Research · Open questions

The questions I keep coming back to.

The handful of problems I find genuinely worth chewing on. They're what most of my writing, building and papers circle back to.

How do we know it's any good?

Judging an AI honestly, without fooling ourselves

It's surprisingly easy to convince yourself a model is brilliant. I care about ways of testing that survive contact with the real world — measuring what it can truly do, not what a benchmark happens to reward.

Trust

Why does it break for real people?

When AI that “works” meets messy, human input

A system can look perfect in a demo and fall apart the moment a real person uses it. I spend a lot of time in that gap — the part the tutorials quietly skip.

Reality

When is the clever version worth it?

Where extra complexity actually earns its keep

Sometimes a fancy, autonomous setup is the right call. Far more often, one clear instruction does the job. I like figuring out which is which before building the expensive thing.

Judgment

What should a person still own?

Keeping humans accountable for what AI produces

Automating a task doesn't move the responsibility for it. I'm interested in where a person has to stay firmly in the loop — and how to design that seam so it helps rather than rubber-stamps.

Responsibility

How do we keep up without drowning?

Staying current in a field that changes every week

Most of the noise is forgettable; a little of it genuinely matters. I think a lot about how to tell the difference quickly, so the firehose never crowds out the actual work.

Practice

Publications

Peer-reviewed papers, written with colleagues at LUT University. Newest first.

2026

Technological Landscape of Civic Tech: Current Practices and Lessons Learned

Viktoriia Olshanskaia, Duc Thinh Tran, Janne Parkkila, Antti Knutas

Proceedings of the 2026 International Conference on Information Technology for Social Good (GoodIT ’26). ACM, pp. 402–410. Pisa, Italy, 2–4 September 2026.

What does the software behind civic tech actually look like? We crawled the repositories of 55 civic tech projects and computed more than 25 indicators for each. Most are web apps with thin documentation, most of the work rests on a very small group of contributors, and nearly half show signs of AI-assisted development — yet activity doesn’t fade as the projects age.

DOI 10.1145/3794786.3830780

GoodIT ’26

2025

Exploring Perceptions of Blockchain in Cross-Border Workforce Mobility

Anastasiia Gurzhii, A. K. M. Bahalul Haque, Bilal Naqvi, Jaakko Vuolasto, Janne Parkkila, A. K. M. Najmul Islam

Software Business. ICSOB 2024. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol. 539 (eds. E. Papatheocharous, S. Farshidi, S. Jansen, S. Hyrynsalmi). Springer, Cham, pp. 186–201. Utrecht, The Netherlands, 18–20 November 2024.

Most blockchain work on credential checks is about the technology. This paper asks the people who do the checking. From 13 interviews with experts who verify applicants’ credentials and a workshop with applicants, we drew out what motivates them, what gets in the way and what they’d propose — and turned it into design requirements for everyone involved: the individual, the certificate issuer and HR.

DOI 10.1007/978-3-031-85849-9_16 Free manuscript

ICSOB 2024

2024

Designing GDPR Compliant Credential Verification Using Blockchain: A Design Science Research Approach

Janne Parkkila, AKM Bahalul Haque, Jaakko Vuolasto, Anastasiia Gurzhii, Sami Hyrynsalmi, Najmul Islam

ECIS 2024 Proceedings, track: Blockchain and Fintech, paper 5. AIS eLibrary. Paphos, Cyprus, 13–19 June 2024.

How do you verify a job applicant’s certificates on a blockchain without breaking GDPR? Using design science research, we interviewed people involved in hiring, derived design requirements in four areas — trust, automation, usability and regulation — and built a prototype that puts the resulting design principles into practice.

Read it · AIS eLibrary

ECIS 2024

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