Tag invited speaker

Guest Lecture: Open data: ecosystem, current and future trends, success stories and barriers

October – the month of Guest Lectures

Anastasija Nikiforova Leave a comment

This autumn, and more precisely in October, there were a lot of public activities, including delivering my talk at the ICEGOV2021 (14th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (ICEGOV2021) “Smart Digital Governance for Global Sustainability“: “Towards enrichment of the open government data: a stakeholder-centered determination of high-value data sets for Latvia“ – this year I was able to take part in it in an online mode but hope this will change at some point), my Invited Talk delivered at the Nanotech2021, my participation in the Latvian Open Geospatial Data hackathon as a mentor – my team won, by the way 🙂 and my participation in the Europe Biobank Week 2021.

14th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance (ICEGOV2021) “Smart Digital Governance for Global Sustainability“: “Towards enrichment of the open government data: a stakeholder-centered determination of high-value data sets for Latvia“, Athens (hybrid mode)
Invited Talk, Nanotech2021
Open Geosaptial Data hackathon, mentor

Yet another experience was related to a very new experience – the guest lectures. In the past, I had a few minor experiences, but these were mostly short talks that cannot be considered as normal lectures or lectures delivered only to Latvian students. It’s changed this autumn!

This autumn has changed this! I was very pleased and honoured to serve twice as a Guest Lecturer this October. One lecture for the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN) on the open data – its ecosystem, barriers, current and future trends in both worldwide and Norway context (see slides here), focusing on data quality, which the audience found to be especially interesting. I was extremely pleased to have such a lively discussion on the variety of points that we were able to cover during this lecture, because students have shown both an interest in my talk and what is more – their knowledge and ability to think and elaborate on the given points even without prior knowledge in this area. A very educated and intelligent audience!

The second lecture, however, was delivered at my neighboring Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Latvia (Latvijas Universitāte), on the potential of open data, reflecting the Latvian case and pointing out some examples that we can take over from other countries (see slides here). This lecture will also stay in my memory as one with a very fruitful discussion – hopefully this conclusion will be the same for the audience!

To sum up, thank you, for those professors who have invited me to serve as a Guest Lecture – Salah Uddin Ahmed and Visvaldis Valtenbergs. Hope that this was a great experience for us both!

My first Invited Talk

Anastasija Nikiforova 2 Comments

Recently, I was invited to deliver my talk on the openness (open data and open science) in the context of Society 5.0 during the International Conference and Expo on Nanotechnology and Nanomaterials. It was very pleasant to receive an invitation to deliver the invited talk on my recently published article Smarter Open Government Data for Society 5.0: Are Your Open Data Smart Enough? (Sensors 2021, 21(15), 5204), which I have entitled as “Open Data as a driver of Society 5.0: how you and your scientific outputs can contribute to the development of the Super Smart Society and transformation into Smart Living?“. The paper has been briefly discussed in my previous post, thus, just a few words on this talk and overall experience. Although I have participated in different conferences as a speaker delivering presentations on my ongoing studies, this was my first experience of serving as an Invited Speaker, which is a sort of “Welcome to the senior league!”.

So, what was the main idea of the talk? Today, the open data and portals that provide these data and which can be accessed and used by everyone for their own needs became a daily phenomena. These phenomena became popular in science, contributing to the development of the concept of the “open science”, according to which making findings of the research available to the audience by means of articles, preferably OA, is not enough. Therefore, some more advanced guidelines have been defined and involved (or are involved, as is the case for (bio)medicine). These topic became valuable for both scientific and societal areas at (inter)national level. However, these initiatives, as well as users’ intent for open data, are evolving continuously and today, in line with IoT and smart city trends, real-time and sensor-generated data are of greater interest to users. This is all the more relevant for research-related data. These data may lead to solving problems that were not central research objects to the original data holders, improve previous results, establish cooperation to tackle challenges together. In addition, these data are considered to be one of the crucial drivers of a sustainable economy and can have an impact on information and communication technology innovation and become a creativity bridge in developing a new ecosystem in Industry 4.0 and Society 5.0. Although there are some studies reporting on open data and open science, understanding how and whether they have a positive impact on our lives at various levels and drives real transformation of the society, science, governments etc., this topic requires extensive work. Thus, in this talk I have provided my recent findings on this topic with some evidences of the importance of an “open science” trend, following the principles of open data. The aim of the talk is to make everyone ask themselves “am I promoting open science?” and “how can I promote open science?”.

Invited talk “Open Data as a driver of Society 5.0: how you and your scientific outputs can contribute to the development of the Super Smart Society and transformation into Smart Living?”

To sum up, this was the first Invited Talk I have delivered and this was a great experience at the larger stage…. and… what to say, I liked it! It was a pleasure to get a very positive feedback on the talk and to see an interest from the researchers representing very medicine-related domains. Thank you, the International Conference and Expo on Nanotechnology and Nanomaterials.