This autumn, and more precisely in October, there were a lot of public activities, including delivering my talk at the ICEGOV2021 (14th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (ICEGOV2021) “Smart Digital Governance for Global Sustainability“: “Towards enrichment of the open government data: a stakeholder-centered determination of high-value data sets for Latvia“ – this year I was able to take part in it in an online mode but hope this will change at some point), my Invited Talk delivered at the Nanotech2021, my participation in the Latvian Open Geospatial Data hackathon as a mentor – my team won, by the way 🙂 and my participation in the Europe Biobank Week 2021.

Yet another experience was related to a very new experience – the guest lectures. In the past, I had a few minor experiences, but these were mostly short talks that cannot be considered as normal lectures or lectures delivered only to Latvian students. It’s changed this autumn!

This autumn has changed this! I was very pleased and honoured to serve twice as a Guest Lecturer this October. One lecture for the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN) on the open data – its ecosystem, barriers, current and future trends in both worldwide and Norway context (see slides here), focusing on data quality, which the audience found to be especially interesting. I was extremely pleased to have such a lively discussion on the variety of points that we were able to cover during this lecture, because students have shown both an interest in my talk and what is more – their knowledge and ability to think and elaborate on the given points even without prior knowledge in this area. A very educated and intelligent audience!

The second lecture, however, was delivered at my neighboring Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Latvia (Latvijas Universitāte), on the potential of open data, reflecting the Latvian case and pointing out some examples that we can take over from other countries (see slides here). This lecture will also stay in my memory as one with a very fruitful discussion – hopefully this conclusion will be the same for the audience!

To sum up, thank you, for those professors who have invited me to serve as a Guest Lecture – Salah Uddin Ahmed and Visvaldis Valtenbergs. Hope that this was a great experience for us both!