Velkommen til Lørn.Tech - en læringsdugnad om teknologi og samfunn, med Silvija Seres og venner.

Silvija Seres: Hello, and welcome to Lørn, my name is Silvija Seres. Our topic today is Tech for good, and my guest is Letizia Jaccheri. A professor from NTNU, welcome. 

Letizia Jaccheri: Thank you Silvija for inviting me.

Silvija: It's lovely having you here. We were discussing for a moment whether we should speak Norwegian with our similar accents, but decided to make it an international podcast.

Letizia: Yes, we will show the accent later, maybe.

Silvija: Yes, we can make a little duo at the end. Letizia, you are a professor of software engineering, and yet you propose that we sort your topic under tech for good, sustainable software engineering processes. This is a mouthful, a mindful as well. So, help us explain the social side of software engineering processes, I guess, and before we go there, I would like to hear a little bit about you; who you are and why you think this is important.

Letizia: Okay. I start from who I am. I came to Norway first time in 1989 as an exchange student. I joined a software engineering group as a guest researcher, so I have been doing software engineering for 30 years. The software engineering field has lasted for 50 years, but at least in the 30 years I have been in the field, we have been obsessed by three things; that software should be faster, that software should bring more profit to the organization that is producing software, and that software should have better quality for the users. But we have not been thinking so much about that software can also have negative impacts on the society, for example of AirBnB. When it came, it made a lot of changes to the society, and some cities, let's take Venice, they have many challenges that come from the piece of software AirBnB.

Silvija: Too many tourists, and too little space for locals?

Letizia: Yes, and the local hotels are not making revenues anymore, and people are working for AirBnB without insurance and proper contracts and so on. And I could give you many more examples, and yes... I want to give you an example from my own research, from my own lab. We are producing together with university of Tromsø Apps for adolescence who should exercise more. So, kind of games for adolescence with intellectual disabilities. And when you produce such software, you cannot use the same processes that we have been using, like Agile Development or Extreme Programming. Those processes don't work anymore.

Silvija: Because you're producing such a specific thing? Such a culturally sensitive thing, or?

Letizia: Yes, a social sensitive thing. And then we have.., and I don't have an answer because this is something that we have recently started to do, and it is not something that I have started to do alone. The international conference of software engineering, for the first time in 2015, started with this society track, exactly to try to address these issues; how can we produce software that will not harm, and that will have social benefits for the society. And, yeah, I think this is very interesting, and it gave me a good kick to do research and to invest even more time in research. 

Silvija: So basically, we are moving from a time when we were focusing, as you said, a time where we were focusing more on fast, profitable and user-friendly front-end considerations on software, to the... or, we are adding, at least, a fourth dimension that has to do with social effects of computing. It is really interesting; I'm just reading a book called "What algorithms want" and he's talking about algorithms as cultural engines. Basically, using Uber and AirBnB and Google and so on as examples of things that on one hand provide us, as consumers, with more comfortable and attractive services, but they up hand the other side of delivery through changes in workplace and work politics and maybe globalization. But it's really difficult, Letizia, because... You know, I'm a software engineer by trade, ages ago. but I was trained to think about producing efficient software, and somebody else was going to worry about the commercial side of it and the social side of it. Are you saying that now we need to work more closely in these functional teams, or that every person in the team has to have at least a triple perspective?

Letizia: I think... What I know very well, about the students, is that we should give to each student an ethical package, or a sustainability package, when they go out from the university. I don't know what the world will be like in 5 years, if I knew I would have done something else, haha. But I imagine that we need to give to each engineer who comes out of our computer science department, and we have 3.000 students only at our department, that they need to know something about these issues, they must have some baggage with some ethical, more ethical knowledge, tools, about sustainability, so that when they come out, they will not do wrong choices. Because sometimes I'm worried that, with risk of going against my own profession, sometimes I think "okay, will software become the new plastic? If we don't think enough now, if we don't instruct the student that they should not do more apps and more software. It's not enough, they should do the right software, the good software.

Silvija: I think this is a really interesting metaphor as well. I was sitting yesterday and thinking about plastic, and throwing away some plastic for reuse. And I was thinking that it's very strange how we have created this incredibly good and useful material, it is a super incredible and useful material. Think of a world where we didn't have plastic and we had to deal with containers made out of wood, or... But it's the longevity and its overabundance that has made it such a pest, right. And it is what you said, there is so much software that might be doing a little too much, that might make it a pest. Unless we think about the sustainability of it, as you say.

Letizia: I like to think about... I worked in a European project that it was the first time I thought seriously about these sustainable development goals, the 17 goals. And if we want to touch the gender dimension, because goal 5 about gender equality, is very much related to software as well. And now we go into a difficult theme, but think about who is making software for whom. So, this gender dimension, it's not only that I want to have more girls at the computer science departments because I think it's nicer to have more girls... I would like to have more women in the software process because then... My assumptions are that these women will make software that is not only for men, but also for women. And this is just an example of one of these sustainable goals, and for health is the same, for energy... So, I don't know, this is a problem that we have started to work on recently, but if you tell me what the two ingredients you want to put in the sustainable engineering processes are, I say 1. is ethics at all levels, and 2. is involvement of the stakeholder at all levels. Because if you have to make apps for children with intellectual disabilities.., if you don't include the parents of the children with intellectual disabilities, you and I can sit here until midnight, but we don't know what to put in these apps.

Silvija: Very interesting. I have to ask, Letizia, just before we drop Letizia as a topic. You are originally from Italy. What's the best thing about coming from Italy, and what is the best thing about now being in Norway, and where are you from in Italy?

Letizia: I am from Pisa, and the best is that I experience Italy in the 80's, and it was very great to be in Italy in the 80's. Italy was one of the five economic powers, we had Nobel prize in medicine by an Italian woman, we had Rubbia who was leading CERN, we were very strong. And then I came here, to what at the time was called NTH, and yeah. It was like I was bringing some knowledge, even if I was a young girl, I think my colleagues still acknowledge that in the group, the first journal and high quality paper was written by the professor and me, because I was coming from this strong environment in Pisa. But then, unfortunately, things did not go so well for Italy in the last 30 years. Then when I go back to Italy now, I feel like it is not the same big country and big culture and big in the same way we were 30 years ago.

Silvija: It's strange how quickly those things can change. I come from Yugoslavia. I keep still saying Yugoslavia rather than Serbia. I'm Hungarian minority, but for me, it was actually quite personal shock that I never really got over, how quickly you can destroy a country if you have a demagogue at the top, who is playing for political points rather than for future growth. And I think we both ended up in Norway, which has this democracy and respect between the parties, and you know. I still to this day think the weather is terrible, but I love the democracy and the country. And I like the fact that you can have work-life-balance.

Letizia: Yes. And this gender equality is something that I think I always had inside me, and when I think of why I chose computer science, I think... It's difficult to reconstruct our own choices, because we have also told different stories, but I think, for me, it was like a feminist choice. I thought that if I choose computer science, I will be able to travel the world, I will be able to do what I want. But I realized I was a feminist many years ago, here in Norway, because here it is positive to be a feminist. In Italy, to pronounce the word feminist, it is a negative word.

Silvija: I had a different... When I was in the computer science laboratory in Oslo, I think it was my first year in Norway, and 8th of March, I congratulated 8th of March to a female friend, very big smile and happy, and she was taken back and didn't believe in that red stocking stuff. And to me, 8th or March in Yugoslavia, was a day where you went and bought carnations for your mother, and you sang some songs in school for all the mothers, and it was just a positive thing. But then I guess the communist culture of Yugoslavia was very into celebrating women as a workforce, haha.

Letizia: When did you come to Norway?

Silvija: Same year as you.

Letizia: Amazing.

Silvija: Yes. 88-89. So, from Pisa to Trondheim, and then 30 years in Trondheim.

Letizia: Not exactly, because after that, I went back to Italy and had my PhD in Torino. And after Torino, I came back here, because I had a Norwegian boyfriend, and we decided to spend a couple of years in Norway, but then it became many years.

Silvija: You grow roots at that age.

Letizia: Yes, yes.

Silvija: And you are a professor now at NTNU, and I think you have been an important part of this growth of women in computer science here.

Letizia: I hope so.

Silvija: How did that happen? Because, actually, NTNU has a reasonable percentage of women.

Letizia: Now, at my department, we have a number that is amazing. We have 50 percent female PhD students. And when I came in 89, I think there was one female PhD student, and if you ask some people, they say that "yeah, it is Letizia's merit, that when she was department head, we increased so much the number of PhD". And this we will never know, because this was not an experiment, if it is my merit or the merit of the professor Reidar Conradi who was my own supervisor, who was the first one who started to talk about women and computer. But we can be happy that we have these numbers now, and now we have to work to get these women up in the pipeline. Because it is not enough to have them as PhD. Now we have a project, this Idun project that I lead.

Silvija: You have a pin, thank Idun.

Letizia: Yes, I have a pin. And when I talk to the department head and say "okay, we want this pitch, these students, to write applications so that they will know how to make applications, how to make their own projects" and somebody said that the students should not write applications. Okay, what should they do? Should they just produce a book and go back to their countries? If we want to keep them in the pipeline, we have to make them think one, or even two or three steps ahead-

Silvija: Create their future here.

Letizia: Yes, yes.

Silvija: I completely agree. And you have to train them on how to do that. Writing applications for grants is a completely overwhelming thing the first three times you do it, right. So you're also really good at communicating your personal story, kind of interwoven with your professional story. You have a blog, you have this communication around Idun, you have written a book called Love and Computers.

Letizia: Yes.

Silvija: And you told me before we started the podcast, that sometimes people challenge you, that you are being almost too open, too transparent, but I am pretty sure, Letizia, that exactly that transparency and openness was the attraction factor for other women who welt that, you know, I can recognize that, I want to be like that. 

Letizia: Thank you very much, Silvija, I feel like after going to the psychologist now, it was very therapeutic to talk to you. Because sometimes, it is not that others people criticize me, it is that I criticize myself and say now I have been too generous or naive, and if I have to share something about me, I think I have a reasonable IQ, I have managed to get a master and PhD in computer science, blah blah blah, but if I play chess, I will lose against everybody. My son, 8 years old, was winning against me at chess. And sometimes I have this feeling in life, that when I lose at chess, that now I'm really under... Yeah. I think I have to play something else than chess.

Silvija: By the way, my favorite computer scientist in the world, if I am to go by dead people, is John von Neumann, and he has this wonderful quote that I keep going back to, and he says "people think that life is like a game of chess, but life is like a game of poker." Because it is too complex, it is not a system you can model and think about all positive outcomes. You know, you get a random set of cards, and you get a new shuffle of hands every now and then. And then you need to figure out how to play these cards in a way that makes sense to you. You need to do a little bit of game theory thing, where you guess what the others are doing. And I think that is really important, because you have to appreciate the randomness in your life, and I think both you and I have had so much randomness in our lives that you have to learn to love it, and you have to learn to kind of be very open about the good and the bad, and your values, because... I hear too many people who are successful talk about their journey, and they always talk about it as if they knew exactly where they were going to go, and they stumbled a little, but they got there, and there were profits all along. And to be honest, I think it's terrifying young people. You know, who can be Elon Musk if Elon Musk never did anything wrong? If you say it honestly, that you made some mistakes and you learned from them, and you did it better next time, I think it is much easier for young people to want to do the same. No?

Letizia: I hope so, and a comment, maybe, about these cards you get. One, I have two main projects now that I really like and work for. One is the Idun, and the other one is the IPIT that is a cooperation with China and USA about software engineering. And that project is very interesting, first of all, because we learn about China. And second now, because we have this coronavirus that is reshuffling all of our plans. I have plans and meetings in China in June, and now I cannot go around at NTNU, because everyone asks me "will the meeting be on the first of June?" I mean... We'll see. So, this is the coronavirus. And about the science, I think that I get this inspiration to go back to the start, working with sustainability and with ethics. Also because of this project, because I see that if I have too, I want to cooperate with China, because they are amazing, because they are working very fast and are doing amazing things, but then we must really be aware of the ethics, of what our boundaries are, about what we want to do, what we want to teach to our students, because otherwise... Yeah...

Silvija: We have a very different underlying, and it is going to be mirrored in the software we produce. But you have a lecture on ACM, as one of the distinguished speakers? What is the lecture about?

Letizia: Yes. Lecture is called "From software, through art to social entrepreneurship". And somehow it is also a summary of what I have been doing in my working life, so working with software engineering. Then I had some years I was working a lot at the intersection between software and art, and then we started with this social innovation, social entrepreneurship project, that in fact started because one researcher here at SINTEF, Jaqueline Floch, who is also a friend of mine, had seen something we had done with art and technology, and told me that this is social innovation, and that we should join this project about social innovation. And then; from software, through art, to social innovation. And now, I would very much like to go back to software. Back home, and bring this journey back.

Silvija: Bring the social innovation back into the next generation of software. Very interesting. There is a lot of both, what should I say, cultural diversity and subject metafield diversity. You talk about art, you talk about engineering, you talk about societies. How do you learn to connect? How did you go from software to art?

Letizia: I think I use very much myself. Because before I started computer science, I was educated in these classic, in Den Norske Skole, like latin, greek, history of art... So, I knew these things from before I started computer science, and then, at NTNU, we have a course that in my opinion is amazing, that is called Experts in team, that all the students have to take in their fourth class, and each professor who wants to join. It is not very prestigious, those who wants to join, can join. And at the beginning, when I joined, I said "okay, I will propose a multidisciplinary theme; software and art." 20 years ago. Then you go there, and you invite students from the world university. And then, from this, by working with these students, I learned how to work in the intersection of software and art.

Silvija: Very cool. And the focus is then to produce tools for art, or to use art as an interpretation, or what are the perspectives?

Letizia: Now, the last years, I have not been teaching that course, because of too many projects and other things, but when I was teaching, and when I will teach again, the idea in Experts in Teams is to let the groups define their own problems. I will give you the best example, it was when we had Liv Arnesen, the Norwegian explorer who went to the South Pole, I met her here, and she asked me if my students could help her in this art and technology. So, one group decided to make a bike, that was a secondhand bike, that was connected to a computer came, and you bike on this ergometric bike, and depending on which country you are, you should do more effort to produce water on the screen. So, this is an example of artistic exhibition that we have been doing in that course. But I had that course for maybe 12-15 times, and each group produced either a tool or an art installation, or something.

Silvija: Very cool. Is there an exhibition? Is there somewhere we can see the results?

Letizia: Now, only on the web. I have some pictures, still.

Silvija: I'll look them up. So, now sustainability comes into this, and technology is a solution to many of these things, and technology is a cause for many new things. How do you think about working with sustainability and tech for good, from a software perspective?

Letizia: I think that we have to start as you start, we cannot, for example, in China, they invest millions of dollars in green technology, and this is very good. But how can we be sure that we will solve a problem that technology has solved by producing new technology? So, my idea is to look into the processes that produce software, and try to see, try to study them, and see which part of the processes are producing good, and which parts are not producing good, so what we are able to design better processes for the future. It is not that we say "okay, now we will produce other technology." Wait. Let's see how we produce technology before we produce new technology that will solve the problems of the old technology.

Silvija: Look at the alternatives before we keep adding?

Letizia: Yes. And look at the choices that we have.

Silvija: Can you say something more about this Chinese project?

Letizia: Yes, of course. This is a cooperation with the department of computer science at Tsinghua University, and this department has been ranged as.., now I don't remember exactly, but just after MIT as the most successful computer science department. And then we have Nanjing University that is excellent in software engineering. And then we have University of Michigan in USA. And the idea of this project, is to exchange both at research level and at education level. And again, this is something that I like very much, to connect the students to the research, and try to see a bigger pipeline that you have in classic research projects where everybody works on specific quests. But here we work at broader levels. For example, we took 60 bachelor students to China, and showed them around in these universities and encouraged them to go there again as master students, we encouraged them to enter our projects. So, yeah. 

Silvija: Basically, you hope that they meet people? I think through those relationships, we can have completely new kinds of collaborations and projects also.

Letizia: Yes. And in fact, on top of this project, we have got a new one that is about Blockchain and fishing, how to track the fishmarked by help of blockchain. That is a very big project that we have acquired because of this project that we have been doing for some years.

Silvija: What do you think is relevant knowledge for the future? What should we learn more about?

Letizia: As a computer science professor, I think, and as a software engineering professor, I think that we have a challenge to explain to the society that it is not only the programming and the technology that is important to know, but there are many things around the design, the choices, the consequences, and I must admit that for some years I didn't do enough with software engineer, I was working with art and... But now, I really think that software engineering is important, because software engineering is the 90% that is not caught in. Like, to take again a gender example, this famous example that software for recruiting people is based on that asset, that it is mainly white men, young... You don't need to know the last techniques of artificial intelligence to understand these issues.

Silvija: But you need to know a little bit about how things work. I was just thinking that, for example, I think it is going to be super important for us to understand that the software that's kind of, you know, arbitraging our lives is working. So, for example when Netflix recommends a film, it always says that it recommended it because you saw something else. And it saves you from conspiracy theories. And I think it is really important that all these new kinds of software engineered solutions to our lives in the future have this explainability on the surface, in a way. And then there will be a question on how much we will trust that, that is going to be the next level. 

Letizia: And I think we have to struggle so that there will not be 10% of very intelligent young men who know everything, and 90% who don't know anything. But to enlarge this pool of people who know something, enough, about computer science, and about technology.

Silvija: Agreed. What do you think are Norway's advantages in this age of digitalization?

Letizia: That Norway was digitalized very early. Things went very fast here, and it is easy to notice when you travel... You meet wireless networks that are much slower than what we have here, and when I deal with things in other countries, on the web portal, things are not working so well as they are working here. But a disadvantage that we may have here, seen from my own professor bubble, is that Norwegian people are not so encouraged to make these brave choices and become researchers, and... Because they have easy lives anyway.

Silvija: It will work out anyway, hehe.

Letizia: Yes. Det går bra.

Silvija: Letizia, you have written a book called "kjærlighet og computer," that is kind of your personal and professional life. And then you recommend also, and you give a book to all your students, from a colleague in Sweden. What's the book?

Letizia: Ah, "The experimentation in software engineering."

Silvija: Okay. It's a good professional book, then?

Letizia: Yes. It is the first book I read about making our field into a science. Because people, when they hear about software engineering, they think it is only about programming. But software engineering is a science, and you have to make.., to collect data, analyze the data, to make models, to make theories about how the software engineering processes are going on and should be...

Silvija: Letizia, do you have a quote that you like, something that we can tag on to your picture?

Letizia: In English...

Silvija: You can say it in Norwegian, we can go over to Norwegian.

Letizia: You can say that Rome was not built in a day. This is something that I have started to tell to my students when they come to the supervision. They want to have an answer. They come to me, they are confused and want an answer. Before, I think until a couple of years ago, I was trying to solve the problems of all the people to show how clever I am. But now I say that Rome wasn't built in a day. We have to live with this challenge for a couple more weeks, and we will with an answer.

Silvija: It will dawn on you. But yeah, teach people some patience, and all things worth doing are difficult.

Letizia: And I don't have to solve the problems of all the people. As a professor, and a supervisor, you should have learnt this before.

Silvija: I think many of us should have learned it, and I think what you're saying is not just that Rome wasn't built in a day, but Rome was not built by one person. And it's OK. If there is one thing you want people to remember from our conversation, what would you like it to be?

Letizia: That there is not only the past, but there is the future. And I feel very motivated now. I will be 55 in a couple of weeks, and I feel very motivated, and that we should not only motivate the young ones, but we should also motivate each other, and the people that may be older than us. That we need to think about the society in a different way, that we try to lift up each other, independently from age. So, the students should lift up the professors, and the professors should lift up the students.

Silvija: I agree. Letizia Jaccheri, professor from NTNU, thank you so much for coming here to us in Lørn, and for inspiring us about both love and computers.

Letizia: Thank you, Silvija.

Silvija: Thank you for listening.

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