DWS, Day 2: Futures of digital wellbeing

The second day of DWS 2019 started at 9 at Terkko Health Hub on 10th of May. This was a very special day as many keynote speakers joined us and gave us inspirational speeches. 

As an opening of the Sprint day 2, tutor Tytti guided the students to have a deep reflection on what they have learned from the first round of the Sprint. It seemed that most of the students had had their tasks on check. I personally thought this reflection was a brilliant idea and I do hope the students found it essential as well, as the next round of Sprint starts today. 

After reflection, Tuukka Vartiainen from IBM talked about their progress and development on artificial intelligence. During his talk, Watson was introduced to the audience. Watson is a question-answering computer system trained by data. Watson can do many cool things already. For example, not only is Watson able to distinguish different testicles and tell the colours based on pictures, but can also roughly profile a person just by scanning a facial imagine. According to Tuukka, they are currently training Watson to have higher performance, such as speech recognition, facial recognition, text recognition, and so on. At present, Watson is at work assisting productions and services in a wide range of business as well as in hospitals supporting health care. When comes to the future, how fascinating it is to even imagine that artificial intelligence will be widely integrated into one’s daily life. 

After Tuukka Vartiainen, we warmly welcomed Mikko Dufva from Sitra to take everyone on a journey of teleporting to the uncertain futures. Yes, you read it right. Futures. Future holds many possibilities and is full of uncertainties. 

Besides speakers from IBM and Sitra, we also had Sanna Huttunen from Helsinki Oodi library telling us about their ongoing robot project, and Anjariitta Savolainen from Caleidocons sharing with us how their journey of implementing artificial intelligent in coaching.

The rest of the day was programmed to Sprint idea validations. The representatives from the partner companies sat down with the students to discuss further about the progress so far. 

At last, let us not to forget the importance of evidence-based research in service design process. Thank the librarians from Laurea UAS for sharing with us the best ways and tools to do background information research. 

Writer: Lin Lamnaouer, DWS Tutor