Digitization and Sociotechnical advances

Some recent news / activities:

This October (2022) I had a pleasure and honor to take part in 14th International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Systems (KMIS2022), where I was not only attendee, but also an author / presenter, chair session and the person who received Best Paper Awards for the paper “Putting FAIR principles in the context of research information: FAIRness for CRIS and CRIS for FAIRness (read more…)


One of the recent articles Transparency of open data ecosystems in smart cities: Definition and assessment of the maturity of transparency in 22 smart cities” (Lnenicka, Nikiforova, Luterek, Azeroual, Dandison, Valtenbergs, Machova) was noticed by the Living Library that seeks to provide actionable knowledge on governance innovation, informing and inspiring policymakers, practitioners, technologists, and researchers working at the intersection of governance, innovation, and technology in a timely, digestible and comprehensive manner, identifying the “signal in the noise” by curating research, best practices, points of view, new tools, and developments… Proud to see our joint article there (read more…)


The Open Data Institute hosted micro-site on the exploration of the future of data portals and citizen engagement (led by Rachel Wilson, in collaboration with ODI Associate Consultant Tim Davies) publishes very insightful posts reflecting on the most prospective studies to take stock of the state of portals, and explore possible futures, where two of them reflect on my previous studies! (read more#1…) (read more#2…)


Recently I was honored to contribute to Babu Banarasi Das University (BBDU, Department of Computer Science and Engineering) Development Program «Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Development» with the talk entitled “Artificial Intelligence for Open Data or Open Data for Artificial Intelligence?”…. (read more…)


AfricanSmartCitiesLab

July 5 I had a pleasure to serve as a keynote for “Integration of open data and artificial intelligence in the development of smart cities in Africa” workshop and deliver the talk about “Open data and crowdsourced data as enablers and drivers for smart African cities“. The workshop is a part of the African Cities Lab Project aimed at creating a digital education platform on urban development in Africa, and act as a forum for the exchange of digital educational resources and the management and governance of African cities to foster sustainable urban development (read more…)


This June I was glad and honored to take part in a four-day ONE Conference 2022 (co-organised by EFSA, ECDC, ECHA, EEA, EMA, and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC)) as one of panelists of the “Turning open science into practice: causality as a showcase” thematic session as part of “ONE society” thematic track, where I served as an open data expert with a substantial background in data quality area (read more …)


September 12 (2022) I had a pleasure to serve as a keynote for the Innovation and Smart Government Conference 2022 (ISGOV2022) opening it with my talk titled “Data as an asset for sustainable development of data-driven smart cities and smart society”…. (read more…)


This year I was invited to organize my own panel session within the Research and Innovation Forum (Rii Forum). I was glad to accept this invitation, but I did not even think about how many roles I will act in it – panel organizer, speaker, PC member, moderator and Best panel moderator award (read more…)


As the general co-chair of the First International Conference in Electronic Governance with Emerging Technologies (EGETC-2022), I sincerely invite you to consider your participation in this event. Its aim is to provide a forum for academics, scholars, and practitioners from academia and industry to share and exchange the recent developments in the domain of e-government and governance of digital organizations… (read more…)


Happy to share that I have been invited to serve as a keynote for the International Innovation and Smart Government Conference “Challenges for Public Innovation in a post-pandemic government” (ISGOV) to be held in September, 2022. ISGOV focuses on understanding the organizational challenges public administrations face at all levels due to the COVID-19 pandemic and how to face the short and medium-term challenges (read more…)


Digitization plays an important role in my activities (academic, research, and professional outside academia). This is also the case for delivered courses and supervised students theses, in addition to my participation in Google.org supported Riga TechGirls initiative – the first community in Latvia aimed at educating and inspiring women and girls in IT, empowering them to be architects of the future, where I acted both as a speaker and as a leading mentor in the digital development workshop on Information and data literacy for more than 2 000 Latvian teachers, as well as my continuous support of Open Data Hackathon for pupils, where I act as a mentor for participants dealing with diverse range of social issues they try to tackle.

This is also a part of my professional activity. This applies not only to the studies I was or am involved in, but also refers to my role of an IT-expert at the Latvian Biomedical Research and Study Centre, BBMRI-ERIC Latvian National Node. As part of my one-year contract with the Latvian Biomedical Research and Study Centre, BBMRI-ERIC Latvian National Node, I was involved in ERDF-funded project “DECIDE – Development of a dynamic informed consent system for biobank and citizen science data management, quality control and integration” and H2020 project “Integration of knowledge and biobank resources in comprehensive translational approach for personalized prevention and treatment of metabolic disorders“. DECIDE was devoted to the development of a dynamic informed consent system for biobank and citizen science data management, quality control and integration (software engineering-oriented), another one – INTEGROMED – was of more biomedical nature, where my major input was related to data management- and data ecosystem- related activities, in scope of which I inspected the current data ecosystem of both Latvian Biomedical Research and Study Centre and related data artifacts, including Latvian Genome database, identified existing gaps, defined room for improvements and tasks together with their allocation from the resource management perspective and took active part in their implementation. It also included digitization to be made at various levels. This included the substitution of the surveys and questionnaires, which were typically completed by hand by either patients, donors or done doctorates and then inserted in the database by manual rewriting of answers from paper-based surveys, by the e-survey system based on the LimeSurvey. Previously, data tended to be incomplete, non-compliant with the database design, inaccurate errors are made, when the person reenter the data to the database from the paper-based survey or interpret the answer to made it compliant with it. The set of e-surveys has been developed and introduced, which allows to ensure data integrity and in-built data quality checks, and compliance with the actual database and reduce the number of errors made within the process of data collection and insertion. The above-mentioned inspection and the definition of corrective actions should allowed a transition of currently rather closed and immature ecosystem to the new and cooperation-oriented open data ecosystem facilitating cooperation with both local and external/ foreign bodies. These activities resulted in a set of guidelines towards efficient data management for heterogeneous data holders and exchangers developed as a deliverable of the HORIZON2020 INTEGROMED project and presented during the European Biobank Week 2021. They aimed at improving awareness among all stakeholders within LBMC and outside it about the data ecosystem. This set of guidelines should create a baseline for other (bio)medical organizations and be consistent with the cooperation-oriented biobank paradigm. It, however, served as an input for the DECIDE – Development of a dynamic informed consent system for biobank and citizen science data management, quality control and integration. Later refers to the software engineering tasks, where requirements for the DECIDE system have been defined (both, software-specific and user experience related ones).

In addition, I am also a part of Quantum Humanities Network hosted by the university of Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany.

Considering my interest and, hopefully, expertise in data management and disruptive technologies, I also act in several events delivering talks based on the ongoing studies on the intersection of data management, and data quality in particular, and AI.

The later, i.e. Artificial Intelligence, is also considered in the context of open data, where an increased popularity of both phenomenons not only reveal new opportunities, but also brings some risks to be addressed by researchers (i.e. the coin has two sides), and as I tend to say, Open data in combination with AI is not only about unicorns and ice-cream.

And of course, from time to time, I refer to another topic, which was the very first topic of my interest in IT – security. The latest studies devoted to this topic by me were mainly devoted to the exploration of vulnerable databases across the Internet, which were inspected by means of IoTSE (Internet of Things Search Engines).

It also lead to the development of several studies. In order to avoid duplicates, here are listed most “purely” digitization-related studies, including some security-related studies, while the full list of articles with some others digitization-related studies can be found here:

I have also delivered some talks on this and related topics or participated in events relevant to them, including:

Past activities

This February I took part in Google.org supported programme launched by Riga TechGirls – the first community in Latvia aimed at educating and inspiring women and girls in IT, empowering them to be architects of the future – as both a speaker and lead mentor for the digital development workshop on Information and data literacy for more than 2000 Latvian teachers (read more…)


This November (8-10 November, 2021) I had an opportunity to take part in the Europe Biobank Week 2021 with this year’s theme “Biobanking for our Future – Opportunities Unlocked”, where I was honored to be represented in two posters as part of the Latvian Biomedical Research & Study centre team, where I work as an IT-expert. (read more…)


Recently I have delivered an Invited Talk at the International Conference and Expo on Nanotechnology and Nanomaterials 2021: “Open Data as a driver of Society 5.0: how you and your scientific outputs can contribute to the development of the Super Smart Society and transformation into Smart Living?“ (read more…)


This October (2021) we have successfully prepared and submitted the next INTEGROMED deliverable “Guidelines for the maintenance of efficient biobank, health register and research associated data management”. It aimed at improving awareness among all stakeholders within LBMC and outside it about the data ecosystem. We have inspected the current situation, identified weak aspects, defined the room for improvement and planned activities to be carried out. This set of guidelines should create a baseline for other (bio)medical organizations and be consistent with the cooperation-oriented biobank paradigm (read more…)