When Personas Talk to You (PDF)
Associate Professor at the University of Vaasa. Based in Finland. If you'd like me to give a talk or workshop, please reach out via jonisalm@uwasa.fi.
When Personas Talk to You (PDF)
Three thoughts on students using LLMs to do their thinking. Of course, I’m not in favor of it. But it’s been hard to articulate why in a way that students would understand it. Think I found a good analogy for this in chess. If you watch chess videos, great moves often appear self evident after the player has made them,…
Presentation slides of “personas and startups: some ideas” talk at ERLab Days 2025 in Heilbronn, Germany. Personas and StartupsDownload
This is a snippet of an email I periodically send to my PhD students. “Let’s not break the head” is a good related quote, from my PhD student, Ilkka Kaate. Dear team, (cc other supervisors) you’ve all seen this place. You know you’re there when weird things start to happen: the research comes into your sleep. You can’t focus on…
When to defend. Now, there’s a thing with being a PhD student and a supervisor. There’s some information asymmetry: the supervisor has more experience and knowledge. So, should the student do everything the supervisor asks? No. Definitely not, because the supervisor is still a fallible human being. The goal is to somehow surpass the supervisor! (it has to be 🙂…
CHI research has become more complex (but not more insightful). The reason? Complexity is a competitive factor: it helps separate your paper from others. Lengthy papers with more substudies and details are more likely to do better than short but insightful work that might have more relevance for HCI theory and/or practice. Reviewers are instructed to pay attention to HCI…
Some ideas on directions toward which Marketing Mix Modeling Software-as-a-Service Platforms should be developed: So, an MMM SaaS tool should not only observe but it should actively suggest and, if suggested policy is accepted by the human manager, implement it in the ad platforms! I think this step from observations to interventions is necessary to unleash the potential of MMM.
(Written with Claude-3.5-Sonnet. I have checked and edited the content. -Joni) Summary of the Issue The holdout paradigm, commonly implemented as a train-test split, is a fundamental technique in machine learning for assessing model performance. However, when applied to cross-sectional data, it can lead to significant challenges in terms of model generalizability. Cross-sectional data, by its nature, provides a snapshot…
Written in collaboration with Claude-3.5.-Sonnet. All information checked by human author. Background Because of the utility and value of large language models (LLMs) in tasks supporting persona creation and users’ interaction with personas, chat-based AI personas are becoming increasingly prevalent. However, these personas present unique challenges that can be understood through the lens of agency theory (also known as the…
The illusion of similarity: two papers (A and B) look the same.They have the same structure.They have the same number of words.Both use fluent, nearly flawless English.Both reference the same number of papers.They have the same number of tables and figures. For a layperson, both these papers look the same. Yet, one of them is the worst horsesh*t you’ve ever…