Tag open science

The International Day of Women and girls in Science and my new role – Keynote Speaker for the international Innovation and Smart Government (ISGov) conference

Anastasija Nikiforova Leave a comment

And today, celebrating the International Day of Women and Girls in Science dedicated to celebration of both science and gender equality (as part of United Nations Transforming our World: 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development), I would like to share the information about very special event, in which I am invited to take a part – this time the role of mine is to be a keynote speaker for the international Innovation and Smart Government (ISGov) conference!!!

In case you are interested in topics related to public innovation, smart government, public governance, open government data, and changes in government organizations, I believe that this event, in which I will act as a keynote, could be of interest for you.

This conference aims to discuss cutting-edge solutions for the technology in government implementations. Propose alternatives and solutions for practical governmental problems and advance research in emergent trends. This conference seeks for contributions representing 4 different tracks:

  • TRACK 1. Smart Government and Public Innovation focused on research for public innovation and smart government in this challenging times. This track seeks research on new frameworks, ideas and evaluation of e-government services. Topics include but are not limited to: One-stop government – service integration, Digital Transformation of public administration, Governance for Smart Government, Framework for smart government, Frameworks and model of IT adoption for the smart government, Framework for governance and management the e government, Smart government public policies, Evaluation of e-government services, Adoption and implementation of AI in public organizations, Impacts on public governance, e-Government;
  • TRACK 2. Artificial Intelligence in Government  focused on discussing AI applications, experiences, and unintended consequences, drawing on a variety of methodologies, techniques, applications, theoretical frameworks, and empirical cases, in order to capture the unique phenomena triggered by the increasing adoption of AI. Topics include but are not limited to: Governance of AI, Trust in AI, AI Ethics, Applications or cases of AI use, AI-based public policy and public policies for AI, Machine learning techniques useful for government efficiency, AI frameworks for government;
  • TRACK 3. Open Government Innovations and challenges focused on research about open government and related topics, such as government transparency, citizen participation, accountability, open data, among others. This track seeks to concentrate and disseminate research work on new case studies, theoretical frameworks, and evaluation of institutional openness policies. 
  • TRACK 4. New digital technologies in public services focused on the investigation of the improvement of public services through new digital technologies. The investigations can be frameworks, applications, case studies, methodologies and empirical cases that allow knowing the impact of these technologies on public services. Topics include but are not limited to: Internet of Things in public services, Social and Mobile Media for Public Administration, Web-mobile ethics, Virtual Communities, Mobile technology in public services, Digital culture, Digital surveillance, tracking, and monitoring, Digital divide, AI-based technologies, Big data in Public Services, Wireless Technology in public services.

Two keynote speeches will be delivered during this event, delivered by J. Ramon Gil-Garcia and me. As regards Dr. J. Ramon Gil-Garcia, he is an Associate Professor of Public Administration and Policy and the  Director of the Center for Technology in Government, University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). He is considered the most prolific author in  the  field of digital government research worldwide and in 2013 he was selected for the Research Award, which is “the highest distinction given annually by the Mexican Academy of Sciences to outstanding young researchers.” More recently, Dr. Gil-Garcia was named “One of the World’s 100 Most Influential People in Digital Government” in 2018 and 2019 by Apolitical. Dr. Gil-Garcia is the author or co-author of articles in prestigious international journals in Public Administration, Information Systems, and Digital Government and some of his publications are among the most cited in the field of digital government research worldwide. His research interests include collaborative electronic government, inter-organizational information integration, smart cities and smart governments, adoption and implementation of emergent technologies, digital divide policies, and multi-method research approaches. This makes my participation as the second keynote to be even more pleasant for me as for relatively young researcher.

At this moment, the topics of our speeches are not very well known, since we both work actively on our ongoing studies and perhaps will be ready to present some the most recent results, but, hopefully, despite the final decision on the topic to be covered (within the general scope of the conference, of course) they will be of interest for the audience and will result in a lively and fruitful discussion!

And Happy International Day of Women and Girls in Science! 👩‍🎓💻

Research and Innovation Forum 2022 and my own panel on data security

Anastasija Nikiforova 1 Comment
Research and Innovation Forum 2022, Soruce: https://rii-forum.org/

This year I have been invited to organize my own panel session to take place during the Research and Innovation Forum (Rii Forum). This invitation was a follow-up to several articles I recently published (***see below) and Chapter I was developing at that time, and I was very glad to accept this invitation. So, what is this panel about? It is dedicated to data(base) security and is entitled “Security of data storage facilities: is your database sufficiently protected?” and is a part of the track called “ICT, safety, and security in the digital age: bringing the human factor back into the analysis“.

Another question to be asked is “why?” The answer is as follows – today, billions of interconnected devices form an Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. With an increasing number of devices and systems in use, the risk of security breaches increases. This even more the case in times of COVID-19 pandemics, when pandemics affected not only human beings’ health and lives but also lifestyle of the society, i.e. digital environment substituted the physical one. This led to an increase of cyber-security threats of different nature. At the same time, while security breaches and security protection mechanisms have been widely addressed in the literature, the notion of “primitive” artifact, such as database seems to have not been paid same attention of researchers and practitioners. But are databases always secure and protected by default, i.e. do databases follow the “security by design” principle? Previous research and regular updates on data leakages suggest that the number and nature of vulnerabilities of databases is very high. Several factors contribute to that and a variety of different measures can be employed to address the issue. Their complexity varies significantly. The aim of the panel is to examine both, the current research on data security, threats posed by weak security of databases, especially NoSQL databases, as well as the approaches to inspect and identify this issue with regards to the question of who owns data storage facilities, security by data storage facility type and country – whether this is country-specific or rather data storage facility-specific question?

In addition, this event and track to which my panel belongs to expects to cover broader security- and safety- related issue. To get a brief overview, let me provide an abstract of this track, which is as follows:

“The inroads of ICT in the fields of safety and security are overwhelming. While several opportunities have thus been created to foster the capacity of our security and defense systems, ICT is also the source of new risks and threats, e.g. cybersecurity issues and cyberwarfare. Amidst the debate on the added value that ICT may bring to the fields of public order (safety issues) and defending society from (mostly) external threats (security issues), ICT, and especially artificial intelligence (AI), has been hailed as the golden means to increased military capacity. The objective of this track is to map and explore recent advances in the field and to dwell on the question of the role of the human factor in contemporary defense systems, including the notions of leadership, administration, human-to-human interaction, and human-computer interaction. This track will be of particular interest to researchers and practitioners engaged with topics and issues relating to the military, policing, security, safety, and others” (source: Rii Forum)

In case you are interested in either my panel, or the track or the event in general, book the date – the event is scheduled to run on April 20-22, 2022 and will take place in hybrid mode, i.e. both online and offline modes will be acceptable. For those who prefer on-site events, it would be beneficial to know that it will be in Athens, Greece.

*** just in case you are interested in those articles I have referred to at the beginning of this post:

Europe Biobank Week 2021

Anastasija Nikiforova 1 Comment
Source: Europe Biobank Week 2021

This is a short note about Europe Biobank Week 2021, which took place in an online mode this year during 8-10 November. EBW is jointly organized by ESBB (European, Middle Eastern & African Society for Biopreservation and Biobanking) and BBMRI-ERIC with this year’s theme “Biobanking for our Future – Opportunities Unlocked”. The programme was plenty of very different events and opportunities, including rich programme of live presentations from high-level experts, and a collection of selected posters, where I was honored to be represented in two of them (14 main topics) as part of the Latvian Biomedical Research & Study centre team, where I work as an IT-expert.

One of them authored by me was presented within “Novel IT solutions, effective data storage, processing and analysis” section. This poster titled “Towards efficient data management of biobank, health register and research data: the use-case of BBMRI-ERIC Latvian National Node” (authors: Anastasija Nikiforova, Vita Rovīte, Laura Ansone) was devoted to the ongoing project (funded by the European Union under the Horizon 2020) called INTEGROMED – Integration of knowledge and biobank resources in comprehensive translational approach for personalized prevention and treatment of metabolic disorders, where some preliminary results of my activities on the inspecting and improving the ecosystem of the Latvian Biomedical Research and Study centre and then summarized and transformed into the set of guidelines towards efficient data management for heterogeneous data holders and exchangers, were presented.

European Biobank Week 2021, poster
“Towards efficient data management of biobank, health register and research data: the use-case of BBMRI-ERIC Latvian National Node” (authors: A. Nikiforova, V. Rovīte, L. Ansone)

Another poster titled “Development of a dynamic informed consent system for Latvian national biobank and citizen science data management, quality control and integration” (authors: Kante N., Nikiforova A., Kalēja J., Svandere A., Mezinska S., Rovīte V.) was presented under “Population-based cohorts – addressing global challenges for future generations” section and was dedicated to another project, which is funded by European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) – “DECIDE – Development of a dynamic informed consent system for biobank and citizen science data management, quality control and integration“.

“Development of a dynamic informed consent system for Latvian national biobank and citizen science data management, quality control and integration” (authors: Kante N., Nikiforova A., Kalēja J., Svandere A., Mezinska S., Rovīte V.)

This was another very nice experience!

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.

The Open Data Daily (PSI Monitor) and World Health Organization (WHO) recommend my article “Smarter Open Government Data for Society 5.0”

Anastasija Nikiforova 2 Comments

The Open Data Daily (PSI Monitor), World Health Organization, Europe PMC and FreeMedArt recommend my recently published article Smarter Open Government Data for Society 5.0: Are Your Open Data Smart Enough? (Sensors 2021, 21(15), 5204), in which I explore OGD portals of 60 countries in order to understand the correspondence of their content to the Society 5.0 expectations. The paper provides a report on how much countries provide these data, focusing on some open (government) data success facilitating factors for both the portal in general and data sets of interest in particular.

The idea lies in the fact that the open (government) data initiative as well as users’ intent for open (government) data are changing continuously and today, in line with IoT and smart city trends, real-time data and sensor-generated data have higher interest for users. These “smarter” open (government) data are also considered to be one of the crucial drivers for the sustainable economy, and might have an impact on information and communication technology (ICT) innovation and become a creativity bridge in developing a new ecosystem in Industry 4.0 and Society 5.0.

The presence of “smarter” data, their level of accessibility, availability, currency and timeliness, as well as support for users, are analyzed. The list of most competitive countries by data category are provided. This makes it possible to understand which OGD portals react to users’ needs, Industry 4.0 and Society 5.0 request the opening and updating of data for their further potential reuse, which is essential in the digital data-driven world. View Full-Text