Tag technology adoption

27th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2024): Celebrating the past, inspiring the future

Anastasija Nikiforova 2 Comments

This October was one of the busiest yet most rewarding months of the year for me. Among several work trips, the highlight was attending the 27th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2024) in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Celebrating its 50th anniversary, ECAI remains Europe’s premier venue for AI research and innovation, bringing together thought leaders, researchers, and industry professionals from around the world.

This year’s theme, “Celebrating the Past, Inspiring the Future,” captured the spirit of ECAI’s half-century legacy while driving forward-looking discussions on the next era of artificial intelligence. With over 1,500 participants from 59 countries (so not so very European conference anymore, but rather a global event) and a packed schedule of more than 150 events, among which:

  • “Towards Real-World Fact-Checking with Large Language Models” keynote talk by Iryna Gurevych, (Technische Universität Darmstadt), reflecting on advancements in using language models for verifying information in real time;
  • “Robots (Still) Need Humans in the Loop,” keynote talk by Iolanda Leite (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), who underscored the essential role humans play in AI-driven robotics, even as systems grow more autonomous;
  • “Economic Complexity: Using Machine Learning to Understand Economic Development” keynote talk by Cesar A. Hidalgo (Toulouse School of Economics & Corvinus University of Budapest) that examined how machine learning is transforming our understanding of economic trends and predictions.

These were accompanied with a range of panels, with a few sessions that stood out (my personal opinion though):

  • Economic Impact of AI: Threats and Opportunities with Jeremy Rollison (Microsoft Corporation), David Autor (MIT), and Raquel Jorge Ricart (Elcano Royal Institute) on AI’s potential to reshape labor markets and economies around the world;
  • AI Regulation: The European Scenario (Kilian Gross, Dr. Clara Neppel, IEEE, Beatriz Alvargonzalez Largo, European Commission, José Miguel Bello Villarino, ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society), addressed regulatory considerations;
  • 50th Anniversary Session on the History of AI in Europe paying tribute to AI’s history in Europe, with Luc Steels, Stefano Cerri, Fredrik Heintz, and Tony Cohn sharing reflections on past achievements and a “follow-up” on it in the Future of AI: The Next 50 Years with Fredrik Heintz, Iryna Gurevych, José Hernández-Orallo, Ann Nowe, Toby Walsh;
  • Designing Ethical and Trustworthy AI Research Policies for Horizon Europe centered on ethical standards and trustworthy AI research practices within the EU’s Horizon program, led by Mihalis Kritikos from the European Commission;
  • Funding your Scientific Research with the European Research Council (ERC) with Enrique Alba.

As part of this conference, I had pleasure of presenting a paper co-authored with my former student Jan-Erik Kalmus, based on his Master’s thesis, which I had the privilege of supervising. Our paper, “To Accept or Not to Accept? An IRT-TOE Framework to Understand Educators’ Resistance to Generative AI in Higher Education,” examined what barriers might prevent educators from adopting Generative AI tools in their classrooms? Since the public release of ChatGPT, there has been a lively debate about the potential benefits and challenges of integrating Generative AI in educational contexts. While the technology holds promise, it has also sparked concerns, particularly among educators. In the field of information systems, Technology Adoption models are often used to understand factors that encourage or inhibit the use of new technologies. However, many existing models focus primarily on acceptance drivers, often overlooking the unique barriers that educators face. This study seeks to fill that gap by developing a theoretical model specifically tailored to identify the barriers that may prevent educators—academic staff in particular—from integrating Generative AI into their teaching. Our approach builds on Innovation Resistance Theory, augmented by constructs from the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework. With the designed mixed-method measurement instrument, combining quantitative data with qualitative insights, to capture educators’ specific concerns around Generative AI adoption in higher education, our model has been applied in real-world settings, specifically focusing on Estonian higher education institutions. We examined whether academic staff at public universities in Estonia – often referred to as a “digital nation” – show reluctance toward Generative AI use in educational settings. Preliminary findings highlight several concerns unique to educators, which may shape how Generative AI is integrated into teaching practices.

A Heartfelt Thanks to ECAI’s Organizers – the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI), the Spanish Artificial Intelligence Society, CiTIUS (Research Centre on Intelligent Technologies), and, of course, the city of Santiago de Compostela for being such a welcoming place.

Track chairs: Anastasija Nikiforova, Marijn Janssen, Francesco Murredu

EGOV2024 – IFIP EGOV-CeDEM-EPART 2024 & 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 EGOV2023 – IFIP EGOV-CeDEM-EPART Emerging Issues and Innovations Track (chairs: Anastasija Nikiforova, Marijn Janssen, Francesco Mureddu).

EGOV2023 – 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 Ghent University and KU Leuven – both top 100 universities.

 Innovation and application of emerging technologies is 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-CeDEM-ePart conferences proved that one should not come to such a conclusion too easily. Upcoming technologies, innovative organizational solutions, or new avenues of involvement in public sector activities seem to be more commonplace – along with the potential issues and challenges that come with such endeavours. Policy-makers 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, that keep entering the public sphere. Ideas that are emerging but might not fit other conference tracks are also welcome. Focus may include but is not limited to:

  • 💡 Looking ahead into social innovation
  • 💡Future studies, the future of government, policy-making and democracy
  • 💡New trends in public sector research such as Metaverse, 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;
  • 💡Global challenges that go beyond nation states (such as migration, climate change etc.) and which require international collaboration of individual governments;
  • 💡Digital transformation in public sector context;
  • 💡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 known as Society 5.0;
  • 💡Government in the metaverse;
  • 💡Self-Service Structures for Inclusion;
  • 💡Public-private sector collaboration and integration;
  • 💡Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), smart contracts and blockchain;
  • 💡Preparing for the policy challenges of future technologies;
  • 💡Regulating misinformation;
  • 💡New technologies for automated decision-making;
  • 💡The future public sector use and regulation of latest AI or genAI solutions;
  • 💡Public use as well as regulations of industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0 and the Internet of Things (IoT);
  • 💡The relationships of governments and Fintech;
  • 💡Upcoming issues of eVoting / internet voting including application of digital signatures in the public sector;
  • 💡Online public community building;
  • 💡Utilization of digital billboards;
  • 💡Latest trends in co-creation and service delivery;
  • 💡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.

Track Chairs

  • Anastasija Nikiforova, Tartu University, Estonia
  • Marijn Janssen, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands
  • Francesco Mureddu, The Lisbon Council, Belgium

This time International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) EGOV-CeDEM-EPART will be hosted by KU Leuven and Ghent University, September 2024, while the deadline for submitting your paper is set to March, 2024.

Stay tuned, more info to come!

💬💬💬 Contributed talk for QWorld Quantum Science Days 2023 (QSD 2023)

Anastasija Nikiforova 1 Comment

In the very last days of May 2023, I had yet another experience – I delivered a contributed talk at QWorld Quantum Science Days 2023 (QSD 2023) titled “Framework for understanding quantum computing use cases from a multidisciplinary perspective and future research directions” (Ukpabi, D.C., Karjaluoto, H., Botticher, A., Nikiforova, A., Petrescu, D.I., Schindler, P., Valtenbergs, V., Lehmann, L., & Yakaryılmaz, A), which, in fact, is based on the paper we made publicly available some time ago and developed it even earlier when together with Germany, Spain, Finland, Romania, and Latvia we built a consortia and submitted a project proposal to CHANSE call “Transformations: Social and Cultural Dynamics in the Digital Age”. We went there much far beyond my expectations, i.e. in fact, we were notified that this time we will not be granted the funding for the project at the very last stage, having gone through all those intermediate evaluation rounds, which were already fascinating news (at least for me). While working on the proposal and building our network, we conducted a preliminary analysis of the area, which then, regardless of the output of the application, we decided to continue and bring to at least some logical end. We like our result so decided to make it publicly available. And now, a few years from that, we submitted our work to QWorld Quantum Science Days 2023 (QSD 2023) and were accepted. It was a big surprise, and I, as the person delegated by our team to present our study, delivered this talk, where I finally familiarized the audience with our findings. What was my surprise when my talk, which followed immediately after the keynote “Let’s talk about Quantum; Societal readiness through science communication research” delivered on behalf of Quantum DELTA NL by Julia Cramer, was in the very similar direction? It is also worth mentioning a very interesting coincidence that while the keynote elaborated on the DELTA that stands for five major quantum hubs, namely Delft, Eindhoven, Leiden, Twente, Amsterdam, I was preparing the last things for my presentation located in the Delta building – it is the name of the building my office is located in. In both cases, no connection with COVID-19 😀

🤔 What is the paper about?

There has been increasing awareness of the tremendous opportunities inherent in quantum computing. It is expected that the speed and efficiency of quantum computing will significantly impact the Internet of Things, cryptography, finance, and marketing. Accordingly, there has been increased quantum computing research funding from national and regional governments and private firms. However, ❗❗❗ critical concerns regarding legal, political, and business-related policies germane to quantum computing adoption exist ❗❗❗

Since this is an emerging and highly technical domain, most of the existing studies focus heavily on the technical aspects of quantum computing. In contrast, our study highlights its practical and social uses cases, which are needed for the increased interest of governments. More specifically, our study offers a multidisciplinary review of quantum computing, drawing on the expertise of scholars from a wide range of disciplines whose insights coalesce into a framework that simplifies the understanding of quantum computing, identifies possible areas of market disruption and offer empirically based recommendations that are critical for forecasting, planning, and strategically positioning QCs for accelerated diffusion.

"Framework for understanding quantum computing use cases from a multidisciplinary perspective and future research directions" (Ukpabi, D.C., Karjaluoto, H., Botticher, A., Nikiforova, A., Petrescu, D.I., Schindler, P., Valtenbergs, V., Lehmann, L., & Yakaryılmaz, A)

To this end, we conducted a gray literature research, whose outputs were then structured in accordance with Dwivedi et al., 2021 (Dwivedi et al. (2021). Setting the future of digital and social media marketing research: Perspectives and research propositions. International Journal of Information Management, 59, 102168), which embodies three broad areas—environment, users, and application areas—and the dominant sub-themes presented in figure below. We found that for application areas, business and finance, renewable energy, medicine & pharmaceuticals, and manufacturing are now the hottest. While for environment, we found subdomains such as ecosystem, security, jurisprudence, institutional change & geopolitics. And for the users, nothing surprising – as typically, customers, firms, countries. We then dive into each of those areas, as well as later come up with the most popular topics, the most promising, and overlooked.

Sounds interesting? Read the paper here, find slides here, watch video here.

Quantum Science Days is an annual, international, and virtual scientific conference organized by QWorld (Association) to provide opportunities to the quantum community to present and discuss their research results at all levels (from short projects to thesis work to research publications), and to get to know each other. The third edition (QSD2023) included 7 invited speakers, 10 thematic talks on “Building an Open Quantum Ecosystem”, 31 contributed talks, an industrial demo session by Classiq, and a career talk on quantum. QSD2023 was sponsored by Unitary Fund & Classiq and supported by Latvian Quantum Initiative.

Qworld

The International Open Data Day and my role of Keynote Speaker for the 5th International Conference on Advanced Research Methods and Analytics (CARMA 2023) 🎤🎤🎤

Anastasija Nikiforova Leave a comment

This post is dedicated to two very pleasant events for me, namely the international Open Data Day 🎉🍾🥂, and the announcement of the keynote talk that I was kindly invited to deliver at the 5th International Conference on Advanced Research Methods and Analytics (CARMA) organized and sponsored by Universidad de Sevilla, Cátedra Metropol Parasol, Cátedra Digitalización Empresarial, IBM, Universitat Politècnica de València, Joint Research Center – European Commission and 🥁 🥁 🥁 Coca-Cola – what a delicious conference!🍸🍸🍸

CARMA is a forum for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas and advances on how emerging research methods and sources are applied to different fields of social sciences as well as to discuss current and future challenges with main focus on the topics such as Internet and Big Data sources in economics and social sciences including Social media and public opinion mining, Web scraping, Google Trends and Search Engine data, Geospatial and mobile phone data, Open data and public data, Big Data methods in economics and social sciences such as Sentiment analysis, Internet econometrics, AI and Machine learning applications, Statistical learning, Information quality and assessment, Crowdsourcing, Natural Language processing, Explainability and interpretability, the applications of the above including but not limited to Politics and social media, Sustainability and development, Finance applications, Official statistics, Forecasting and nowcasting, Bibliometrics and sciencetometrics, Social and consumer behaviour, mobility patterns, eWOM and social media marketing, Labor market, Business analytics with social media, Advances in travel, tourism and leisure, Digital management, Marketing Intelligence analytics, Data governance, and Digital transition and global society, which, in turn, expects contributions in relation to Privacy and legal aspects, Electronic Government, Data Economy, Smart Cities, Industry adoption.

And as almost each and every conference, CARMA expects to have keynotes, which are two – Patrick Mikalef, who will talk about Responsible AI and Big Data Analytics, and me, whose keynote talk will be devoted to the topics I studied in recent years titled “Public data ecosystems in and for smart cities: how to make open / Big / smart / geo data ecosystems value-adding for SDG-compliant Smart Living and Society 5.0?” Sounds interesting? (I hope so) Stay tuned to know more! And return back, since I plan to reflect on the content of both talks and the conference in general.

The CARMA 2023 conference will be held on 28 June – 30 June 2023 in the University of Seville.