This October, I had the distinct honor of participating in Estonia’s premier event on open data, the Open Data Forum (Avaandmete foorum), organized by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications of Estonia, invited to talk about the role of academia and private sector in the open government data landscape. This annual gathering brings together industry experts, academic researchers, and government leaders to discuss key trends, achievements, and the future of open data in Estonia, along with highlighting the contributions coming from universities awarding the best dissertations developed by Estonian students. The latter made this event very special for me, as one of my students – Kevin Kliimask – was awarded for his outstanding bachelor’s thesis 🏆 🥇 🏅!
In his thesis –“Automated Tagging of Datasets to Improve Data Findability on Open Government Data Portals,” Kevin developed an LLM-powered interface to automate dataset tagging in both English and Estonian, thereby augmenting metadata preparation by data publishers and improving data findability on portals by users – as the practice shows their presence tend to be a challenge. E.g., our analysis conducted on the Estonian Open Data Portal, revealed that 11% datasets have no associated tags, while 26% had only one tag assigned to them, which underscores challenges in data findability and accessibility within the portal, which, according to the recent Open Data Maturity Report, is considered trend-setter. The developed solution was evaluated by users and their feedback was collected to define an agenda for future prototype improvements. The thesis has been already transformed into the scientific paper 👉 “TAGIFY: LLM-powered Tagging Interface for Improved Data Findability on OGD portals“ presented at the IEEE international conference (I posted on this earlier 👉 here).
As for my talk titled “Unlocking the Power of Open Data: The Role of Academia and the Private Sector in Building Inclusive and Sustainable Open Data Ecosystems,” I emphasized the need for a holistic approach to open data that transcends merely opening/publishing data, rather requiring adopting a systemic view that considers an open data initiative as an Open Data Ecosystem (also confirmed by Open Data Charter 👉here), as we deal not only with open data (availability), portal, stakeholders, actors, but also processes surrounding them, emerging technologies & different forms of intelligence, going beyond just Artificial Intelligence, whose role, however, is crucial (see our paper on the eight-fold role of AI in OGD).
As such, while discussing the main idea of the talk – the role of academia & the private sector in the ODE, which as per me is at least four-fold, namely – data consumers, data providers, contributors to ODE sustainability & myth busters on the global stage (assigning “Made in Estonia” tag to OGD in addition to the one we have for e-government), I also expanded the general mantra of “Data For AI” to “data for AI, AI for data, data not only for AI and not only AI for data”.
A big thank you to the organisers, who gathered so many speakers (Cybernetica, FinEst Centre for Smart Cities, Riigi Infosüsteemi Amet // Estonian Information System Authority (NCSC-EE), University of Tartu and many others) to discuss the highlights of today & tomorrow for Estonian Open Data and High-Value Datasets in particular as it was the main focus of the Forum – was happy to be part of these discussions!
This May, I had a pleasure to deliver one more guest lecture for master and doctoral students of the Federal University of Technology – Paraná (Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná (UTFPR))as part of Smart Cities course delivered by prof. Regina Negri Pagani. This time the topic of my lecture was “Unlocking the symbiotic relationship of Artificial Intelligence, Data Intelligence, Collaborative Intelligence, and Embodied Intelligence for innovative urban planning and governance of Smart Cities”.
In the pursuit of enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of Artificial Intelligence, it is imperative to explore synergies with other form of intelligence, such Data Intelligence and Collaborative intelligence. These forms of intelligence (along with Embodied Intelligence) constitute a new transformative paradigm of intelligence proposed by Verhulst et al. (2021) that offers potential for increased added value when synergized. However, their synergy requires understanding and harnessing the symbiotic relationship between these intelligences. The reimagination of decision making and problem-solving processes, is essential to unlock this symbiotic potential fostering more meaningful, but at the very same time more sustainable AI utilization. In other words, AI itself brings a certain value that can be (and must be) increased through integration with other forms of Intelligence. This, in turn, has a list of preconditions / prerequisites that must be satisfied by the above – Artificial, Data, Collaborative, and Embodied Intelligence – components. These prerequisites are diverse in nature and span both the artifacts in question, such as AI, data (type, format, quality, value, availability, accessibility, incl. openness), stakeholders’ skills and literacies, but also management and organizational aspects. In other words, each form of Intelligence influences the others, making it crucial to explore their interconnections. This talk endeavoured to uncover this intricate web of relationships between the three forms of intelligence, taking a step towards a more meaningful and intelligent approach to decision making and problem solving.
This followed up by the fruitful discussion with the participants of the course that I enjoyed very much. I can only hope that this lecture was just a little bit as interesting as my dear Regina characterized it! There is nothing better than hear an immediate invitation for the next editions of this course – will be glad to continue this tradition!
The very last days of the year give us all time to reflect on what the past year has brought us. This years and these very last days of it are no exception. As usually, I will skip the part about pains and tears and try to focus only on positive things, because at the end of the day, “that which does not kill us makes us stronger” (Friedrich Nietzsche). Otherwise, this year has been full of a lot of different events and experiences, so I indeed want to take a moment and summarize what has so little time for some things (actually, not because you are lazy – as I often think of myself (a moment when people who know me well can laugh a little), but because you were busy with other things you gave you preference / priority over others).
So, how has 2023 been or what am I grateful for?
First of all, given the amount of emotion they bring, I am grateful for all those conferences I attended this year, serving as both – a part of the organizing committee, the program committee, the chair – chairing my (co-)organized workshops, the track (co-)chair, the speaker – presenting my works, or even serving as a keynote & invited speaker, as well as a plenary speaker and taking part in the “meet the publisher” session as a representative (Area Editor) of the journal. In total, I attended 13 international conferences (some of which I attended virtually), with some more events of a more national and/or regional nature.
Let me start with the role of keynote speaker, as I finally added another continent to “my list” of keynotes this year. Surprisingly, it was Europe. In other words, in previous years I have already served as a keynote or invited speaker at events in Latin America, Asia, Africa, but this year I gave 4 more talks in Asia and finally in Europe – 3 keynote talks / invited talks 🙂 (not to say how cool I am, but rather to express my gratitude to those who invite me to deliver keynote talks, despite my relatively young age but being interested in the content I deliver).
Moreover, I had the pleasure of covering all those topics that I love and deal (or dealt) with, namely public/ open data ecosystems, data quality management, information systems / data security, and intersection of artificial intelligence, data intelligence and collaborative intelligence. Moreover, I had the exceptional pleasure of delivering them to very different audiences, where two talks were delivered to academic circles (CARMA2023 and DemocrAI as part of PRICAI), one – to participants of one of the leading hackathons in Europe (HackCodeX Forum), and one – to representatives of industry (CyberCommando’s meetup 2023):
In addition, plenary debates within the Research and Innovation Forum 2023 “Innovation 5.0: Navigating shocks and crises in uncertain times Technology-Business-Society” (RiiForum2023): “Advances in ICT & the Society: threading the thin line between progress, development and mental health“, where I was kindly invited to take part as one of plenary speakers, is another wonderful experience worth mentioning, especially, when you are invited with the line stating that your “expertise and your contribution to the academic debate make you one of the trendsetters in current debate on open data and data quality management“. As part of this event, we – Prof. Dr. Yves Wautelet, Prof. Dr. Marek Krzystanek, Karolina Laurentowska & Prof. Marek Pawlicki – discussed disruptive technologies and their role in our professional lives in the past years, how they affected us and our colleagues, how they affect(ed) society and its specific groups, including their mental health, and general perception of technology, i.e. an enemy of humanity, or rather a friend and support, and how to make sure the second take place. And from this we have developed a discussion around AI, chatGPT, Metaverse, blockchain, even slightly touching on quantum computing. Of course, all this was placed in the context of democracy and freedoms / liberties. All in all, we approached the topic of governance and policy-making, which is too often reactive rather than proactive, which, in turn, leads to many negative consequences, as well as elaborated on the engineering practices. You can read about this here.
In addition, two international workshops were (co-)organized and chaired by me this year and took place as part of IFIP EGOV-CeDEM-EPART 2023 and dg.o 2023, namely:
The other role of session chair is particularly special as it allows you to actively participate in the discussion of all the works presented in those sessions, as well as to “drive” and “direct” the discussion established and developed by and with others participants. Therefore, I am often pleased to accept an invitation to chair sessions, and this year I did it for:
EGOV2023 – IFIP EGOV-CeDEM-EPART 2023, “Emerging Issues and Innovations” track
ICCNS2023 – The International Conference on Intelligent Computing, Communication, Networking and Services
Research and Innovation Forum 2023 “Innovation 5.0: Navigating shocks and crises in uncertain times Technology-Business-Society”
iMeta and FMEC 2023 – The International Conference on Intelligent Metaverse Technologies & Applications in conjunction with the The Eighth IEEE International Conference on Fog and Mobile Edge Computing (FMEC)
At some of these conferences, along with some others, I also serve as part of the program or even organizing committee, which allows me to be closer to the event itself, being involved in it as much as possible. This, of course, requires some efforts (at times a lot of them), but still it is a very valuable experience that allows to derive many valuable insights for developing yourself – for this opportunity this year I am grateful to all those 18 conferences that I managed to count (EGOV, AMCIS, iLRN2023 etc.), in which I have been involved in one or another capacity, taking one or another role that spans from publicity chair to steering committee member. Similarly, it is always a pleasure for me to serve as invited reviewer for high-quality journals (15+), as well as to serve as editor for some of them.
Of course, the above involves participation in these conferences as a speaker/ presenter, presenting your own papers. Therefore, the next point to mention and express my gratitude to both my colleagues – co-authors, reviewers, editors and many more, are those contributions that were published or born this year.
That is, several articles were published this year – 22 to be more precise, some of which were simply published in 2023, although they were written earlier (including my past collaboration with Quantum Humanities network, the Latvian Biomedical Research and Study Centre, BBMRI-ERIC Latvian National Node and others), 9 of which are journal papers (incl. both Government Information Quarterly – a top journal in public administration, social science and information science, and Nature-based European Journal of Human Genetics), 2 are book chapters, 8 – conference papers and 3 – whitepapers & reports, including those published by the European Commission (developed together with my colleagues from European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Task Force “FAIR metrics and data quality”):
Shao, D., Ishengoma, F.R., Alexopoulos, C., Saxena, S., Nikiforova, A. and Matheus, R. (2023), “Integration of IoT into e-government”, Foresight, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/FS-04-2022-0048, Q2 (Business and International Management, Economics, Econometrics and Finance), IF: 1.581, CiteScore: 3.1
Azeroual, O., Schöpfel, J., Pölönen, J., Nikiforova, A. (2023). FAIRification of CRIS: A Review. In: Coenen, F., et al. Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management. IC3K 2022. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1842. Springer, Cham
Wilkinson MD, Sansone SA, Méndez E., David R., Dennis R., Hecker D., Kleemola M., Lacagnina C., Nikiforova A., Castro L. (2023) Community-driven governance of FAIRness assessment: an open issue, an open discussion [version 2; peer review: 2 approved with reservations]. Open Res Europe 2023, 2:146 (https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.15364.2)
“Towards High-Value Datasets determination for data-driven development: a systematic literature review” (Nikiforova A., Rizun N., Ciesielska M., Alexopoulos C., Miletič A.) received a recommendation from 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, has included it in their collection. This is already the second paper recommended by the Living Library (the first one was this paper) that is recommended by them, what makes me very proud – thanks a lot!
According to ResearchGate calculated Interest Score, my score is higher than 99% of ResearchGate members who first published in the same year as me, namely, 2018, which, however, means that more globally, i.e., among all ResearchGate members my current Research Interest Score is higher than 90% of researchers registered in it – although there is a lot of room for improvement, I still find it to be something to be grateful for to all my colleagues with whose support this has been achieved.
Moreover, this year I was listed in the Stanford University database of top 2% scientists! I recognize that this is just a single year category for 2022, and it is about sub-fields (Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems, Information Communication Technologies) same as I realize that citation metrics-based evaluations is not the best approach to assessing the impact and quality of research & researcher (although this database not only acknowledges, but also tries to tackle this issue to some extent), but for me it is a real achievement that made this year special!
Here I would also like to acknowledge the achievements of others, since this year I also witnessed 4 PhD defenses, acting as both opponent, internal reviewer and defense committee, all of which were successful. Here, I would like to once again congratulate both new PhD holders, namely:
Dr. Rozha K. Ahmed and her PhD thesis “Digital Transformation of Court Processes: Driving Forces, Success Factors, Regulations and Technology Acceptance” (TalTech – Tallinn University of Technology, TalTech School of IT) – read it here;
Dr. Abiola Paterne Chokki and his PhD thesis “Open Government Data: Empowering Reuse through Collaboration, Data Quality, and Data Storytelling” (The University of Namur / Université de Namur) – read it here;
Dr. Sidra Azmat Butt and her PhD thesis “A Digital Collaborative Platform to Facilitate Innovative Solutions for the Silver Economy” (TalTech – Tallinn University of Technology) – read it here;
Dr. Abasi-amefon Affia, who has successfully defended her PhD thesis “A Framework and Teaching Approach for IoT Security Risk Management” (University of Tartu) – read it here;
But, of course, I tried not only to acquire new knowledge and develop new skills or improve existing ones, but also to share them with others – students – my own (Business Process Management, as well as Systems Modelling courses) and of my colleagues, colleagues, pupils, school teachers, industry and others. This year I had a few more opportunities to do this by:
continuing collaboration with Latvian Open Technologies Association and serving as a mentor for Open Data hackathon and Idea Generator (this year focused on digital wallet) for pupils, organized by the Latvian Open Technologies Association with the support of Vides aizsardzības un reģionālās attīstības ministrija (VARAM)/ Ministry of Environmental Protection and Regional Development of Republic of Latvia, Latvijas Valsts radio un televīzijas centrs / Latvia State Radio and Television Centre, Valsts izglītības satura centrs / National Centre for Education of the Republic of Latvia, E-Klase, NOBID Consortium, Rīgas Tehniskā universitāte (Riga Technical University), European Commission and supporters – Omniva, ZZ Dats, Latvijas Banka/ The Bank of Latvia and others. This year the main topic of the hackathon was Digital Wallet for secure identification and wide service opportunities within Europe, as part of which dozens of pupils brought on the table great ideas on how the combination of open data and digital wallets can contribute to the development and improvement in such a different sectors, and improve lives of society – with healthcare, wellbeing, sustainability, ecology and simplification of processes as the main topics covered by participants (read a bit more here). This was my fourth hackathon in a row with LATA and it seems not the last;
continuing collaboration with the “School of Excellence” (latv. Izcilības skola), organized by the “Vertikāle” Youth Foundation in cooperation with the University of Latvia (Latvijas Universitāte) for the most promising 10th-12th grade students / brightest minds, helping them make decision about their future career. In this invited lecture, we looked at several topics that they could connect they career with – computer science, information systems, software engineering, artificial intelligence, collaborative intelligence, data intelligence, data quality management, open data, open government data – I hope this will help them make a decision, and, hopefully in favor of IT! This was my third time participating in this series of lectures, and I was already unofficially invited to continue this “tradition”;
continuing collaboration with Riga TechGirls as part of their exceptional program supported by Google.org (“Google Impact challenge” grant, in addition to local supporters such as the Ministry of Education and Science of Latvia, the Ministry of Culture, Riga city council (Rīgas Dome)), titled “Human on technology”, which is intended for more than 2000 Latvian teachers with the aim of disrupting technophobia and provide them with digital skills that are “must-have” in this digital world/ era, where in the last two years I have acted as both the lecturer and the lead mentor for the digital development workshop held as a part of the “Information and data literacy” module (read more…)
making a short research visit to the Université de Namur (Belgium), where I delivered a seminar on my past, current and future research activities, mainly focusing on two areas, namely Data Quality Management, and the open data-, open government data- and public data ecosystems- related topics, covering both technological and social aspects of the above, and their role in the context of Smart City, Society 5.0, sustainable development with the general title of the seminar “Data Ecosystems: from User Centered systems engineering to (open) data management for sustainable and smart living & society”. I was very surprised by a high attendance and very grateful to everyone who managed to find the time for this, especially those colleagues who brought some others – it was a great discussion of different viewpoints, which followed by the closed defense of Abiola Paterne Chokki that fit nicely this discussion as well!
Finally, several ongoing activities to be mentioned includes:
“Sustainable Public and Open Data Ecosystems” track we (chairs: Anastasija Nikiforova, Anthony Simonofski, Anneke Zuiderwijk & Manuel Pedro Rodríguez Bolívar) launched as part of the Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o2024) and awaits your submissions (read more here);
This is a very short list of the events that I wanted to emphasize, and therefore, a short list of what I am grateful for this year and all those who were or are part of it. Overall, it was a busy and eventful year, to which I grateful for all the positive experiences and opportunities to transfer existing knowledge and acquire new ones from all those events and people I met there. I hope the next year will be even better. And in this regard, I wish us all a peaceful, joyful and productive year, in which we can cooperate and collaborate exclusively with those we respect and want to work with!
This November I was glad to deliver a keynote at The 3rd International Workshop on Democracy and AI (DemocrAI2023) held in conjunction with the 20th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI2023), which I entitled “Unlocking the symbiotic relationship of Artificial Intelligence, Data Intelligence, and Collaborative Intelligence for Innovative Decision-Making and Problem Solving”.
In the pursuit of enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of Artificial Intelligence, it is imperative to explore synergies with other form of intelligence, such Data Intelligence and Collaborative intelligence. These forms of intelligence (along with Embodied Intelligence) constitute a new transformative paradigm of intelligence proposed by Verhulst et al. (2021) that offers potential for increased added value when synergized. However, their synergy requires understanding and harnessing the symbiotic relationship between these intelligences. The reimagination of decision making and problem-solving processes, is essential to unlock this symbiotic potential fostering more meaningful, but at the very same time more sustainable AI utilization. In other words, AI itself brings a certain value that can be (and must be) increased through integration with other forms of Intelligence. This, in turn, has a list of preconditions / prerequisites that must be satisfied by the above – Artificial, Data and Collaborative Intelligence – components. These prerequisites are diverse in nature and span both the artifacts in question, such as AI, data (type, format, quality, value, availability, accessibility, incl. openness), stakeholders’ skills and literacies, but also management and organizational aspects. In other words, each form of Intelligence influences the others, making it crucial to explore their interconnections. This talk endeavoured to uncover this intricate web of relationships between the three forms of intelligence, taking a step towards a more meaningful and intelligent approach to decision making and problem solving.
As part of this talk we referred to the theory of multiple intelligences by Howard Gardner presented in his famous book “Frames of Mind: A Theory of Multiple Intelligences”. Then. we referred to the above mentioned intelligence paradigm proposed by Stefaan G. Verhulst, Peter Martey Addo, Dominik Baumann, Juliet Mcmurren, Andrew Young, Andrew J. Zahuranec in “Emerging Uses of Technology for Development: A New Intelligence Paradigm” To put it into the context of the workshop devoted to the role of AI to solving challenging problems by current-day communities and promoting conversational democracy, including but not limited to AI tools in social platforms, we reflected on democratic process, their variety – monitorial, deliberative and participatory democratic processes, and Democratic Activity Model of Open Data Use (DAMODU) proposed by Ruijer, E., Grimmelikhuijsen, S. and Meijer. Then, we finally turned to the discussion on the symbiotic relationship of Artificial Intelligence, Data Intelligence, and Collaborative Intelligence in several contexts with a focus on public and open data ecosystems, which included a brief reflections and outcomes on previous research jointly conducted with my colleagues (such as our paper on open data ecosystems, their calssification, transparency etc.) and indicating future avenues in the light of changing paradigms (or need for such) of both, intelligences, public and open data ecosystems, mechanisms for users (and citizens) engagement and processes accompanying these ecosystems.
This followed up by the fruitful discussion with the participants of the conference that I enjoyed very much (regardless of the fact it was 4AM my time 🙂 since the conference took place in Jakarta). Great thanks to the organizers of The 3rd International Workshop on Democracy and AI (DemocrAI2023) and 20th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI2023) for having me!
Anastasija Nikiforova, PhD 