Tag AI ethics

HICSS2026 Sustainable and Trustworthy Digital and Data Ecosystems for Societal Transformation mini-track

Anastasija Nikiforova Leave a comment


Are you researching sustainable and trustworthy digital ecosystems? Then, submit your work to our HICSS2026 “Sustainable and Trustworthy Digital and Data Ecosystems for Societal Transformation” mini-track we chair together with Daniel Staegemann and Asif Gill at the Association for Information Systems Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-59)!

In an era where data is the foundation of digital transformation, well-designed and managed sustainable and trustworthy digital and data ecosystems are critical for artificial intelligence (AI), strategic innovation, governance, competitive advantage, and trust in increasingly digital societies. With the rise of new data architectures (e.g., data meshes and data lakehouses), the shift from centralized to decentralized systems, and the integration of AI in data governance and management among others emerging technologies (e.g., blockchain, cloud computing), these ecosystems are becoming more dynamic, interconnected, and complex. However, alongside their potential benefits that is a common focus of the research around these ecosystems, challenges related to trustworthiness, transparency, security, sustainability, and governance must be addressed.

HICSS2026 “Sustainable and Trustworthy Digital and Data Ecosystems for Societal Transformation” mini-track we chair together with Daniel Staegemann and Asif Gill invites research on how digital and data ecosystems evolve in terms of resilience, trustworthiness, and sustainability while enabling strategic innovation and societal transformation. We welcome studies that explore the interplay between AI, data governance, policies, methodologies, human factors, and digital transformation across sectors such as finance, government, healthcare, and education.
We seek theoretical, empirical, design science, case study, and interdisciplinary contributions on topics including, but not limited to:

  1. AI, trustworthiness, and governance in digital and data ecosystems:
    • AI as an actor and stakeholder in data ecosystems;
    • AI-augmented governance, security, and data quality management;
    • human factors in AI-integrated ecosystems (trust, user acceptance, participation);
    • interoperability, observability, and data linking across ecosystems;
  2. Emerging technologies and strategic innovation:
    • transition from centralized to decentralized data architectures (e.g., data lakehouses, data meshes);
    • emerging technologies for trustworthy ecosystems;
    • AI-driven business process augmentation and decision-making;
    • industry and government case studies on evolving data ecosystems;
  3. Resilience and sustainability of data ecosystems:
    • ethical AI and responsible innovation in data ecosystems;
    • sustainability and long-term governance of digital and data infrastructures;
    • cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary approaches for building sustainable ecosystems;
    • impact of data democratization on digital transformation and innovation.

By combining the strengths of strategic innovation, trustworthy AI, and data ecosystem governance, this track expects to offer a holistic perspective at the intersection of information systems, AI governance, data science, and digital transformation. It will serve as a platform for researchers and practitioners to explore how digital and data ecosystems can be sustainable, resilient, and trustworthy while driving innovation and societal transformation.

We welcome conceptual, empirical, design science, case study, and theoretical papers from fields such as information systems, computer science, data science, management and process science, policy-making, behavioral economics, and social sciences.

This mini-track is part of HICSS59 “Organizational Systems and Technology” track (chairs: Hugh Watson and Dorothy Leidner) and more information about it can be found here.

CFP for Data For Policy 2024 is open!

Anastasija Nikiforova Leave a comment

And CFP for Data For Policy 2024 scheduled for 9-11 July, 2024 is open! All submissions are welcome with the deadline of 27 November, 2023.

This year Data For Policy conference, which is organized in collaboration with Imperial College London and Cambridge University Press will take place in London, UK, and will be running under the title “Decoding the Future: Trustworthy Governance with AI” – trendy, isn’t it? In this edition the conference “[we] are focusing on the future of governance and decision making with AI. Firstly, what are the emerging capabilities, use cases, and best practices enabling innovation that could contribute to improved governance with AI? Secondly, what concerns are being raised regarding these advancements in areas such as data, algorithms, privacy, security, fairness, and potential risks? For both discussions, we invite proposals that delve into the role and capacity of governance in preventing AI-related harms and explore the potential for governance to generate added value through responsible AI deployment. For a more thorough consideration of the conference theme, please read this informative blog, by Zeynep Engin and conference co-chairs.“

Data for Policy is looking forward to your submission to one of six areas of the respective Data & Policy journal, which are transformed into the tracks for this conference. In addition, this list is complemented with a rich list of 11 special tracks.

Of course, my personal recommendation is to consider Area 1 “Digital & Data-driven Transformations in Governance” (chairs: Sarah Giest, Sharique Manazir, Francesco Mureddu, Keegan McBride, Anastasija Nikiforova, Sujit Sikder). More specifically, the track seeks for contributions on topics that include but are not necessarily limited to:

  • From data to decisions: knowledge generation and evidence formation;
  • Process, psychology and behaviour of decision-making in digital era;
  • Government operations and services;
  • Government-citizen interactions; and open government;
  • Democracy, public deliberation, public infrastructure, justice, media;
  • Public, private and voluntary sector governance and policy-making.


Of course, do not ignore other tracks since each and every track definitely deserves your attention:

  • Area 1: Digital & Data-Driven Transformations in Governance – the one I just suggested;
  • Area 2: Data Technologies & Analytics for Governance;
  • Area 3: Policy & Literacy for Data;
  • Area 4: Ethics, Equity & Trustworthiness;
  • Area 5: Algorithmic Governance;
  • Area 6: Global Challenges & Dynamic Threats;
  • Special Track 1: Establishing an Allied by Design AI ecosystem
  • Special Track 2: Anticipating Migration for Policymaking: Data-Based Approaches to Forecasting and Foresight
  • Special Track 3: AI, Ethics and Policy Governance in Africa
  • Special Track 4: Social Media and Government
  • Special Track 5: Data and AI: critical global perspectives on the governance of datasets used for artificial intelligence
  • Special Track 6: Generative AI for Sound Decision-making: Challenges and Opportunities
  • Special Track 7: Governance of Health Data for AI Innovation
  • Special Track 8: Accelerating collective decision intelligence
  • Special Track 9: Artificial Intelligence, Bureaucracy, and Organizations
  • Special Track 10: AI and data science to strengthen official statistics
  • Special Track 11: Data-driven environmental policy-making

To sum up:

🗓️ WHEN? 9-11 July, 2024 -> deadline for papers and abstracts – 27 November, 2023

WHERE? London, UK

WHY? To understand what are the emerging capabilities, use cases, and best practices enabling innovation that could contribute to improved governance with AI? what concerns are being raised regarding these advancements in areas such as data, algorithms, privacy, security, fairness, and potential risks? For a more thorough consideration of the conference theme, please read this.

Find your favorite among tracks and submit! See detail on the official website.

IFIP EGOV-CeDEM-EPART 2023 – retrospective on how it was? From Metaverse to wine tasting

Anastasija Nikiforova 1 Comment

It finally took place! EGOV2023 – IFIP EGOV-CeDEM-EPART – one of the most recognized conference in e-Government, ICT and public administration and related topics (incl., Smart Cities, Sustainability, Innovation and many more) that lasted 3 days in charming city of Budapest (Hungary) is over, and I am here to reflect on it (just in a few words), since although these were just 3 days, they were very busy and full of insights, as well as activities, since every day I took another role, i.e., day#1 – presenter of the paper, day#2 – workshop organizer, day#3 – chair of two out of three sessions of “Emerging Issues and Innovations” track I co-chaired together with Marijn Janssen, Csaba Csaki and Francesco Mureddu. Not to forget, in this conference I am also a program committee of Open Data track.

Let me now provide a few insights on all these days, including my roles.

Let’s start with day#1… After conference opening by Ida Lindgren and Csaba Csaki – our local host, who did a great job – organized a very unique conference with exceptionally rich social programme, a brilliant keynote talk was delivered by Professor Yogesh K Dwivedi (possibly the most impactful researcher in the area) on Metaverse for Government and associated Challenges, Opportunities, as well as Future Research Agenda, as part of which the claim of a lack of studies on this topic was made. Luckily, our track “Emerging Issues and Innovations” has accepted one paper on Metaverse in digital government, which was the only at the conference, however, unfortunately, the discussion had not happened due to earlier departure of Yogesh and late arrival of authors. Anyway, almost immediately after the keynote the session, where I delivered a talk on HVD determination “Towards High-Value Datasets determination for data-driven development: a systematic literature review” (authors: Nikiforova, Rizun, Ciesielska, Alexopoulos, Miletić) took place. Just to remind you, I posted on this paper before – this is that paper, which has been already named “signal in the noise“, in which we asked ourselves and the current body of the knowledge (this is a systematic literature review-driven study):
❓how is the value of the open government data perceived / defined? Are local efforts being made at the country levels to identify dataset that provide the most value to stakeholders of the local open data ecosystem?
❓What datasets are considered to be of higher value in terms of data nature, data type, data format, data dynamism?
❓What indicators are used to determine HVD?
❓Whether there is a framework for determining country-specific HVD? I.e., is it possible to determine what datasets are of value and interest for their reuse & value creation, taking into account the specificities of the country, e.g., culture, geography, ethnicity, likelihood of crises and/or catastrophes.
Although neither OGD, nor the importance of data value are new topics, scholarly publications dedicated to HVD are very limited that makes study unique and constituting a call for action – probably this is also why it it is recommended for reading not only by us but also by The Living Library (by New York University, NYU Tandon School of Engineering, govlab). All in all, we have established some knowledge based, incl. several definitions of HVD, data-related aspects, stakeholders, some indicators and approaches that can now be used as a basis for establishing a discussion of what a framework for determining HVD should look like, which, along with the input we received from a series of international workshops as part of ICEGOV2022, ICOD2022 and DGO2023 with open data experts could enrich the common understanding of the goal, thereby contributing to the next open data wave.
👉Read the paper here
👉See slides here
👉Find supplementary data in open access at Zenodo here
Here I am very grateful to session attendees for raising a discussion around the topic, where some of those comments confirmed once more the correctness of both the problem statement and our future plans – thanks a lot!

Day#2 of started with another keynote talk, whcih this time delivered by Andras Koltay (President of the National Media and Infocommunications Authority and the Media Council of Hungary) on the protection of freedom of expression from social media platforms – very different but yet very insightful talk. Then, my second role of the workshop organizer and chair followed. As part of our workshop “PPPS’2023 – Proactive and Personalised Public Services: Searching for Meaningful Human Control in Algorithmic Government” (chairs: Anastasija Nikiforova, Nitesh Bharosa, Dirk Draheim, Kuldar Taveter). As part of this workshop, which took place in a hybrid mode (not an easy task), we initiated a discussion about personalised and Proactive Public Services, i.e.:
🎯talked about the concepts of public services, reactive and proactive models of public services, and models of their personalization;
🎯asked participants to share their views on public services and the levels of proactivity and personalisation of these services in their countries aiming to develop concepts for holistic proactive and personalised public service delivery;
🎯tried to establish a clearer vision of the “as-is” model and the necessary transition to the “to-be” model, their underlying factors, as well as pitfalls of which governments should be aware when designing, developing, and setting up proactive and personalised public services, trying to understand what are those emerging technologies that will likely have greater effect on public services in terms of both driving them or creating obstacles / barriers for their development and maintenance.
Read a bit more 👉 here
Special thanks to all participants, who attended and were very active (and survived)!

And now a few insights from day#3, when three sessions of our Emerging Issues and Innovations track (chairs: Marijn Janssen, Anastasija Nikiforova, Dr. Csaba Csaki, Francesco Mureddu) finally took place, where I was delighted to chair two of these sessions. Within these three sessions, 8 very diverse, but at the same time super interesting and insightful talks were delivered (predominantly from the United Nations University and Sweden), namely:
✍Metaverse vs. metacurse: The role of governments and public sector use cases by Charmaine Distor, Soumaya Ben Dhaou, & Morten Meyerhoff Nielsen that can be seen as a continuation of the keynote talk by Prof. Yogesh Dwivedi delivered at the 1st day;
✍Dynamic Capabilities and Digital Transformation in Public sector: Evidence from Brazilian case study by Larissa Magalhães;
✍Affording and constraining digital transformation: The enactment of structural change in three Swedish government agencies by Malin Tinjan, Robert Åhlén, Susanna Hammelev Jörgensen & Johan Magnusson
✍The Vicious Cycle of Magical Thinking: How IT Governance Counteracts Digital Transformation by Susanna H. Jörgensen, Tomas Lindroth, Johan Magnusson, Malin Tinjan, Jacob Torell & Robert Åhlen
✍Buridan’s Ass: Encapsulation as a Possible Solution to the Prioritization Dilemma of Digital Transformation by Johan Magnusson, Per Persson, Jacob Torell & Ingo Paas
✍Measuring digital transformation at the local level: assessing the current state of Flemish municipalities by Lieselot Danneels & Sarah Van Impe
✍Blockchain and the GDPR – the shift needed to move forward by Inês Campos Ruas, Soumaya Ben Dhaou & Zoran Jordanoski
✍Construct Hunting in GovTech Research: An Exploratory Data Analysis by Mattias Svahn, Aron Larsson, Eloisa Macedo and Jorge Bandeira
Read papers 👉 here, here & here
Big thanks go to both authors and presenters, as well as the audience, who was very active (even despite the fact that it was the very last day of the conference) and made these sessions a success!
And right after these two sessions, the third keynote by Laszlo Trautmann “The ethics of expertise – the political economy implications of AI”.


And the last but not the least, yet another social event – wine tasting at Etyeki Kúria Borászat / Winery, which was the perfect happy end of the EGOV2023!

Exceptional organization by Corvinus University of Budapest, Csaba Csaki and his team, International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), Digital Government Society – cheers!🍷🍷🍷

KMIS2022_Best_Paper_Award

14th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K): how it was and who got the Best Paper Award?

Anastasija Nikiforova Leave a comment

In this post I would like to briefly elaborate on a truly insightful 14th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K), where I was honored to participate as a speaker, presenting our paper “Putting FAIR principles in the context of research information: FAIRness for CRIS and CRIS for FAIRness” (authors: Otmane Azeroual, Joachim Schopfel and Janne Polonen, and Anastasija Nikiforova), and as a chair of two absolutely amazing sessions, where live and fruitful discussions took place, which is a real indicator of the success of such! And spoiler, our paper was recognized as the Best Paper! (i.e., best paper award goes to… :))

IC3K consists of three subconferences, namely 14th International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval (KDIR), 14th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development (KEOD), and 14th International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Systems (KMIS), where the latter is the one, to which my paper has been accepted, and also won the Best Paper Award – I know, this is a repetition, but I am glad to receive it, same as the euroCRIS community is proud for us – read more here…!

Briefly about our study, with which we mostly wanted to urge a call for action in the area of CRIS and their FAIRness. Of course, this is all about the digitization, which take place in various domain, including but not limited to the research domain, where it refers to the increasing integration and analysis of research information as part of the research data management process. However, it is not clear whether this research information is actually used and, more importantly, whether this information and data are of sufficient quality, and value and knowledge could be extracted from them. It is considered that FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, Reusability) represent a promising asset to achieve this. Since their publication (by one of the colleagues I work together in European Open Science Cloud), they have rapidly proliferated and have become part of both national and international research funding programs. A special feature of the FAIR principles is the emphasis on the legibility, readability, and understandability of data. At the same time, they pose a prerequisite for data and their reliability, trustworthiness, and quality. In this sense, the importance of applying FAIR principles to research information and respective systems such as Current Research Information Systems (CRIS, also known as RIS, RIMS), which is an underrepresented subject for research, is the subject of our study. What should be kept in mind is that the research information is not just research data, and research information management systems such as CRIS are not just repositories for research data. They are much more complex, alive, dynamic, interactive and multi-stakeholder objects. However, in the real-world they are not directly subject to the FAIR research data management guiding principles. Thus, supporting the call for the need for a ”one-stop-shop and register-once use-many approach”, we argue that CRIS is a key component of the research infrastructure landscape / ecosystem, directly targeted and enabled by operational application and the promotion of FAIR principles. We hypothesize that the improvement of FAIRness is a bidirectional process, where CRIS promotes FAIRness of data and infrastructures, and FAIR principles push further improvements to the underlying CRIS. All in all, three propositions on which we elaborate in our paper and invite  everyone representing this domain to think of, are:

1. research information management systems (CRIS) are helpful to assess the FAIRness of research data and data repositories;

2. research information management systems (CRIS) contribute to the FAIRness of other research infrastructure;

3. research information management systems (CRIS) can be improved through the application of the FAIR principles.

Here, we have raised a discussion on this topic showing that the improvement of FAIRness is a dual or bidirectional process, where CRIS promotes and contributes to the FAIRness of data and infrastructures, and FAIR principles push for further improvement in the underlying CRIS data model and format, positively affecting the sustainability of these systems and underlying artifacts. CRIS are beneficial for FAIR, and FAIR is beneficial for CRIS. Nevertheless, as pointed out by (Tatum and Brown, 2018), the impact of CRIS on FAIRness is mainly focused on the (1) findability (“F” in FAIR) through the use of persistent identifiers and (2) interoperability (“I” in FAIR) through standard metadata, while the impact on the other two principles, namely accessibility and reusability (“A” and “R” in FAIR) seems to be more indirect, related to and conditioned by metadata on licensing and access. Paraphrasing the statement that “FAIRness is necessary, but not sufficient for ‘open’” (Tatum and Brown, 2018), our conclusion is that “CRIS are necessary but not sufficient for FAIRness”.

This study differs significantly from what I typically talk about, but it was to contribute to it, thereby sharing the experience I gain in European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), and respective Task Force I am involved in – “FAIR metrics and data quality”. It also allowed me to provide some insights on what we are dealing with within this domain and how our activities contribute to the currently limited body of knowledge on this topic.

Putting FAIR principles in the Context of Research Information: FAIRness for CRIS and CRIS for FAIRnessDownload

A bit about the sessions I chaired and topics raised within them, which were very diverse but equally relevant and interesting. I was kindly invited to chair two sessions, namely “Big Data and Analytics” and “Knowledge management Strategies and Implementations”, where the papers on the following topics were presented:

  • Decision Support for Production Control based on Machine Learning by Simulation-generated Data (Konstantin Muehlbauer, Lukas Rissmann, Sebastian Meissner, Landshut University of Applied Sciences, Germany);
  • Exploring the Test Driven Development of a Fraud Detection Application using the Google Cloud Platform (Daniel Staegemann, Matthias Volk, Maneendra Perera, Klaus Turowski, Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany) – this paper was also recognized as the best student paper;
  • Decision Making with Clustered Majority Judgment (Emanuele D’ajello , Davide Formica, Elio Masciari, Gaia Mattia, Arianna Anniciello, Cristina Moscariello, Stefano Quintarelli, Davide Zaccarella, University of Napoli Federico II, Copernicani, Milano, Italy.
  • Virtual Reality (VR) Technology Integration in the Training Environment Leads to Behaviour Change (Amy Rosellini, University of North Texas, USA)
  • Innovation in Boutique Hotels in Valletta, Malta: A Multi-level Investigation (Kristina, University of Malta, Malta)

And, of course, as is the case for each and every conference, the keynotes are panelists are those, who gather the highest number of attendees, which is obvious, considering the topic they elaborate on, as well as the topics they raise and discuss. IC3K is not an exception, and the conference started with a very insightful discussion on Current Data Security Regulations and the discussion on whether they Serve or rather Restrict the Application of the Tools and Techniques of AI. Each of three speakers, namely Catholijn Jonker, Bart Verheijen, and Giancarlo Guizzardi, presented their views considering the domain they represent. As a result, both were very different, but at the same time leading you to “I cannot agree more” feeling!

One of panelists – Catholijn Jonker (TU Delft) delivered then an absolutely exceptional keynote speech on Self-Reflective Hybrid Intelligence: Combining Human with Artificial Intelligence and Logic. Enjoyed not only the content, but also the style, where the propositions are critically elaborated on, pointing out that they are not indented to serve as a silver bullet, and the scope, as well as side-effects should be determined and considered. Truly insightful and, I would say, inspiring talk.

All in all, thank you, organizers – INSTICC (Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication), for bringing us together!