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From “Data Quality for AI” to “AI for Data Quality Management”: Insights from BIR 2025

Anastasija Nikiforova Leave a comment

Back in September, our paper “From Data Quality for AI to AI for Data Quality: A Systematic Review of Tools for AI-Augmented Data Quality Management in Data Warehouses” was presented at the BIR Business Informatics Research Conference (BIR) in my hometown, Riga.

The paper, authored by my former student Heidi Carolina Tamm (now DW Lead Designer at Swedbank Estonia) and myself, explores a central question: can AI do more than just consume high-quality data—can it actively create and maintain it?

From “Data Quality for AI” to “Data Quality for AI & AI for Data Quality Management”

High-quality data underpins analytics, AI performance, and regulatory compliance, yet DQ management remains complex, resource-intensive, and often manual. With global data projected to reach 175 zettabytes by 2025, poor DQ carries real business costs—up to 19% of companies report customer loss due to inaccurate or incomplete data.

Traditionally, data quality (DQ) management focuses on ensuring AI has reliable, clean data. We propose a complementary perspective: using AI itself to enhance and automate data quality management. This is particularly relevant for enterprise data warehouses (DWs), which remain central despite the growth of decentralized and domain-driven architectures.

To this end, we systematically reviewed 151 DQ tools, evaluating their support for AI-augmented DQM, particularly automation of rule detection and anomaly identification. Key findings:

  • only 10 tools fully support AI-augmented DQM in data warehouses;
  • most tools focus on data cleansing rather than leveraging AI for rule discovery or explainable quality improvements;
  • metadata + rule-based + ML hybrid approaches show promise but remain underutilized;
  • SQL and natural language rule definitions are rarely supported, yet essential for practical use;
  • explainable AI and governance features are critical for trust;
  • cloud scalability with GDPR compliance is a must for enterprise adoption.

For organizations, AI-driven DQM goes beyond cleaning and profiling, enabling detection, enforcement, and explanation of data quality issues. This leads to better compliance, efficiency, and trust in enterprise data ecosystems.

For researchers and tool developers, there’s a clear need for next-generation DQ tools that are explainable, support SQL/natural language rules, integrate reconciliation logic, and operate under real-world regulatory and architectural constraints. LLMs and AI models can play a role, though they are not a silver bullet; early research shows strong potential.

Our study highlights that while AI has mainly been seen as a consumer of data quality, there is an untapped opportunity to use AI to actively improve DQ, shifting from “Data Quality for AI” to “Data Quality for AI and AI for Data Quality Management.” This research provides practical guidance for organizations and sets the stage for next-generation AI-augmented data governance and DQM solutions.

Read more in the article.

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!

Call for Papers: Accountable and Inclusive Digital Ecosystems for Public Value Creation — dg.o 2026

Anastasija Nikiforova Leave a comment

Call for Papers is now open for our track “Accountable and Inclusive Digital Ecosystems for Public Value Creation” at the 27th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o 2026). The conference will take place June 2–5, 2026, at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, USA.

This track continues and expands the work we initiated in 2024 and 2025 on public and open data ecosystems. Responding to new technological and societal realities, we broaden the focus this year toward AI-enabled, interoperable, sustainable, and human-centered digital ecosystems—their design, governance, and impact on public value creation.

Why this track? Why now?

Digital ecosystems are undergoing profound transformation. Emerging technologies—AI (including generative AI), interoperable data spaces, IoT, cloud–edge infrastructures, and new governance frameworks—now form the backbone of digital public action. These technologies unlock unprecedented opportunities for insight generation, collaboration, transparency, and service co-creation across sectors.

Yet they also introduce new challenges: ethics, accountability, trust, digital literacy, and inclusion. As governments and organizations navigate this shift, we need research that bridges technical innovation, institutional capacity, and societal expectations.

Our track provides a space for this conversation.

What the track explores

We invite contributions that examine the conceptual, technical, institutional, and societal dimensions of digital and data ecosystems, with an emphasis on accountability, sustainability, inclusivity, and public value.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

  • Ethical and accountable AI, data governance, algorithmic transparency, privacy, security
  • Interoperability and trust frameworks, identity infrastructures, standards, reference architectures
  • AI, Generative AI, LLMs, NLP, IoT/cloud/edge integration, green computing, Metaverse applications
  • Human–AI interaction, explainability, accessibility, inclusion in digital public services
  • Stakeholder engagement, empowerment, co-creation, digital literacy, data sovereignty
  • Institutional and organizational mechanisms for ecosystem governance and sustainable management
  • Open, public, and cross-sector data ecosystems, including data spaces and platform ecosystems
  • Social, economic, and environmental sustainability and other public value dimensions
  • Case studies from cities, communities, public-sector organizations, and multi-stakeholder collaborations
  • Impact assessments of digital ecosystems on individuals, organizations, and society

Connection to the dg.o 2026 theme

The conference theme—Collaborative Digital Transformation for Public Value Creation—aligns perfectly with our track’s purpose.
Digital ecosystems represent socio-technical infrastructures where governance, technology, and societal needs intersect. Understanding how to make these ecosystems accountable, inclusive, and sustainable is essential for collaborative digital transformation and for delivering tangible societal outcomes.

Track chairs

  • Anastasija Nikiforova, University of Tartu (Estonia)
  • Anthony Simonofski, Université de Namur (Belgium)
  • Anneke Zuiderwijk – van Eijk, Delft University of Technology (Netherlands)
  • Manuel Pedro Rodríguez Bolívar, Universidad de Granada (Spain)

Together, we bring perspectives from digital government, data governance, public administration, information systems, and socio-technical ecosystem design.

Submission details

Full CFP and submission guidelines are available here:
🔗 https://dgsociety.org/dgo-2026/

We look forward to receiving your submissions and to advancing the conversation on how accountable, inclusive, and sustainable digital ecosystems can drive the next generation of public value creation.

If you have questions about fit or ideas you’d like to discuss, feel free to reach out.

Turing Award winner Robert Tarjan visits University of Tartu

Anastasija Nikiforova Leave a comment

How often do you get to host a Turing Award winner? This week (12 May) we – University of Tartu Institute of Computer Science – hosted Robert Tarjan, who also delivered the public lecture “My Life with Data Structures”!

Robert Tarjan is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University and a preeminent figure in theoretical computer science. He is renowned for his pioneering work on graph algorithms and data structures, incl. union-find, Fibonacci heaps, splay trees & a linear-time algorithm for finding strongly connected components in a directed graph problems. Over his career, he has authored hundreds of influential papers that have shaped both theoretical and practical aspects of computer science. His work is widely cited, with around 100K citations. For his fundamental contributions, he was awarded the Turing Award — the highest distinction in the field of computer science, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing” (as of 2025, only 79 people have ever received it)- in 1986, among many other honors.


In his lecture, he covered data structures, his unique career path, life and science in the era of LLMs, future of traditional data structures in quantum era, gave advice for PhD students and early-career researchers and many more. Missed the talk? Watch the recording below.

It was our honor to host Robert Tarjan — an outstanding computer scientist, speaker, and truly generous person!

The Estonian Open Data Forum – Celebrating Progress and Recognizing Achievements

Anastasija Nikiforova 2 Comments

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!