well planned and executed, but there was no such problem here, as the presentations given by the facilitators were interspersed with discussions of our own questions and experiences, as well as small group activities. The latter involved, for example, studying an extract from a research project proposal and coming up with ways to improve it in terms of stakeholder engagement. One of the things I was hoping the training would give me was information and ideas on how to develop the engagement aspect of my own proposals, and this certainly qualified, although strictly speaking it was perhaps more of a cautionary example of how it’s not meant to be done. We did get more constructive planning tools as well, such as the logic model, a way of planning for long-term impact by laying out the path there as a series of if-then relationships starting with an analysis of the current situation.

Another thing about the workshop that I enjoyed was that we discussed some actual real-world cases of community engagement in action. A particularly interesting one was Access Earth, a mobile app that can be used by people with accessibility needs to find and rate hotels and restaurants by criteria such as accessible parking and wide doors. Clearly the key to successful implementation and deployment of such an application is engaging the people who are going to use it, both to get the design right and to collect the data on the accessibility of various places around the world, and one of the facilitators of the workshop has been working on the project as a community engagement advisor. The app is available worldwide, so the potential impact on the lives of people with disabilities is big – an inspiring example of what engagement is in practice and what it can accomplish.