Inauguration of the new professors

We - the new professors in the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Helsinki - gave our inaugural lectures yesterday!

Professor of Pharmacometabolomics Tiina Sikanen: https://www.helsinki.fi/fi/farmasian-tiedekunta/ajankohtaista/miten-laakeaineet-muuntuvat-ihmiskehossa-ja-luonnossa 

Professor of Pharmaceutical Protein Drug Research Michael Jeltsch: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/faculty-pharmacy/news/blood-and-lymphatic-vessels-connect-cancer-heart-disease-and-neurodegeneration 

The event was streamed live, but there was no recording. Here is a link to the presentation slides: https://mjlab.fi/mj  , but the narration is missing. I tried to get hold of an audio or video recording and post it here, but without success. So I tasked my recently acquired local AI (Hermes/llama.cpp/LLM and Chatterbox for voice cloning/TTS) with recreating my lecture. I gave it the link to the slideshow and a 30-second clip of my voice and asked it to recreate the lecture. The AI created a nice website for me, which lives on my Tailscale network, which makes the whole process very simple. Because AI still occasionally hallucinates, the slide notes should better contain the narration, but this depends very much on your slides.

I have heard that in the past, some teachers read the slides word for word during a lecture. In fact, the German word for lecture (Vorlesung) literally means to read aloud to somebody from a book. It is said to go back to the times when books were so precious that students could not afford them. Thus the habit emerged that professors distributed the knowledge contained in books by reading them aloud to students. At least that’s what we were told when I was a student in Germany.