Some recent news / activities:

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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:

• 14th International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Systems (KMIS2022) – Putting FAIR principles in the context of research information: FAIRness for CRIS and CRIS for FAIRness (authors: Azeroual, Schopfel, Polonen, Nikiforova), October 24-26, Malta – best paper award
• Keynote for the International Innovation and Smart Government Conference (ISGOV2022) with the talk titled “Data as an asset for Sustainable Development of data-driven Smart Cities and Smart Society” – September 12-14 (web-based)
• Invited talk for 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?” – September 24 (web-based)
• Keynote for “Integration of open data and artificial intelligence in the development of smart cities in Africa” workshop organized as part of the African Cities Lab Project, keynote speaker with the talk on “Open data and crowdsourced data as enablers and drivers for smart African cities” – July 5 (web-based)
• International Conference on Intelligent Data Science Technologies and Applications (IDSTA20presenting the paper co-authored with my student – Digital health shopping assistant with React Native: a simple technological solution to a complex health problem (Govoruhina & Nikiforova), September 5-7, 2022, San Antonio, Texas, USA
• ONE Conference 2022 (Health, Environment, Society) – panelist of the “ONE society” thematic track, panel discussion “Turning open science into practice: causality as a showcase”, June 21-24, Brussels, Belgium
• The 12th Samos 2022 Summit on ICT-Enabled Governance in conjunction with the 9th International Summer School On Open and Collaborative Governance, July 4-8 2022, Samos, Greece
• DeepLearn 2022 Summer School (organized by Institute for Research Development, Training and Advice – IRDTA, Brussels/London, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Universitat Rovira i Virgili)
• European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and Evidence-Based Toxicology Collaboration (EBTC) joint workshop for setting the scene on the creation of a standard for data exchange in support of automation of Systematic Review – speaker / expert – July 7 (web-based)
• the 4th international conference on AIRSI2022 Technologies 4.0 in Tourism, Services & Marketing (AIRSI – Artificial Intelligence, Immersive Technologies, Social Networks and Internet of Things), extended abstract “Integrating AI into Customer Service: Improving the Actionability of Customer Feedback Analysis Using Machine Learning” (Salminen J., Mustak M., Rizun N., Revina A., Nikiforova A., Almerekhi H., Jung S., Jansen B.J.), July 11-13, web-based
• Invited Talk (2022) “Data Security as a top priority or what Internet of Things (IoT) Search engines know about you“, monthly “Virtual Brown Bag Lunch Talks” intended for the Information Technologies, Manufacturing, and Engineering Employees in Companies associated with Index Manufacturing Association (Mexico, web-based), June 16
• Guest Lecture (2022) “The role of open data in the development of sustainable smart cities and smart society“, the Federal University of Technology – Parana (UTFPR, Brazil), May 5
• 15th International Conference on Current Research Information Systems (CRIS2022) – Linking Research Information across data spaces: “Combining Data Lake and Data Wrangling for Ensuring Data Quality in CRIS“, May 11-14, Croatia (authors: Azeroual, Schopfel, Ivanovic, Nikiforova)
• Research and Innovation Forum 2022 (RiiForum2022): “Data security as a top priority in the digital world: preserve data value by being proactive and thinking security first“, April 20-22, 2022, Athens, Greece (hybrid mode)
• The Fifteenth International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS2021): “Digitalization in Sports to Connect Child’s Sport Clubs, Parents and Kids: Simple Solution for Tackling Social and Psychological Issues“, Cyprus (web-based) (authors: Marcenko I., Nikiforova A.)
• The 4th International Workshop on Data Science Engineering and its Applications (DSEA 2020) in conjunction with The Seventh International Conference on Social Networks Analysis, Management and Security (SNAMS-2020): “Towards a Concurrence Analysis in Business Processes” (web-based)
• Europe Biobank Week 2021, Section “Novel IT solutions, effective data storage, processing and analysis” – “Towards efficient data management of biobank, health register and research data: the use-case of BBMRI-ERIC Latvian National Node” (authors: Nikiforova A., Rovīte V., Ansone L.)
• Europe Biobank Week 2021, Section “Population-based cohorts – addressing global challenges for future generations” – “Development of a dynamic informed consent system for Latvian national biobank and citizen science data management, quality control and integration” (authors: Kante N., Nikiforova A., Kalēja J., Svandere A., Mezinska S., Rovīte V.)

Past activities

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