Date: March 19, 2026

Time: 14:30, Room A102

Title: Machine learning as part of civic tech case studies: How to leverage machine learning and data mining techniques when studying software production.

Abstract

Machine learning and data mining techniques have been an established part of quantitative and mixed-methods research for decades. However, the people who develop state-of-the-art machine learning techniques and the people who apply them tend to be siloed. This talk gives an overview of one application domain (civic tech; interaction of open source and grassroots development) and a review of how machine learning and data mining techniques can be used in case studies. The talk includes introduction to civic tech as a phenomenon, brief talk about case studies as a research approach, and discussion of how to apply natural language processing (NLP) in analysis. Other examples include discussion of collaboration analysis with graph theory, and how NLP can enrich other quantitative data.

Bio

D.Sc. Antti Knutas is an associate professor at the Department of Software Engineering in LUT University. His research interests involve human factors in software engineering, software communities and collaboration, and civic technology from a software engineering perspective. He uses mixed methods for his research and recently has been focusing on how data mining techniques can be used to analyze the rich, complicated data present in these communities. He leads a research team of five junior researchers, has over 100 publications in his field, and is the PI in multiple European topics.