STI Tampere Network

About me

I am a Senior Research Fellow at the Research Centre for Knowledge, Science, Technology and Innovation Studies (TaSTI) at the Faculty of Social Sciences, and an Adjunct Professor of social pscychology at Tampere University. I teach in the field of science and technology studies.

Research topics

Academic identities and careers, disciplinary cultures, temporal acceleration, women and science

Research unit

TaSTI

Research fields

Science studies, higher education studies, time studies, social psychology

About me

Professor in Human-Centered Design (of ICT), specializing in:

Social Technology — Sustainable Design of ICT — Digital Ethics

How to design Information and Communication Technology (ICT) services with a critical voice, mindful of digital ethics, social sustainability, and environmental footprint? I've worked on ICT applications for collaboration, technology-mediated interaction on social media services, new types of "social technologies" that aim to support or enhance social interaction, as well as sociotechnical solutions for supporting cultural integration and community building. I want to contribute to building a future where ICT services are imagined, built, and used with consideration of diverse values, cultures, and user groups. I'm a user-centered interaction designer and a computer scientist by training and a great enthusiast of behavioral and social sciences. 

Please find a short introduction video here (from 2022; presented in Finnish, with subtitles in English).

I have the great privilege of leading the Technology x Social Interaction Research group at Tampere University. Please check the page for further info on collaboration opportunities, available thesis topics, etc.

For up-to-date publications, please see my Google Scholar profile.

Responsibilities

Research: 

I'm leading the "Technology x Social Interaction" research group at Tampere University, working with inspirational scholars across the fields of design, computer science, and behavioral & social sciences. 

I'm the academic director of the Digital and Sustainability Transitions in Society research platform at TAU, aiming to steer digitalisation work towards a more environmentally and socially sustainable future. 

Recently, I've been a: 

• Principal investigator in AIdience – How might AI applications for the audience influence journalism and its futures?
• co-PI in a Strategic Research Council project Trust-M: Creating trustworthy and accessible digital public services for migrants
• Principal Investigator in Business Finland project Big Match
• co-PI in the Academy of Finland project Emotions in Digital Media (EmoDiM)
• a work package leader in ERDF project on Human-Centered AI (KITE)
• the PI of an internally funded Fairness in Social Matching Systems project
• and involved in a number of other externally funded projects, such as Future of Remote/Hybrid Work. 

Teaching: 

I'm heading the new international Master's Degree Program in Computing Sciences and Electrical Engineering (CSEE) at the ITC faculty, the parent program of more than 12 study tracks and home of more than 200 students. 

I'm the responsible professor coordinating the Human-Technology Interaction studies (under CSEE). 

I'm also actively involved in offering and developing the Sustainable Digital Life Master's program.

I serve as a supervisor and a planning group member in the Doctoral Programme of Humans and Technologies. 

I am or have been the responsible teacher for the following courses:

• SDL.530 Sustainable Design
• SDL.600 Technologies for Enhancing Social Interactions
• HTI.311 User Research Methods
• TAYJ12 Ethics of Technology 

In addition, I'm participating in the Introduction to Sustainable Digital Life MOOC and a Finnish basic course on information sciences (Johdatus tietojenkäsittelytieteisiin).

Thesis supervision: I'm gladly supervising master's and doctoral theses in relation to my research interests. Please see this page for further info and preliminary topic ideas.

Affiliations and memberships:

I'm affiliated with the Computing Sciences unit, where I'm also serving as a member of the steering group, in the faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences.

I have been developing my professorial expertise in the nurturing atmosphere of the New Social Research programme at Tampere University. From 2017 to 2021, NSR was a bold endeavour to create interdisciplinary social scientific competence relevant for 21st-century academia. 

I'm actively involved in Rajapinta, a scientific community focused on digital social sciences and interdisciplinary Internet research.

Field of expertise

The overarching goals of my research are (1) to understand how Information and Communication Technologies shape and condition social behavior and collaboration; (2) to envision and design novel ICT prototypes that could sustainably enhance various forms of human sociality. I'm a user interface designer and a (very soft) computer scientist by training and a great enthusiast of the social sciences. The fields I mainly publish in are Human-Computer Interaction and Computer-Supported Collaborative Work. I've published over 140 scientific papers in international journals and conferences, including ACM CHI, ACM CSCW, and Communications of the ACM. I regularly serve as an Associate Chair in ACM SIGCHI flagship conferences CHI and CSCW, and I actively serve as a reviewer in journals, such as Human-Computer Interaction, Interacting with Computers, and Human-Computer Studies.

Research areas and topics (as keywords): social technologies, computer-supported cooperative work, socio-technical systems design, sustainable HCI, ICT for sustainability, computer-mediated communication, cultural integration of migrant people, professional social matching, enhancing collocated social interaction, people-nearby applications.

(Topics I've studied in the past: mobile augmented reality, collective use of user-generated content, early online communities, haptic human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, proactive and context-aware systems, playful applications of ICT).

Technology: I'm interested in various emerging technologies, particularly People Recommender Systems, new Digital Media services, Recruitment & HR technology, and Artificial Intelligence. Rather than developing such technology, I focus on the user-centric, cultural, and societal requirements as well as designing service concepts and user interfaces.

Methodology: my research is mainly qualitative by nature, aiming to make sense of and conceptualize unexplored phenomena and gain user-centric insight into the behavioral and social effects of new ICTs. We often follow the research through design approach, critically investigating existing design conventions in an attempt to design new, more sustainable social user experiences and to encourage ethical and socially sustainable design of technological services. I've also utilized computational social science approaches like network analysis and computational analytics methods based on machine learning. 

I'm well familiar with both the Centrum and Hervanta campuses of Tampere University. Before the merger of the local universities in 2019, I was an Associate Professor at University of Tampere (centrum campus) and before that an Adjunct Professor and Post-doctoral Researcher at Tampere University of Technology (Hervanta campus). 

About me

I am a Professor of Science, Technology, and Organization. I study institutions, knowledge production, work, and careers especially in academia. My research agenda delves into the organization and management of interdisciplinary research, collaboration at disciplinary and professional boundaries, academic entrepreneurship, and, most recently, ethical regulation in science.

I am the principal investigator of The Emergence of Health and Life Science Innovations (HeLSI) project and Competing Imaginaries of Ethical Science (IMAGES) project. I have a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in sociology from the University of Helsinki and a Ph.D. in organization studies from Stanford University.

I am a docent at the Faculty of Social Sciences at University of Helsinki.

Research topics

Interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and translational science; Team science; Academic careers; Knowledge making practices; Academic entrepreneurship; Commercialization of scientific findings; Research ethics and ethical regulation

Research unit

Management and Organization

Research career

2023–ongoing: Professor (Science, Technology, and Organization), Tampere University, Faculty of Management.

2018–2023: Associate Professor (tenure track), Tampere University, Faculty of Management and Business and New Social Research.

2017–2018: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Tampere, Institute for Advanced Social Research.

2015–2017: Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Tampere, Faculty of Management.

2010–2015: PhD Student Researcher, Stanford University, Graduate School of Education, Stanford, CA.

Responsibilities

I work as a Academy Research Fellow at the Tampere University Research Center for Knowledge, Science, Technology and Innovation Studies. My Academy of Finland fellowship project explores the development of complementary and alternative medicine as a research field. I am Project Coordinator in the EU-funded research project VAX-TRUST, which focuses on vaccine hesitancy. I co-lead a research project on criticism of medicine, Health, Knowledge and Expertise with Dr Johanna Nurmi. I am an active member of STI Tampere Network, which gathers Tampere University people interested in science and technology studies and innovation studies.

Field of expertise

My research concerns scientific controversies, criticism of science and the societal status of science. In particular, I study controversies related to health, criticism of medicine and knowledge production in different alternative health practices. I am interested in the boundaries of science and the status of experts and expertise in contemporary societies. In my research, I combine sociology and philosophy of science, science and technology studies and higher education studies. I also focus on sociology of health, especially the use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in Finland and Europe and health care professionals' perceptions on CAM. I am conducting research on vaccine hesitancy among the general public and health care professionals.

One of my research projects deals with knowledge production in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). I analyze the transformation of the research system and how CAM is challenging and questioning the field of conventional medicine. I have edited the volume Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Knowledge Production and Social Transformation with Jenny-Ann Brodin Danell from Umeå University and Caragh Brosnan from Newcastle University, Australia (2018).

Research unit

Tampere University Research Centre for Knowledge, Science, Technology and Innovation Studies (TaSTI)

Research fields

science and technology studies, sociology, medical sociology, higher education studies

About me

I hold a PhD in philosophy (1998) from University of Tampere and received the title of docent in philosophy in 2002. My current research interests include ignorance studies and social epistemology relating to expertise and the politics of digitalisation in the post-capitalist society. My philosophical expertise covers social epistemology, the philosophy of technology and the phenomenology of embodiment.  

Responsibilities

 Research and leadership in research  

Field of expertise

The Philosophy of Technology, Social Epistemology, Phenomenology, Ignorance Studies, Body Studies  

Research topics

The Philosophy of Technology, Social Epistemology, Phenomenology, Ignorance Studies, Body Studies  

Research unit

TaSTI: Research Centre for Knowledge, Science, Technology and Innovation Studies Tieteenalat

Research career

My dissertation in philosophy (Bodies Moving and Moved, 1998) was a pioneering research focusing on contemporary dance within the context of the philosophy of the body. In my postdoctoral research, I have evolved a phenomenological approach to the technology of philosophy, published in several articles and as the monograph, Meduusan liike (2006). My aim has been to rethink the theoretical foundations of human-technology interaction from a phenomenological perspective and body studies. Drawing on the philosophy of technology, critical theory and phenomenology, my recent research on the philosophy of technology has focused on virtual environments, wearable technologies, big data, the digitalisation process of schools, smart cities, artificial intelligence and care robotics. 

Since 2008, I have led five research projects to develop theoretically and epistemologically relevant conceptualization and approaches to understanding embodied capabilities and competences required of professionals in post-capitalist economies. In the research project ‘The Working Body in the Post-industrial Economy’ (WORKBOD, 2011-2014), funded by Academy, in collaboration with co-researchers we used various case studies and theoretical frameworks to outline a detailed and more general view of how digitalized work cultures modify the conditions for working bodies in the 2010s. 

Throughout my research career, I have focused special attention on how researchers in empirical sciences and philosophy can cooperate in studies to develop research questions, frameworks and outcomes that are practically, empirically, theoretically and/or methodologically ambitious. Approximately half of my published books, papers and scientific articles are collaborative efforts. I have co-written research papers and articles with about 40 researchers in various disciplines, including management studies, education, sociology, information sciences, engineering, media studies, social policy, cultural anthropology and political sciences. 

Responsibilities

I am currently teaching philosophy of science and causal inference methods in the social sciences.

Field of expertise

The majority of my research has followed three main lines of inquiry: 1) Methodological issues in the use of models and simulations in the social sciences, 2) Theory of explanation, and 3) Mechanism-based heuristics and interdisciplinary relations. I am currently working on new ways of combinig different kinds of evidence in the social sciences (especially the use of research synthesis methods), based on the methodological precepts of analytical sociology, models of cognitive diversity and collaborative problem solving, and methodological issues in macroeconomic modeling - among other things.

Research unit

New Social Research