Dr Sanna Tiilikainen is a ROSETTA Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Galway, working with Prof Kieran Conboy on advancing carbon footprint calculators through tactful human–LLM collaboration. Her research combines human-centred design, information systems, and artificial intelligence to generate theoretical and design knowledge for intelligent technologies that support sustainability across everyday life, business, and public services.

Sanna earned her PhD in Information and Service Management (Information Systems) from Aalto University School of Business, Finland. Her dissertation, Augmented Sociality: How the Digital and Physical Worlds Merge in the Social Use of ICT, examined how digital technologies become meaningful through everyday practices in work, family life, and public services. Her research has been published in leading journals, including MIS Quarterly, European Journal of Social Security, International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making, and British Food Journal, and in leading conferences such as ICIS and ECIS.

Sanna develops human-centred intelligent interactive systems that strengthen user autonomy, collaboration, and sustainability while recognizing the transformative role of information systems in organizations and society. She combines deep qualitative, video-based, and design-oriented research with mixed methods and AI-enabled analysis and prototyping, bridging design science, information systems theory, and sustainability research to deliver practical, evidence-based innovations. Her collaborations with leading Nordic and international businesses, public organizations, NGOs, and sustainability communities ensure that her research generates measurable real-world impact.

Sanna’s ROSETTA project, titled, “Improving Carbon Footprint Calculators by Addressing Temporal Complexity with Tactful Human-LLM Collaboration” uses carbon footprint calculators as a case context to address a fundamental challenge: helping people translate climate intentions into meaningful action. Existing tools are often generic, impersonal, and difficult to personalize, overlooking the temporal realities of everyday life. Through tactful human–LLM collaboration, she examines how conversational AI can provide empathetic, context-aware guidance that supports both immediate decisions and long-term emissions reductions. The resulting design principles and AI-enhanced methods aim to reduce development costs, overcome technical constraints, and increase civic engagement in sustainability.

Her work delivers ethically persuasive, practically feasible, and empirically validated design knowledge for sustainability-oriented information systems. The broader outcome is a toolkit of AI-enhanced methods that can be adopted by researchers, businesses, governments, NGOs, and public-sector organizations to accelerate carbon reduction and sustainability transitions.

Her research advances the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, particularly:

• SDG 9 – Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
• SDG 12 – Responsible Consumption and Production
• SDG 13 – Climate Action
• SDG 16 – Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
• SDG 17 – Partnerships for the Goals

By advancing responsible, human-centred AI for everyday sustainability, Sanna’s research connects individual choices with organizational innovation and societal change, creating digital systems that are empathetic, effective, and scalable.