Research collaboration with Stockholm University in the field of Human-Computer Interaction

With the aid of HIIT Community Support, Jesse Haapoja, who is part of the Digital Content Communities (DCC) group at Aalto University’s Department of Computer Science, visited the Post-Interaction Computing group (PIC) at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University, Sweden. The visit lasted for three months during the spring of 2019. PIC is a multidisciplinary research group that focuses on Human-Computer Interaction. It is led by Professor Barry Brown. The group’s recent research has focused on mobility and mobile technologies, interpersonal and economic encounters, and using speech and gaze as design materials for human-computer interaction.

During his stay, Haapoja worked with HIIT-alumni Dr. Airi Lampinen, who is an Associate Senior Lecturer at the Department and one of the three faculty members in the PIC group. The visit was a part of Haapoja’s doctoral studies and related to the Kone Foundation funded project Algorithmic systems, Power and Interaction for which Lampinen acts as the principal investigator. The project studies how people interact with and resist algorithmic systems and what kind of power these systems have in the society, and how this power should be conceptualized and studied.

In addition to familiarizing himself more with the type of HCI research and methodologies that the PIC group specializes in, Haapoja worked on two specific projects during his stay. First, related to the Algorithmic systems project, Haapoja finalized and submitted to peer-review a manuscript co-authored by Lampinen and Dr. Salla-Maaria Laaksonen from the Centre for Consumer Society Research on gaming automated hate-speech detection. The article studied a project where municipal election candidates’ social media messages were automatically monitored for hate-speech and negative reactions that the project incited. Second, together with Associate Professor Rob Comber from the Royal Institute of Technology KTH and Lampinen, Haapoja worked on a project to envision what human-computer interaction could be beyond the interaction, that is, what might be left unnoticed if research only focuses on those aspects of interaction that are intentional from the user’s or designer’s perspective and how HCI might better account for such issues in both empirical studies and design. This collaboration has also led to an article submitted to peer-review.

Finally, during the visit, Haapoja co-organized the first workshop of the NOS-HS funded series of meetings on Nordic perspectives on Algorithmic systems. This multidisciplinary workshop series brings together researchers from Finland, Sweden, and Denmark to discuss what could be a Nordic way of approaching different kinds of algorithmic systems as they gain constantly more importance in our daily lives.

Collaboration with Stockholm University continues with the still ongoing Algorithmic systems project and the workshop series.