You can always change this.

During today’s interview with Henrik Hansson, I produced few bright ideas for which you can quote me (paraphrased, the original will be soon online, hope not):

R: “You go twenty kilometers away from Joensuu and there is nothing.” – when comparing North-Carelia with Africa.

H: “Is there any special characteristics a phd student must have?” R: “Let me think for a while…hm, no.”

R: “If I don’t hear anything from a student in one week, I start to be afraid he might be sick!”

H: “How did you select the topic of your thesis?” R: “Well, we were building a usability lab, that’s how it happened.”

It seems that joint attention has been well studied in several interesting domains. For example, development and evolutionary studies (do not mix with international development) have confirmed that our elaboration of the skills related to joint attention are our main advantage against other species. Other major contributions are then from monkey research. Somebody even studied dolphins. The latest attempts focus on implementing architectures that imitate the shared visual attention mechanisms! So we have robots, to top the bunch.

Now, we will be researching programmers’ shared (visual) attention. Imagine that extreme title of this post as an upcoming paper title!

I had an opportunity to collaborate on a paper with Marcus. His project, briefly, is about assisting a change in behavioral patterns of youth in Africa. By the means of application development, participatory design, and incremental implementation-evaluation cycles, he aims to affect the ways people talk (or do not talk, currently) about HIV.
Read more »

For the opponent and for the wholeness of the defense, it is important to show that the opponent read the whole thesis carefully. It is then a good idea that the candidate leaves at least one obvious typo in the manuscript.