0000000000513263
AUTHOR
Joni Kultanen
How to Write Ethical User Stories? : Impacts of the ECCOLA Method
AbstractArtificial Intelligence (AI) systems are increasing in significance within software services. Unfortunately, these systems are not flawless. Their faults, failures and other systemic issues have emphasized the urgency for consideration of ethical standards and practices in AI engineering. Despite the growing number of studies in AI ethics, comparatively little attention has been placed on how ethical issues can be mitigated in software engineering (SE) practice. Currently understanding is lacking regarding the provision of useful tools that can help companies transform high-level ethical guidelines for AI ethics into the actual workflow of developers. In this paper, we explore the i…
Using Blockchain in Digitalizing Enterprise Legacy Systems: An Experience Report
Blockchain technology and distributed ledger technology (DLT) offer a secure, distributed, and tamper-proof way to store and exchange information. However, apart from standard cryptocurrency-based networks, innovations and process improvements based on the blockchain technology have mostly remained on the conceptualizing stage and have not yet reached mass adoption. There is a high demand for practical experiences from developing blockchain and DLT based systems in various domains outside FinTech. This work seeks to contribute to this gap by presenting real-world experiences from developing a proof of concept for automatizing conditional payments in social benefits and healthcare domains. W…
Ethically Aligned Design of Autonomous Systems : Industry Viewpoint and an Empirical Study
Progress in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been accelerating rapidly in the past two decades. Various autonomous systems from purely digital ones to autonomous vehicles are being developed and deployed out on the field. As these systems exert a growing impact on society, ethics in relation to artificial intelligence and autonomous systems have recently seen growing attention among academia. However, the current literature on the topic has focused largely on theoretical contributions, and there is a gap between research and practice in the area. Though this gap has been acknowledged in existing studies, the exact issues resulting in this gap remain blurred. In order to better …
COVID-19 Remote Work : Body Stress, Self-Efficacy, Teamwork, and Perceived Productivity of Knowledge Workers
Due to COVID-19, companies were forced to adopt new work processes, and reduce modern work environments such as collaboration spaces. Professionals from many fields were forced to work remotely, almost overnight. Little is known about the impact of such non-volunteer remote work on productivity, stress, and other key aspects of work performance. To further our understanding of the impacts of this situation and remote work in general, we conducted an exploratory study by studying 28 knowledge work professionals (researchers, software developers, interior designers, service designers, and development consultants) from the viewpoint of perceived productivity and aspects affecting it in this un…
The Current State of Industrial Practice in Artificial Intelligence Ethics
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems become increasingly widespread, we have begun to witness various failures highlighting issues in these systems. These incidents have sparked public discussion related to AI ethics and further accelerated the on-going academic discussion in the area. High-level guidelines and tools for managing AI ethics have been introduced to help industry organizations make more ethical AI systems, but we currently know little about the state of industrial practice. Have these guidelines been adopted by the software industry for developing AI solutions? Are these failures that make the news just the tip of the iceberg? We provide insights into the current state of p…
Software startup education: gamifying growth hacking
Startups seek to create highly scalable business models. For startups, growth is thus vital. Growth hacking is a marketing strategy advocated by various startup practitioner experts. It focuses on using low cost practices while utilizing existing platforms in creative ways to gain more users for the service. Though topics related to growth hacking such as marketing on a general level have been extensively studied in the past, growth hacking as a practitioner-born topic has not seen much interest among the academia. To both spark interest in growth hacking, and to facilitate teaching growth hacking in the academia, we present two board games intended to serve as an engaging introduction to g…
Does Self-efficacy Matter? On the Correlation of Self-efficacy and Creativity in IT Education
Self-efficacy belief affects humans in life, action and work. Higher self-efficacy enables stronger contribution in fulfilling tasks, helping others in a team, and survive when facing obstacles and failures. Also creativity correlates to higher self-efficacy. At the same time, design is a powerful skill in note-making, improving the student’s understanding of the undergoing topic in a class. Note-making, when consisting of recorded writings, self-drawn images and other supportive subjects like structural analyses, charts, ad-hoc notes, detailed features and verbal links to related themes, forms a fundamental skill and ability in learning and applying new motifs and patterns. We executed dur…