 Hello everyone and welcome to this edition of Cycling Research Review, Interview Edition. And today, once again, we are in Helsinki at the Nektar 2019 conference and with me here we have Miloš from Aalto University. So I have a few questions for you today and let's start off with your latest work and I wanted to ask what inspired you to write your paper Decision Support Framework for Cycling Investment Prioritization. Did I get it right? Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I'm going to be sort of a blank forward. I think we have to recognize that scientific work is filled with values. And I value cycling a lot, so I wanted to do some research on cycling and this is how this came to be sort of inspired from the beginning. Of course, this motivation of mine was sort of got the perfect timing together with a colleague of mine from University of Belgrade who was kind of thinking about having a project on this on this topic. So kind of, you know, this is perfect window of opportunity to do some do some research on this topic. So the basic idea was that if you think about sort of professionalizing cycling planning overall, we have a lot of tools that might exist within specific municipalities, ad hoc tools, a lot of them are just sort of ad hoc, depending on kind of the motivation of the particular planner in the city. But not a lot of them are actually being sort of put up on a sort of open access level for everyone. And also kind of the academic community is also doing a lot. So if you think about decision support systems, overall, this has been a thing for, you know, transport engineering for decades now. But if you put decision support system and you put cycling, you'll get like five references or like three single digit number one way or another. So I mean, we have been really good in planning for a specific type of mode, as we all know, and then kind of gradually moved into into now, of course, transit and other kinds of things. But I think cycling is still sort of largely under researched, comparatively speaking, yeah, on the research area in our in our domain. That was sort of the one side of the story. But the other side of the story I think comes much more to the to the question of how do I position myself as a researcher, which is I mean, I like reading scientific things and so on. But I think we really need to be able to engage with practice with practitioners. And sort of when I say engage, I don't mean like I write a paper, and then I send it to them at the end of the day. So this work was done together with practitioners, they were involved in the workshops, they were involved in the whole process of thinking about the methodology of the whole framework. And they were sort of the knowledge was kind of co developed together with the practitioners. And then it kind of just stayed in their organization now. So it's not that I want to keep this my knowledge for myself. But the whole point is that this knowledge become in a sense institutionalized now somewhere. And then of course, that organization can later on teach some other organizations, and so on and so on. This can sort of spread spread further. So we just say part of the purpose of this paper is to get practitioners to act in a way, instead give them a platform to understand what they're doing. And though the most important part is action and then putting this into practice. Yeah, yeah. So, so philosophically speaking, knowledge is all about planning, sorry, is all about knowledge to action. But sort of in a pragmatic manner, I think what I've seen a lot is not, we oftentimes have this attitude that sort of the planners, the hypothetical planners, whoever those people might be in our mind are sort of not doing a good job. They're still planning for cars. And you know, this is a kind of like this is a never ending rant from the academic side. And I don't think it's like that always. I think we have a lot of planners who want to plan their cities in a different way. But I don't think the tools are there. If you think about the basic thing like how traffic forecasting is interlocked with cost benefit analysis, and this is in a sense an institution in itself that is really difficult to break down and move away from, because if you would move away from that, you would be left with almost no tools whatsoever to kind of deal with what is the other challenge of planning, which is the process of legitimacy. They have to legitimize their own solutions or their own proposals to someone oftentimes who has no clue in the political system of what did these numbers mean? They have to give them a map with green and red lines on a map and tell them, look, cars, if we plan for cars, that's going to be bad. If we just plan for transit and cycling and walking, it's going to be better. That's the sort of the level of argument they have to present to decision makers. So on one side, I mean, I've seen it a lot, especially also in the Helsinki region. We have a lot of planners who are really kind of, they're thinking about sustainability, they're thinking about well-being, health, how do we tackle climate crisis and everything else. But they're kind of playing with the existing tools that they have. So I think we still have to use this window of action of trying to help them develop, co-develop these tools with them and try to help them sort of grow the new institution of planning together. Now, this particular paper is on the topic of cycling, but you write about all sorts of different transportation issues. I know you, for example, the first time we met, we were talking about ethics of automated vehicles, for example. Could you tell us a bit about the diversity of all the work that you do? Yeah, so I'm really hoping my dean is not going to watch this. So dean watches you, too. I mean, of course, the essential, and we can talk about this later, the essential academic requirement is specialized, specialized, specialized. Yeah, that's how you get citations, that's how you get sort of your name attached to one keyword. I am not that kind of a person. I have really, really big struggle to sort of fit into this kind of a box. So to be honest, the reason why I'm studying mobility and transportation is because I mean, this gives me a chance to just study everything. Yeah, like studying like philosophy, sociology, psychology, but also physics, you know, algorithms, mathematics, complex networks, whatever, whatever comes to my mind. It sort of has something to do with the only thing is that I don't really like is chemistry. So some trauma from high school and so on. But otherwise, I mean, this is kind of the thing. So I started with gradually kind of, I mean, I've learned a lot before in traffic management, sort of sorts of things, then I gradually from there expanded into general sort of modeling of things and trans persistence planning, and now it's sort of transit planning. And now we're even dealing with integrated planning sorts of issues. But then I also dabbled in policy and governance. We have been recently studying also planning processes from more kind of a organizational knowledge theory and so on. I mean, yeah, I don't know. I mean, there is probably a lot of other things that I've done and I'm planning to do actually even more. So I've just sort of, yeah, I think it's an open field. Let's say like that. But speaking of this, so the other thing that you mentioned about the self-driving vehicles and the whole ethics thing. So there's a whole buzz too. There's so much buzz around it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I started working on these things, let's say, 2010 issues. So this was sort of before the hype overall. And back then I was just trying to figure out how to sort of, there's this sort of value sensitive design idea. And one of the values that I was thinking about was kind of cooperation, while the other one was, you know, human cooperation. And the other one was social justice. So how do we design technologies like self-driving vehicles for sort of these kinds of values? So I started with designing traffic control algorithms for self-driving vehicles back then. Now I mean, we're still doing some of that work more for the sake of disrupting the current way of thinking into that domain. But this has really allowed me, so playing with a self-driving vehicle is an artifact in itself as something that is kind of quite indistinct and powerful artifact at the end of the day. It has allowed me to learn a lot about philosophy of technology on one side and then also political philosophy on the other side. And on top of that, some other things like, you know, psychology, sociology and whatnot. So it was more of a kind of a learning tool, let's say, over the years. So now I'm one of the rare people who is actually trying to raise this, not just on an ethical question, like what we usually discuss, these kind of trolley problems or whatever, like that kind of a narrow definition of ethics. But to bring it about more as a moral question, the basic question is, do we even need self-driving vehicles at all? I think this is an ultimate moral question that I as an engineer have to ask myself. Yeah, it's not just how should we make this technology, when should it be sort of available, but do we need it? I mean, is this the thing that we desperately need in 2019 to address a lot of other questions that we should be addressing at the end of the day? So what I'm usually kind of in the back of my mind, I still have to kind of put this down somewhere, I'm playing with this thought of the lure of technology. A lure, yeah. Like a fishing hook. Which means sort of the technology has this kind of attraction, it has power over a certain domain of ourselves. We are ultimately as human beings, we are technological beings. We have sort of relied on technology to cope with the nature and so on. But we have largely failed to be in a kind of reflective in our relationship with technology. If you usually ask, I mean, this is my favorite question to my engineering students, what is technology? And then they're like, yeah, hit by lighting. But after a while, if we sort of have this a little bit of reflection process, they move beyond the usual preconceptions, that this is applied science or this is used for sort of addressing our problems and so on. And kind of we start seeing that there is a much deeper set of questions or kind of premises behind technology that it really frames us who we are, defines who we are as human beings. So we do put some kind of values in it. It's not value free. So it's not neutral. It has very often consequences that we didn't anticipate. We kind of always paint it as a rosy thing. It's this kind of a classical, there is a Promethean myth up to it. So the being basically sort of the Prometheans stole the fire and gave it to the people and now sort of the fire is the power and it will liberate us from the gods and from the nature and so on. So it's sort of a powerful liberating device. But we kind of all know that it's usually a double-edged sword. Yeah, like the things that surround us, they shape us and sometimes in negative ways. And kind of they bring about negative consequences. But and then sort of the lower part is this innate obsession to start sort of tinkering with the device as soon as you sort of have it at your hands and not being able to just sort of let it go for like just put it down, let it go for a while. Like move away your gaze off the device and just ponder the life a little bit. Like, why am I doing this? Like, do I need to be doing this thing as opposed to this sort of like distraction? Does that relate to the idea of progress? Do you think? Yeah, and I think that it is especially there sort of embedded in this kind of, of course, also the progress of time and how we perceive time in the western sort of civilization as a linear thing and kind of the progress is something that is usually means also kind of more technology to it and so on and so on. Yeah, so I think there is a big set of issues that it's fascinating on the other side. The people who are responsible for developing technologies are oftentimes not taught or even encouraged to just think about these things. Yeah, it's sort of like, no, the technology is just about the device design. It's the other day, when I was presenting this sort of, I was of course raising the question of what is to be a human together with with the technology and then sort of one of the people from the audience says, well, technology is all about minimizing human effort. And I'm like, sure, maybe one among many, many things in some cases, but I mean, is this the purpose of human life? Yeah, and then we get to this discussion about meaning. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So what is the meaning of all of these, the deeper meaning behind all of these things? So, I mean, I don't know, I mean, am I just sort of inclined to be thinking about these non-engineering questions? I just think that this is something that the 21st century engineers should be thinking about. Yeah, and then sort of also kind of rethink what is to be an engineer. So we played, we had a summer school before Nectar. Yeah, tell us a bit about that Nectar summer school and how it went. So we have a summer school that we're organizing every year. This was the 13th time we were running it and basically it's usually in August and this year we decided to put it before Nectar. So kind of have a bit of a preview event to Nectar because something will be already coming before and so on. And then it's basically sort of set of lectures and then in this case, in this edition, we also made a case about part of a sort of a Boulevard city in Helsinki. So City of Helsinki is planning to kind of remove some of these city motorways, parts of those and rebuild the city around the concept of a Boulevard of sorts. So we're playing with that area and what we have been discussing with the students is the process of imagining. So Disney is going to sue me now because apparently they copyrighted this. The YouTube algorithm to pick it up. But basically when we came up with it and we googled it and we realized that it was copyrighted. But anyway, the process, the discussion was between what is engineering and then what is imagination. Because engineering is oftentimes about tangible kind of deliverable functional devices. It's having your feet firm on the ground. That's the classical sort of misconception, maybe. While imagination is a process, it's a mental state that sort of lasts over time as a process of speculative thinking. It requires you to be thinking about the desirable very often, but not necessarily about feasible. It's supposed to be a liberating mental state about thinking about 100 in feasible options to be able to come to 100 and first feasible, but still creative option. So it's keeping your head in the clouds. So this was so imaginary was how do you keep your head in the clouds and be able to dream and sort of think a bit broadly and imagine different futures while still keeping your feet firm on the ground. So that's what we kind of had as the beginning premise of the school. And you wouldn't believe it. If you set it up like this, the human mind just takes over. So all these participants from different places around the world, they just clicked. There was no, like we didn't give them a structure method, matrixes, equations, whatever to deal with. They were just dream. But first dream, then think about feasibility. Don't start with feasibility and then limit yourself. So they were allowed to dream. So these were a group of academics, young academics, and you put them into a consulting role almost. What are your reflection on that? Were they able to perform satisfactory lead towards the system in terms of having ideas that could reasonably be implemented? Or were you going for something completely other than that in this summer school? Yeah. So what we got was nine different groups with three to four people. So we allow them to diverge. That was the whole idea. Not forcing them to kind of come to one solution, but allowing that personalities of these different people emerge at the end of the day of how do they think about knowledge? Ultimately, how do they think about the reality of the human experience? The values that should be in the built environment? How do they think about the connection between the process and the outcome? And we got nine different solutions and sort of not just solutions, but also different processes of how they did these things. And basically, there were a lot of things in common. For example, they all valued nature a lot because we also had part of our own process was walking around the area where we were over there. And I was trying to kind of ask them to also be perceptive about their environment or just observe with their eyes and also with their ears and maybe with their skin, other kinds of things. So they noticed the wind, they noticed the sort of the birdsong in the nature and so on. So a lot of them agree that nature is very important and they really built various solutions around how to incorporate nature into their built environment, protect the existing nature, but even expand. But you could see that through that process of thinking, they were still coming to the questions, okay, is this type of a tree feasible to actually have in a city? But these the feasibility things, you can still Google. That's the part of the machine. The machine can tell you nowadays if this bearing load can handle something or not. We can do these kinds of things, but imagination is still a human thing and it should be a starting point. And they all kind of saw really the point in kind of liberating themselves to thinking this way. And it was also interesting to see how they also understood that the world is much more complex than we usually present it. That they can't think about this as just the street or the land use, but they have to think about so many other things. Of course, the nature is already said, but really also values, what kind of values they want to have over there. So the sense of place, the sense of a community, the sense of being welcomed somewhere, even the sense of social justice as part of it, the positive experiences and various other things. So I think they did a really, really good job. Nice. So you're training really interdisciplinary scholars in a way, preparing them for these complex issues and to try and step out of their single lens, which most of them come from. Yeah. So I'm hoping that this is sort of a, I mean, to me, this is a natural way of thinking. The challenges that our silos are already there, like, you know, we usually have, even in the primary school, you start with like, this is a biology class. And this is just, you know, a physics class. How about the connections between the two? Don't think about the connections. Physics teacher, biology teacher, art teacher. Exactly. And for me, it's actually very difficult to think in silos. Like I think in networks, I think in connections. And I don't, I don't see silos. I mean, it's kind of a natural way of thinking for me. But then the problem, the underlying problem is the language. So the disciplines are still using their languages. It's like, how many languages do you speak? It's not anymore like I speak German or French or whatever, but I speak architecture. I speak geography. I speak sociology. I speak philosophy. I speak whatever computer science and so on. I speak economics. That was a tough transition. Exactly. So what kind of language do you speak? And as part of this is, of course, learning how to bring these people at the table who speak already, maybe speak different languages, but also how to invent like, imagineering, like, you know, how to introduce new words that will help them reconceptualize things. So for example, when I teach, I'm trying to teach the basics of kind of transport systems, dynamics of how things move around the city. And there is, of course, a limited capacity to our city, just like the land uses limited to transfer network is also limited. Often, often a preconception of many people come from kind of ICT into transport. Yeah. So I would, I would, I could very easily call this traffic flow theory. And people will be like, you know, what are you talking about? But if I call it system dynamics, we can sort of all agree. Okay, this is about dynamics, you know, some kind of a system. Do I have to really use a specific kind of a niche term that will identify me or validate me as kind of like, he's definitely an expert. He used a key word, yeah, like sort of a thing. As opposed to them learning on a kind of an upper level, that this is the same kind of a thing that exists in another field. It's just, it's called differently. So let's sort of all agree. It's like Esperanto, a sense of world of science. Yeah. Well, so where can they find you on the internet, Milux? No, I, I'm in the middle of the forest. No, I don't exist. It's, you know, I mean, in a shack, you have to walk 20 miles through the snow. I'm pretty sure if you, if you Google, Milos, Alto, so AA LTO, you will find me. Awesome. So we definitely have this transparency principle in Finland. So I'm pretty much visible. And you do try to publish open access, right? Yeah, yeah, definitely. Great. So I'll throw the links on below to him on Twitter, right, you're on Twitter, and through his latest publications and to the cycling publication that we mentioned. This was a conversation about cycling, but clearly it went elsewhere, which is fine, because everything recycled away here, everything's connected. So once again, I want to thank you, Milos, and stay tuned for the next episode.