Digitization plays an important role in my academic activities, both in terms of 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 2000 Latvian teachers.

This is also a part of my professional activity. This applies not only to the studies I was 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 allow 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).

Some activities are briefly summarized below:

---

---

---

---

---

---

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, including:

• 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: Otmane, 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.)