Rebekah Rousi

• PhD Cognitive Science
• Associate Professor of Communication and Digital Economy at University of Vaasa

Background Artificial intelligence (AI) has potential to transform health care, but its successful implementation depends on the trust and acceptance of consumers and patients. Understanding the factors that influence attitudes toward AI is crucial for effective adoption. Despite AI’s growing integration into health care, consumer and patient accep...

Geert Hofstede famously labelled culture as the “software of the mind”, affecting how people cognitively process the world, and how organisations, communities and societies are structured. This lends to explain how culture influences the ways that people, perceive, use and experience technology design, and how within user experience design, cultura...

The rapid proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has raised pressing concerns regarding their trustworthiness, spanning issues of reliability, transparency, fairness, and ethical alignment. Despite the increasing adoption of LLMs across various domains, there remains a lack of consensus on how to operationalize trustworthiness in practice. T...

In today's world nothing has been left untouched in relation to artificial intelligence (Al). Al is used for everything from mowing lawns to reporting news. One field in which its presence is highly complex and multifaceted is education. Discussions regarding both the role of Al and the role of learning in education have taken center stage. The fie...

Personalised Interactive Music Systems (PIMS) are emerging as promising devices for enhancing physical activity and exercise outcomes. By leveraging real-time data and adaptive technologies, PIMS align musical features, such as tempo and genre with users’ physical activity patterns, including frequency and intensity, enhancing their overall experie...

Emotion AI is an emerging field of artificial intelligence intended to be utilized by organizations to manage and monitor employees emotional states supporting employee wellbeing and organizational goals. The current paper presents a case study that took place in a Finnish research institute in which 11 research participants were interviewed about...

There is a war going on and this war entails information, public governance, and corporate spheres in the context of national security and innovation. Amidst the actions of innovation and governance is a very human core of emotional control that is based on both reason and desire. In a statement made on X (formerly Twitter) on October 31, 2023, Goo...

Visuospatial Neglect (VSN) affects spatial awareness, leading to functional and motor challenges. This study explores virtual reality (VR) as a potential complementary tool for VSN rehabilitation, offering a novel environment that intends to support therapy outcomes. Specifically, we aim to explore the initial experiences of patients and physiother...

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) and large language models (LLMs) such ChatGPT has enabled the realization of long-harbored desires in software and robotic development. The technology however, has brought with it novel ethical challenges. These challenges are compounded by the application of LLMs in other machine learning s...

Currently artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled chatbots are capturing the hearts and imaginations of the public at large. Chatbots that users can build and personalize, as well as pre-designed avatars ready for users' selection, all of these are on offer in applications to provide social companionship, friends and even love. These systems, however,...

AI-based systems, including Large Language Models (LLMs), impact millions by supporting diverse tasks but face issues like misinformation, bias, and misuse. Ethical AI development is crucial as new technologies and concerns emerge, but objective, practical ethical guidance remains debated. This study examines LLMs in developing ethical AI systems,...

Efforts to develop ship fleets and maritime traffic systems that take advance of artificial intelligence to operate without the direct guidance of humans have been on planning tables for decades. There are many challenges to removing humans from direct operation. Several are bound to human-specific abilities to sense and gauge changing conditions b...

Humans are, by nature and nurture, flawed from the outset in a variety of physical and socio-psychological ways. Humans strive however, to achieve perfection within themselves and phenomena around them. Human imperfection can be seen as an impetus behind all technological development. Technology augments human abilities and compensates for limitati...

This chapter presents the results of a case study on a new transportation system built in the city of Tampere, Finland, ushering in a contemporary tramway era into the city geared towards an autonomous future. The study aimed to understand the embodied experience of tram users in the context of transformation and to utilise universal fashion as a f...

A super-intelligent AI- society should be based on inclusion, so that all members of society can equally benefit from the possibilities new technologies offer in everyday life. At present, the digital society is overwhelming many people, a large group of whom are older adults, whose quality of life has been undermined in many respects by their diff...

BACKGROUND Artificial intelligence (AI) has potential to transform health care, but its successful implementation depends on the trust and acceptance of consumers and patients. Understanding the factors that influence attitudes toward AI is crucial for effective adoption. Despite AI’s growing integration into health care, consumer and patient accep...

This study uses a mixed-methods approach to investigate the learning outcomes, student experiences, and concentrated-behaviour patterns of two classes of elementary school music students (N = 42). The study examines the academic performance resulting from students using established music technology, the iPad, in comparison to using an experimental...

Geert Hofstede famously labelled culture as the “software of the mind”, affecting how people cognitively process the world, and how organisations, communities and societies are structured. This lends to explain how culture influences the ways that people, perceive, use and experience technology design, and how within user experience design, cul...

This study uses a mixed-methods approach to investigate the learning outcomes, student experiences, and concentration-related behaviour patterns of two classes of elementary school music students (N = 42). It compares the academic performance of students using an established music technology, the iPad, with those using an experimental technology, a...

The use of Personalised Interactive Music Systems (PIMS) may provide benefits in promoting physical activity levels. This systematic review and meta-analysis was conducted to assess the overall impact of PIMS in physical activity and exercise domains. Separate random effects meta-analyses were conducted for outcomes in physical activity levels, phy...

This study uses a mixed-methods approach to investigate the learning outcomes, student experiences, and concentrated-behavior patterns of two classes of elementary school music students (N = 42). The study examines the academic performance resulting from students using established music technology, the iPad, in comparison to using an experimental t...

Describing distinct differences in children's use of the iPad and a novel Music Glove across three domains: (1) Learning (2) Ease of use (3) Concentrated-related behaviour.

Business and technology are intricately connected through logic and design. They are equally sensitive to societal changes and may be devastated by scandal. Cooperative multi-robot systems (MRSs) are on the rise, allowing robots of different types and brands to work together in diverse contexts. Generative artificial intelligence has been a dominan...

Internet Research’s Special Issue - Ethics and Sustainability in Gaming and Persuasive Systems, is now calling for papers. Guest Editors: Nannan Xi, Rebekah Rousi, Juho Hamari, Pekka Abrahamsson and Ville Vakkuri. This SI aims to attract multidisciplinary contributions that deal with ethics and sustainability, along with sub-fields such as privac...

Neglect is a common result of a right hemispheric stroke. Neglect may also be referred to as hemineglect, spatial neglect, visuospatial neglect, visual neglect, unilateral spatial neglect, paresis, and hemiparesis. Chen et al. (2012) indicate that the frequency of patients suffering from neglect in the United States (USA) is estimated to be between...

Ethics, or moral philosophy, have existed throughout civil human history. Ethics can be described simplistically as the study of what is good and bad or good and evil. More relevant for contemporary societal discourses, are behavioural understandings of ethics, and ethical practice. It is integral for individuals operating in the fields of communic...

Ethics, or moral philosophy, have existed throughout civil human history. Ethics can be described simplistically as the study of what is good and bad or good and evil. More relevant for contemporary societal discourses, are behavioural understandings of ethics, and ethical practice. It is integral for individuals operating in the fields of communic...

The aim of this study is to investigate how employees’ work-life balance (WLB) can be supported by various resources, and what mechanisms steer the use of these resources to achieve WLB. The research is based on the Conservation of Resources (COR) theory and a multidimensional balance construct by Casper et al. (2018). Through thematic analysis of...

Extended reality (XR) is changing the way humans interact with information. Developers are currently experiencing a need to understand more about the use and design of XR-delivered information. Humans are active agents within human-technology interaction. There is a need to systematically study how human agency affects the nature of XR content and...

Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a growing research field that has emerged in response to the challenges related to AI. Transparency poses a key challenge for implementing AI ethics in practice. One solution to transparency issues is AI systems that can explain their decisions. Explainable AI (XAI) refers to AI systems that are interpretab...

This article connects the concepts and phenomena of Design AI, AI in creative industries and AIs capacity for creativity. It links Design AI to UX design and UX designer discourse. Its vagueness and the prominence of UX designers as speakers and writers in the spectacle of cultural AI discourse. The article then, draws comparisons between the Theat...

During the 1950s Scandinavian Design caught international attention with its minimalism, simplicity, functionalism and sophistication. Several factors rested at its heart: functionality, democracy and affordability. Aesthetic styles connected to international minimalist, modernist and functionalist movements, which were also symbolically connected...

In an ever more connected world, awareness has grown towards the hazards and vulnerabilities that the networking on sensitive digitized information pose for all parties involved. This vulnerability rests in a number of factors, both human and technical.From an ethical perspective, this means people seeking to maximise their own gain, and accomplish...

Background: The continuous development of artificial intelligence (AI) and increasing rate of adoption by software startups calls for governance measures to be implemented at the design and development stages to help mitigate AI governance concerns. Most AI ethical design and development tools mainly rely on AI ethics principles as the primary gove...

Ethics, artificial intelligence (AI), and design thinking are current buzz words. The threat of bias-riddled machine learning algorithms is represented media-wide. Research and development initiatives are endeavoring to ‘translate’ ethics into processes and machine logic and design thinking as a method is adopted to gauge the interests and values o...

Neglect is typically experienced after suffering from a stroke. Despite various rehabilitative interventions used in treatment for neglect, there is no consensus about the most effective intervention or treatment. Virtual Reality (VR) combined with music therapy practices may offer a promising intervention for use during neglect rehabilitation. Thi...

The aspirations for a global society of learning technology are high these days. Machine Learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) are two key terms of any socio-political and technological discourse. Both terms however, are riddled with confusion both on practical and conceptual levels. Learning for one thing, assumes that an entity gains and...

Neglect is typically experienced after suffering from a stroke. Its symptoms often decimate a stroke survivors’ awareness of stimuli, and create a neglected feeling of space on one side of their body. Music therapy practices combined with Virtual Reality (VR) simultaneously may offer a promising intervention for use during neglect rehabilitation. T...

There is much discussion about super artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous machine learning (ML) systems, or learning machines (LM). Yet, the reality of thinking robotics still seems far on the horizon. It is one thing to define AI in light of human intelligence, citing the remoteness between ML and human intelligence, but another to understa...

Advances in machine learning (ML) technologies have greatly improved Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. As a result, AI systems have become ubiquitous, with their application prevalent in virtually all sectors. However, AI systems have prompted ethical concerns, especially as their usage crosses boundaries in sensitive areas such as healthcare,...

Ethical concerns related to Artificial Intelligence (AI) equipped systems are prompting demands for ethical AI from all directions. As a response, in recent years public bodies, governments, and companies have rushed to provide guidelines and principles for how AI-based systems are designed and used ethically. We have learned, however, that high-le...

There is a struggle in Artificial intelligence (AI) ethics to gain ground in actionable methods and models to be utilized by practitioners while developing and implementing ethically sound AI systems. AI ethics is a vague concept without a consensus of definition or theoretical grounding and bearing little connection to practice. Practice involving...

Issues relating to ethics and how moral principles evolve are imminently engrained in culture. Culture and technology cannot be separated from one another, as both are processes and reflections of social cognition and experience through action and practice. Technology is the embodiment of values and enabler of culture. As technology develops and hu...

Technology designers and developers can be understood as social experience (SE) mediators. In user experience (UX), notions of SE have served to identify and define the factors contributing to human-technology interaction (HTI). Three dominant perspectives have been promoted in UX discourse: 1) SE of brand, brand value and consumer culture; 2) tech...

In recent years, music technology in the classroom has relied on general devices such as the iPad. In the current study, we used a mixed-methods approach to examine the learning performance, learning experience, and behavior of two class groups of primary school music students (N = 42), using established music technology (i.e., the iPad with the Ke...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are increasing in significance within software services. Unfortunately, these systems are not flawless. Their faults, failures and other systemic issues have emphasized the urgency for consideration of ethical standards and practices in AI engineering. Despite the growing number of studies in AI ethics, comparat...

Designing intelligent technologies is a multidisciplinary process. From this perspective, fashion has continued to be an under explored dimension of technology design. While there persistently are connections between the term fashion and the clothing design industry, an historical and sociological approach to fashion reveals a much deeper and perme...

This is the Festschrift of Dr. Jack Rueter. The book presents peer-reviewed scientific work from Dr. Rueter’s colleagues related to the latest advances in natural language processing, digital resources and endangered languages in a variety of languages such as historical English, Chukchi, Mansi, Erzya, Komi, Finnish, Apurina, Sign Languages, Sami l...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2212868920300519

Humans behave towards and experience technological design in conflicting and contradictory ways. On the one hand, the very mention of the word ‘future’ conjures expectations of the radically new and unexpected. On the other hand, previous research has shown that people have a threshold for the level of change and the unexpected that they can cope w...

The relationship between emotions and ethics has been debated for centuries. The act of understanding emotions through the framework of ethics involves accepting that emotions are to some extent culturally dependent. By linking emotions in design to larger ethical discussions, it may be accepted that ethics and design are both technological constru...

Emotions are a hot topic in design, human–computer interaction and any area of business these days. Their significance in areas in which people make choices, decisions and engage in action has been undeniable for at least the last 40 years of psychology and consumer scholarship. What once was an extremely contested, fuzzy and (almost) easily scient...

While technological development is becoming more integrated into our surrounding environments, it is also moving closer towards the human body. In fact, numerous examples can be seen in which information technology (IT) is being designed not just for use on the body, but also inside it. Technologies dominating this domain can be described as ‘cogni...

Recent decades have revealed that the digital educational technology that is expected to revolutionise schooling for generations to come, is fraught with challenges. One major challenge is that educational systems vastly vary between cultures and countries. The differences start from the conceptualisation of education and school. It is, therefore,...

Understanding emotions is becoming ever more valuable in design, both in terms of what people prefer as well as in relation to how they behave in relation to it. Approaches to conceptualising emotions in technology design, how emotions can be operationalised and how they can be measured are paramount to ascertaining the core principles of design. E...

Oftentimes, and quite logically, developers and scientists become fixated on considering interactions and interaction design from the perspective of humans operating machines. Throughout the decades of user experience research, more attention has been placed on non-instrumental, emotional qualities in design, yet ultimately, when considering the en...

The aim of this research is to explore the positive user interface (UI) design of digital mental health resources for children and youth. For this purpose, a heuristic model is introduced and heuristic evaluation is used as a method to systematically assess 49 digital mental health resources. In the assessment, the resources are evaluated by observ...

Relationships between humans and technology are constantly fraught with controversy, utopian idealism and in particular, dichotomies. In a recent short communications article titled “Insight into Bio Inspired Robotics” by Shaikh and Begum [1] present a bio inspired model of robotics that among other things includes soft robotics, plantoids and cybo...

Trust is essential when using technology. If people do not trust new technology, they do not accept it. If people do not accept new technologies such as autonomous ships, their development is hampered in the absence of financial support. The importance of trust brings into question the essential conceptual components of phenomena that contribute to...

With a backdrop of action and science fiction movie horrors of the dystopian relationship between humans and robots, surprisingly to date-with the exception of ethical discussions-the relationship aspect of humans and sex robots has seemed relatively unproblematic. The attraction to sex robots perhaps is the promise of unproblematic affectionate an...

Using information and communication technology (ICT) for learning purposes has become more ingrained in curriculums and students’ lives over the past decades. Commonly, the lack of understanding about learning and pedagogy, and more specifically their contexts, will lead to creating learning software that utilize outdated pedagogy or are lacking in...

In human-technology interaction, the balance between simplicity and complexity has been much discussed. Emphasis is placed on the value of simplicity when designing for usability. Often simplicity is interpreted as reductionism, which compromises both the affective nature of the design and usability itself. This paper takes a cognitive-semiotic app...

Semiotics undergirds understanding of how people experience life (in both general and specific contexts) and thus impacts choices in regard to technology and its design. The papers in this issue draw on historical and contemporary scholarship of philosophy, practices, and theories in aesthetics, embodiment, and art experience in exploring the inter...

Recent decades have revealed that the digital educational technology that is expected to revolutionise schooling for generations to come, is fraught with challenges. One major challenge is that educational systems vastly vary between cultures and countries. The differences start from the conceptualisation of education and school. It is, therefore,...

Love has been described as unpredictable, immeasurable and non-purchasable and as such, poses challenges for anyone in a relationship to both stay in love, and to not fall in love with someone else. Scientists are still discovering whether or not love follows any specific recipe. Outlooks, personality, sense of humor and talent may not perfectly gu...

This study explores student teachers' future design scenarios focusing on promoting children's mental health literacy through virtual reality (VR) environments. VR use is on the verge of many breakthroughs in several areas of lived experience. One such area pertains to educational contexts. Student teachers were chosen as the subjects of this study...

With information technology becoming ever more embedded in our surrounding everyday things, the nature of interactions and the way we experience digitalization is becoming increasingly embodied. Thus, growing effort is placed on examining the multisensory nature of interaction experience. From a design perspective, increased knowledge of how people...

Insight into how people mentally represent, and thus, make sense of visual designs is the key to understanding how people interact with technological devices. This paper presents a study in which participants were asked to write their interpretations of two webpage design examples, based on what they thought they would say and what would remain as...

1 Synnyt / Origins | 1 / 2017 Performing Science Blurring the Boundaries Among Art, Research, and Academic Communities Dr. Rebekah Rousi University of Jyväskylä, Finland When and where does the art performance stop? Are there boundaries? The aesthetics of actions can be viewed as a series of unique artistic and genuine experiences and expressions....

The availability of learning technology has increased over past decades; however, severe usability issues that cause adverse effects on the learning experience can be found in many available technolo-gies. Learning solution usability is commonly evaluated by focusing on either technical or pedagogical usability and rarely both. This artificially se...

At the User Psychology Lab, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, our main focus is on human technology interactions. Visitors can expect to see people interacting with any number of weird and wonderful designs, from in-vehicle displays to glassware and frying pans. Although this scope may seem daunting, the link between all the studies is the person (...

Augmented reality is a fast developing field, which will no doubt gain strong footing in the area of social media in the near future. Recently, Google Glass placed AR towards the top of the technological hype curve in regards to interaction possibilities, information overlay, information search and recording. Questions still remain however, regardi...

Elevators enable people and goods to be transported to great heights at substantial speeds.The feats required technologically for suspension, movement, controls and safety are no less than remarkable. This is increasingly so when considering the competing new heights of skyscrapers. Although technological accomplishments are becoming ever more extr...

Immersive virtual environments (VEs) have the potential to provide novel cost effective ways for evaluating not only new environments and usability scenarios, but also potential user experiences. To achieve this, VEs must be adequately realistic. The level of perceived authenticity can be ascertained by measuring the levels of immersion people expe...

Information technology has perpetuated the role of symbolism in everyday life practice, through its reliance on sign systems for its creation and operation. Increasingly attention has been placed on applying semiotic techniques to analyze user interface design and usability. Surprisingly, although the move towards symbolic interaction has been one...

This is another rejected paper that presents the results of a study of mobile phone icons written in 2010. The paper specifically looks at the performance of the icon designs in light colour, and speculates as to whether the ability to make sense of (build a cohesive picture) the icons influences the attractiveness experienced by users.

Global conditions are changing at such a rate that foreseeing trends in technological development, economic fluctuations and climatic conditions is ever more difficult. When developing technologies, there is one constant factor that practitioners and researchers should be aware of, and that is people. This is not to say that people, culture and soc...

Usability is a key element in successful software. Ensuring the technical usability of a learning solution enables users to focus on their main task, learning. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the results of heuristic usability evaluations of digital learning solutions. Heuristic evaluations were conducted on 24 digital learning solution...

This is another paper that didn't make it to the publishers. It's about the social possibilities of augmented reality and new 'imaginary' friends.

This paper was submitted and rejected. And while the research wasn't robust, there are still one or two valid arguments regarding the balance between simplicity and complexity and gender.

This is my PhD dissertation that discusses user experience as a communication process.

This paper was published at DAC2009, and is about theorizing attractiveness in order to determine what people will find attractive in mobile phone icons.

Visual perspective has dominated experience research in human-technology interaction for decades now. The neglect of other sensory modalities is gradually being addressed by scholars and designers, who investigate user experience based on touch, smell, taste, sound and even expressive bodily interactions. In cognitive and affective processes, user...

Contemporary research in human-technology interaction emphasises the need to focus on what people experience when they interact with technological artefacts. Understanding how people experience products requires detailed investigation of how physical design properties are mentally represented, and the theorisation of how people represent informatio...