Tag genAI

AI, Data, and Public Benefit: Reflections from Data for Policy CIC 2025

Anastasija Nikiforova Leave a comment

At Data for Policy CIC 2025 in The Hague, themed “Twin Transition in Data and Policy for a Sustainable and Inclusive Future,” we explored how emerging technologies—especially AI—and diverse data sources can support accountable, inclusive, and sustainable policymaking.

Across several full days of sessions, the event brought together transdisciplinary researchers, policy practitioners, and technology experts. Notable contributions included:

  1. Research presentations – “Proactive-by-Design: The Future of Governance Beyond Bureaucracy?,” on the study we conduct with Paula Rodriguez Müller & Luca Tangi (European Commission JRC) and “The Data Agency Awakens: A New Era for Official Statistics” we prepared with Luca Di Gennaro Splendore
  2. Panel on National Data Strategies in Europe: Learning from and for the Dutch Data Strategy, which I joined the conversation as a panelists, along with Tim Faber (Ministry of Interior & Kingdom Relations), Anne Fleur van Veenstra, Iryna Susha, Adrianna Michałowicz (chaired by Devin Diran & Thijmen van Gend)
  3. finally, the paanel on Responsible AI and Data Science Revolutions: Implications for Public Benefit Research and Policy Making that I was honored to chair, with panelists representing Smart Data Foundry and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), joined by Magdalena Getler, Oliver Berry, and Rosario Piazza.

Our discussion highlighted the immense potential of AI and data, but also the responsibilities that come with it. Key insights included:

  • Balancing optimism and realism: AI is transformative, but its adoption requires grounded, practical experience. It can support public benefit—if managed carefully;
  • Data quality over quantity: More data isn’t always better. Governance, documentation, bias mitigation, and transparency are essential for AI-readiness;
  • Embedding public trust: High-sensitivity contexts, such as health or finance, demand proportionality, oversight, and systems designed for inclusivity;
  • Human-in-the-loop mechanisms: Ensuring AI reflects human values and context is critical, even when those values are evolving;
  • Task-appropriate AI: Not every problem requires a large language model; careful alignment between technology and purpose is essential;
  • Data literacy for all: Understanding AI’s limitations and risks is as important as technical infrastructure;
  • Triangulating perspectives: Combining structured/unstructured and qualitative/quantitative data helps address bias, power imbalances, and complexity;
  • Sustainable and inclusive systems: Scalable infrastructure alone is insufficient; AI governance and operational design must prioritize long-term societal benefit.

As Amara’s Law reminds us: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run.” Our discussion echoed this sentiment: AI’s potential is enormous, but realizing it for public benefit requires careful design, governance, and collaboration.

The overarching theme through all days (beyond above) was clear: AI and data are not neutral tools. Their value for public policy depends on human-centered design, responsible governance, and active societal engagement. Tools alone won’t deliver public benefit—they must be operationalized thoughtfully, with attention to ethics, context, and inclusion.

Huge thanks to Sarah Giest, Bram Klievink, Zeynep Engin, and all participating institutions—Leiden University, TNO Vector, Cambridge University Press & Assessment, and The Hague Centre for Digital Governance—for creating the space for meaningful dialogue in such a rich, collaborative environment.

The CIC 2025 conversations reminded us: building a truly responsible, inclusive, resilient, and sustainable AI ecosystem is not just a technical challenge—it is a societal mission and each and every of us is part of it.

Advancing Democracy & AI: Reflections from IJCAI, PRICAI, and ICA 2025 Workshops

Anastasija Nikiforova Leave a comment

Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping how societies govern, deliberate, and make collective decisions. Over the past year, our Democracy & AI workshop series—held across IJCAI, PRICAI, and ICA—has become a global forum for examining both the promise and the perils of AI in democratic contexts. From Montréal to Wellington to Wuhan, our community continues to grow, connecting researchers across AI, political science, HCI, law, design, ethics, and public administration.

DemocrAI at IJCAI 2025: AI at the Service of Society

As part of the IJCAI International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence in Montréal, themed “AI at the service of society,” we (Jawad Haqbeen, Takayuki Ito, Rafik Hadfi, and myself) convened the 6th International Workshop on Democracy & AI (DemocrAI25).
Although I could not attend in person, I am deeply grateful to my co-organizers for leading the workshop and for representing our team—as well as for the chance to meet Yoshua Bengio, one of the pioneers of modern deep learning and the one who recently became the very first researcher who while still being active in research achieved the milestone of 1 million citations!

The workshop opened with two outstanding keynote talks:

  • Mary Lou Maher (UNC Charlotte) — “The Imperative for AI Literacy”
  • Michael Inzlicht (University of Toronto) — “In Praise of Empathic AI”

Across 13 diverse presentations, contributors explored: AI’s impact on trust, civic engagement, and deliberation, risks and governance of LLMs in judicial settings and policymaking, collective intelligence and value aggregation for democratic processes, AI applications in education, law, and policy design, governance, fairness, inclusion, and global research equity.

We were delighted to recognize several exceptional contributions:

  • Best Paper Award — “LLMs in Court: Risks and Governance of LLMs in Judicial Decision-Making” (Djalel Bouneffouf & Sara Migliorini)
  • Best Student Paper Award — “Finding Our Moral Values: Guidelines for Value System Aggregation” (Víctor Abia Alonso, Marc Serramia & Eduardo Alonso Sánchez)
  • Best Extended Abstract Award — “Group Discussions Are More Positive with AI Facilitation” (Sofia Sahab, Jawad Haqbeen & Takayuki Ito)
  • Best Presentation Award — “Democracy as a Scaled Collective Intelligence Process” (Marc-Antoine Parent)

A key message echoed throughout the day: AI can enhance social cohesion, participation, and equity—but only through responsible design and robust governance frameworks.

DemocrAI at PRICAI 2025: Participation, Values, and Governance

Following IJCAI, I joined the organizing committee for the 7th Democracy & AI Workshop at PRICAI 2025, held in Wellington, New Zealand. Two years ago, I had the privilege of giving a keynote at PRICAI DemocrAI on symbiotic relationship of Artificial Intelligence, Data Intelligence, and Collaborative Intelligence for Innovative Decision-Making and Problem Solving. This year, I am excited to help shape the conversation from the organizing side.

The workshop explored the expanding role of AI in democratic life, including AI-assisted policy design and decision-making, AI in governance, elections, and public administration, citizen participation and deliberative democracy tools, behavioral impacts of AI on trust, engagement, and polarization, transparency, accountability, and legitimacy of algorithmic decisions, ethics, socio-technical risks, and AI’s impact on societal wellbeing, and reimagining democracy in the LLM era.

Special Track at ICA 2025: AI in e-Government & Public Administration

Our workshop series expands further with a dedicated Special Track on AI in e-Government & Public Administration at the IEEE International Conference on Agentic AI (ICA 2025), held in Wuhan, China.

Co-organized with Jawad Haqbeen, Takayuki Ito, and Torben Juul Andersen, this track examines how AI-driven tools are transforming public governance—from policy co-creation and civic engagement to service delivery and institutional decision-making.

Topics include:

  • AI for participatory and deliberative governance
  • AI’s impact on societal wellbeing
  • AI in public service delivery and policy design
  • Ethics and risk governance in public-sector AI
  • Case studies and experiments with deployed systems
  • Transparency, accountability, and responsible administration

Across IJCAI, PRICAI, and ICA, one theme is clear: AI’s role in democracy is neither predetermined nor neutral. It can support inclusion, transparency, and collective intelligence—or undermine trust, equity, and participation. The outcome depends on the choices we make now: the values we embed, the governance we build, and the communities we bring together.

Our Democracy & AI workshop series exists to advance this work—uniting technologists, policymakers, social scientists, designers, and ethicists in a shared mission: to ensure AI serves democracy, rather than the other way around.

Huge thanks to all speakers, awardees, participants, and co-organizers.
Onward to DemocrAI at PRICAI and ICA 2025!

EGOV2025 – IFIP EGOV-CeDEM-EPART 2025 & our Emerging Issues and Innovations Track

Anastasija Nikiforova Leave a comment

Are you focusing on new topics emerging in the field of ICT and public sector, incl. public-private ecosystems? Then it is time to start preparing your submission for EGOV2025 – IFIP EGOV-CeDEM-EPART Emerging Issues and Innovations Track, which this time we chair in the updated form, welcoming A. Paula Rodriguez Müller on the board with us – Francesco Mureddu (The Lisbon Council, Belgium)and myself – Anastasija Nikiforova (Tartu University, Estonia)).

EGOV2025 – IFIP EGOV-CeDEM-EPART is one of the most recognized conference in e-Government, ICT and public administration and related topics, which this year will be hosted in Belgium, in the heart of Europe, by University for Continuing Education Krems, Austria. This year, IFIP EGOV 2025 is dedicated to the broader areas of e-Government and e-Democracy, which include facets like Digital Government, e-Participation, Open Government,  Smart Government, AI government, GovTech, Algoritmic Governance, and related topics to digitalization and government.

Innovation and application of emerging technologies are now more and more in the thinking of governments at all levels. While it would be easy to consider the public sector as being less flexible or slow in adoption, presentations at recent EGOV conferences proved that one should not come to such a conclusion too easily. Upcoming technologies, innovative organizational solutions, or new avenues of public sector involvement in the public sector are becoming more commonplace along with the potential challenges and issues these bring. Policymakers and public sector officials are now expected to embrace change, consider digital transformation, or improve governance practices. At the same time, public sector researchers are also influenced by new views, methods, tools, and techniques. The goal of this track is to provide a platform for the discussion of new ideas, issues, problems, and solutions entering the public sphere. Ideas that are emerging but might not fit other conference tracks are also welcome. Focus may include, but are not limited to:

  • Looking ahead into social innovation;
  • Future studies, the future of government, policy-making and democracy;
  • The future of digital governance;
  • Public values in transforming the government;
  • The role of government in smart cities (incl. smart sustainable cities) and sustainable living;
  • The role of the public sector in Human-Centered Society (Society 5.0);
  • New trends in public sector research such as Metaverse, Cityverse, Large Language Models (LLMs), generative AI and its implementations such as chatGPT, Claude, ChatSonic, Poe – benefits, risks, adoption and resistance to its adoption by the public sector and citizens;
  • Government in the Virtual Worlds and Web 4.0;
  • Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), smart contracts and blockchain;
  • New technologies for automated decision-making and their policy implications;
  • Public sector use and regulation of AI, genAI, Industry 4.0, Industry 5.0, and the Internet of Things (IoT);
  • Digital Humanism (responsible and ethical integration of technology into society, ensuring that human values and dignity are prioritized in the development and use of digital tools and innovations);
  • The role of the public sector in competitiveness and tech sovereignty;
  • Global challenges that go beyond nation states (such as migration, climate change etc.) and which require international collaboration of individual governments;
  • Preparing for the policy challenges of future technologies;
  • Regulating misinformation;
  • Digital transformation in public sector contexts;
  • Self-Service Structures for Inclusion;
  • Public-private sector collaboration and integration;
  • GovTech initiatives and innovations;
  • Latest trends in co-creation and service delivery;
  • Online public community building;
  • Upcoming issues of eVoting / internet voting including application of digital signatures in the public sector;
  • Discussion of new research methods that have not been applied in this context;
  • Application of role theory in the analysis of public sector functions and processes;
  • Forward looking insights from case studies – let it be successful or failed experiments.
  • Utilization of digital billboards;
  • Public sector use and regulation of Fintech innovations;
  • Theoretical and practical approaches to experimentation and sandboxing in the public sector.Future studies, the future of government, policy-making and democracy

Stay tuned, more info to come!

45th International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS2024)

Anastasija Nikiforova 1 Comment

As the year comes to an end, so does the 45th edition of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS2024) —a conference filled with presentations, countless chats with old colleagues and friends and meeting new ones, and a tons of emotions coming from a warm Bangkok 🇹🇭

This year the conference held under theme “Digital Platforms for Emerging Societies” aimed at examining the expansive role of information technology in driving economic and societal transformation across the globe. Over 1.7K participants from 49 countries attended ICIS2024 this year, incl. Estonia 🇪🇪 – the only country of the Baltics – represented by both TalTech (Tallinn University of Technology) and finally University of Tartu (with me trying to bring the name of Latvia 🇱🇻 as well), in total accounting only three people – Mari-Klara Stein, myself and my PhD student – Dimitris Symeonidis, which is, however, a significant increase compared to previous editions, which is smth we – Mari-Klara and myself – are still not too happy about, as we still remain “rarities,” as I’ve been called several times, and will try to change that 👩‍🔬

The conference started for me with pre-ICIS Symposium SIGDSA (Special Interest Group on Decision Support and Analytics), which this year run under the “Emerging AI Platforms for Societal Good” theme, which was an action-packed day featuring a keynote by Apirak Kosayodhin (Former Governor of Bangkok), followed by a panel on the role of AI across society, business & academia, with Ofir T., discussing whether Artificial Intelligence, and GenAI in particular, is a “friend or foe” reflecting on our evolving attitudes toward it (through the lenses of other phenomenon, incl. dogs & how our attitudes towards them changed over centuries), Borworn Papasratorn addressing challenges of diffusing & adopting AI in Thai Higher Education Institutions, Kriengkrai Boonlert-U-Thai discussing the role of information technology in driving economic & societal transformation, moderated by Ramesh Sharda.

And as a follow-up to this, the paper of my former master student Jan-Erik Kalmus – “Generative AI adoption in higher education: exploring educator resistance in Estonian universities” was presented. In this study, Jan-Erik examined educator resistance to student use of GenAI in higher education focusing on Estonia, known as a “digital nation”, employing a theoretical model informed by the Innovation Resistance Theory (IRT) that we introduced in previous study presented at ECAI (on which I posted earlier).

It was continued with 7 hours of vibrant dialogue on digital government research as part of the pre-ICIS workshop on eGovernment, including:
✅the first ever study results of my 1st year PhD student – Dimitris Symeonidis – presented (“Reimagining Digital Government: a step towards Blockchain-Enabled Public Data Ecosystems”)
✅a concept of what we call Data Satellites introduced by Asif Gill as part of our “Towards a Data Satellite Architecture for Digital Government Ecosystems” study, in which we call for a data observability level missing in the current data ecosystems, thereby providing zero opportunities to get rid off or at least be informed about dark and toxic data (while the concept name might evolve based on community feedback, whereas happy that the concept itself found an acceptance with community, what we hoped for)
✅and 5 more super interesting studies by colleagues exploring digital transformation, AI in public administration (incl. framework to determine when AI is truly needed (i.e., smth close to the idea of automation as a default and the only in business process redesign – just don’t!), AI literacy, GenAI for citizen engagement), smart cities, and a methodological proposal for a soft digital ecosystem methodology for hybrid cities’ problem design
🎙️all of this masterfully moderated by Rony Medaglia – president of the current SIG-eGov, and tons of discussions around every study and the filed in general, incl. the future plans.

Finally, my first-year PhD student introduced himself to the IS community at probably the most prestigious IS conference, with yet another paper presented at the SIG SVC – AIS Special Interest Group for Services Workshop on Synergizing Service Ecosystems – “Integrating Generative AI with Public Data Ecosystems: Enhancing Decision Making and Efficiency in the Service Industry of the Private Sector”.

All in all, with four papers presented at three ICIS workshops & symposium, this was a very rich week, for which – a heartfelt thanks to the organizers!

CFP for AMCIS2025 “Sustainable Digital and Data Ecosystems – Navigating the Age of AI” mini-track

Anastasija Nikiforova 1 Comment

The Association for Information Systems (AIS) organized America’s Conference on Information Systems is coming! This year it will be held in Montreal (Canada), running under the general theme of “Intelligent technologies for a better future” and the revised list of (mini-)tracks, where the special attention I invite you to draw to is a new “Sustainable Digital and Data Ecosystems – Navigating the Age of AI” mini-track (chairs: Anastasija Nikiforova, Daniel Staegemann, George Marakas, Martin Lnenicka).

In an increasingly data-driven world, well-designed and managed digital and data ecosystems are critical to strategic innovation and competitive advantage. With the rise of new data architectures, the shift from centralized to decentralized systems, and the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in data management, these ecosystems are becoming more dynamic, interconnected, and complex.

The growing importance of emerging data architectures such as data lakehouses and data meshes coupled with the emerging technologies of AI, blockchain, cloud computing to name a few, requires us to rethink how we manage, govern, and secure data across these ecosystems. Moreover, AI is no longer a mere component but an active agent/actor in these ecosystems, transforming processes such as data governance, data quality management, and security. Simultaneously, there is a pressing need to address how these systems can remain resilient and sustainable in the face of technological disruption and societal challenges, and how interdisciplinary approaches can provide new insights into managing these digital environments.

This mini-track seeks to explore the evolving nature of these ecosystems and their role in fostering sustainable, resilient, and innovative digital environments.

We encourage research from an ecosystem perspective (grounded in systems theory) that takes a holistic view, as well as more focused studies on specific components such as policies, strategies, interfaces, methodologies, or technologies. Special attention will be paid to the ongoing evolution of these ecosystems, especially their capacity to remain trustworthy, sustainable, and resilient over time.

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

  • data management and governance in emerging data architectures (data lakehouse, data mesh, etc.), including data governance, data quality management, and security;
  • the role of AI in data management, including AI-augmented governance, data quality management, and security;
  • AI-driven resilience and sustainability in digital and data ecosystems, incl. AI-augmentation of data lifecycle- and business- processes;
  • conceptualization and evolution of digital and data ecosystem components and their interrelationships;
  • emerging technologies, such as blockchain, cloud computing, sensors etc., shaping the strategic development of digital and data ecosystems;
  • case studies on the transition from centralized (data warehouse, data lake, data lakehouse) to decentralized data architectures (e.g., data mesh);
  • human/user factors in digital and data ecosystems (acceptance, interactions, participation etc.);
  • empirical studies on the sustainability, trustworthiness, and resilience of digital ecosystems;
  • methodologies and strategies for managing evolving digital ecosystems in different sectors (e.g., finance, healthcare, government / public sector, education).
  • interdisciplinary approaches to building, managing, and sustaining digital and data ecosystems.

The research and innovation in digital and data ecosystems requires an interdisciplinary approach. Therefore, this track invites papers from various disciplines such as information systems, computer science, management science, data science, decision science, organizational design, policy making, complexity, and behavioral economics, and social science to continue the problematization exploration of concepts, theories, models, and tools for building, managing and sustaining ecosystems. These can be conceptual, design science research, empirical studies, industry and government case studies, and theoretical papers, including literature reviews.

As such, this mini-track will serve as a platform for interdisciplinary dialogue on the critical role of sustainable digital and data ecosystems in driving strategic innovation and competitive advantage. We invite researchers and practitioners alike to share their insights, theoretical perspectives, and empirical findings in this rapidly evolving domain.

This mini-track is part of “Strategic & Competitive Uses of Information and Digital Technologies (SCUIDT)” track (chairs: Jack Becker, Russell Torres, Parisa Aasi, Vess Johnson).

For more information, see AMCIS2025 website (for this (min-)track, navigate to “Strategic & Competitive Uses of Information and Digital Technologies (SCUIDT)” track).

Is your research related to any of the above topics? Then do not wait – submit! 📅📅📅Submissions are due February 28, 2025.