Tag urban data

Wrapping up 2024!🍾🥂🎇

Anastasija Nikiforova Leave a comment

It is already a good tradition at the end of the year to take a moment and wrap up the year, thus reminding myself of what was actually done, thus explaining to myself that maybe I am not as lazy as I think. However, in this post I would like to rather thank those colleagues who were with me in this. As such, let me very briefly summarize what happened (or rather with whom) and what to come in the first months of next year with the later to be spotlighted by me early next year accordingly.

This year I had the opportunity to share my experience, but more importantly, learn from others by participating in panels or plenary sessions, some of which stood out as generating some of the liveliest discussions during and after the events:

  • “Citizen urban data and smart metropolis monitoring” together with Jaewon Peter Chun (President of World Smart Cities Forum), Redouane El Haloui (President of APEBI Fédération des technologies d’information de télécommunication et de l’offshoring), Mahdi Barouni (The World Bank), Khouloud Abejja (Digital Transformation Director, Agence de Développement du Digital-ADD), Youssef El Maddarsi (CEO Naoris Consulting) that held as part of a Casablanca Smart City event (read a bit more here);
  • panel on Trust in AI together with Nicolas Cruz B., Korbinian Bösl, and Anamika Chatterjee as part of the Digital Life Norway conference oganized by Centre for Digital Life Norway (Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)), with my big thanks to Elisabeth Hyldbakk, Ingrid Shields, Kam Sripada, and many more colleagues for hospitality;
  • “Sociotechnical Transformation in the Decade of Healthy Ageing to empower the Silver Economy: Bridging the Silver Divide through Social and Digital Inclusion” with Hsien-Lee Tseng, Chin-Chien Jao, Azmat Butt, Dirk Draheim, Li-chuan Liu as part of 25th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o 2024) (read a bit more here)

To continue on discussions around research that I truly enjoyed, several conferences or tracks to which I served as one of organizers to be highlighted with credits to go to my colleagues, namely:

Selected papers from DGO2024 and EGOV2024 were invited to the “Towards sustainable public and open data ecosystems” Special Section with Information Polity, which we successfully a few weeks ago with the very last preparations before we can announce its final version – big thanks to both co-editors – Anthony, Pedro, and Anneke, as well as Albert Meijer, Kim Willems, William Webster, who supported us in the process, and the authors – Mohsan Ali, Georgios Papageorgiou, Abdul Aziz, Euripidis Loukis, Yannis Charalabidis, Charalampos Alexopoulos, and Francisco Javier López Pellicer, Alejandra Vargas, Rikke Magnussen, Birger Larsen, and Ingrid Mulder and Hsien-Lee Tseng. Stay tuned for the information about this Section!

Together with Jérôme Chenal, Stéphane C. K. Tekouabou and El Arbi Allaoui Abdellaoui we almost finalized our “Emerging Data- and Policy-driven Approaches for African Cities Challenges” Special Issue with Cambridge Press Data & Policy journal – again, stay tuned!

While the two above are those we are ready with, there is another very special issue we have together with Asif Gill, Ina Sebastian, Martin Lněnička and Anushri Gupta and tremendous assistance of Katina Michael – Special Issue “Trustworthy Data Ecosystems for Digital Societies” with IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society (read a bit more here) and we look forward your submission by 30 June 2025 very much!

And of course, several conferences where I shared my own research, gathering feedback and inspiration for future research, with brightest moments coming from The 25th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (DGO2024) (read a bit more here), and big thanks to my personal host Hsien-Lee Tseng, EGOV2024 and my special hosts Cesar Casiano Flores & Caterina Santoro, 27th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2024) (read a bit more here), International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS2024) (a bit more here), and several more, where I was fortunate this year to not only present my own research but also introduce my students to the community. Some of these conference papers have already expanded into journal papers, with some exciting news to share early next year!

I am also very grateful to my colleagues for their invitations to join the International Journal of Information Management (IJIM, Elsevier) and Government Information Quarterly (GIQ) Editorial Boards, Communication Committee at Digital Government Society (and one of its Chapter on which I will post later, similar to several other recent updates), and European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) FAIR Metrics and Digital Objects task force, which is rather continuation of the TF I participated in the past (“FAIR Metrics and Data Quality”).

On a slightly different note, similar to previous years, I continued delivering some courses and lectures to other universities, such as:

I am also grateful for several recognitions I have received this year (e.g., being named the best reviewer for a journal, or called to be “the top 2% of scientists“ for the second year in a row (Stanford Elsevier Top Scientists List) and top 0.5% of all scholars worldwide (0.2% in Government specialty) by SholarGPS), but probably the proudest moment for every academic is the success of our students, and as such, I want to especially mention Kevin Kliimask, whose thesis recognized by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications of Estonia at the annual Open Data Forum (Avaandmete foorum) as the best thesis of the year 🏆 🥇 🏅 (read a bit more here).

I also want to acknowledge achievements of others – this year I witnessed 3 PhD defenses and would like to congratulate Eric Jackson, Richard Dreiling and Lisa Miasayedava again, especially for such insightful discussions – I know I am quite a tough person to have in the committee (esp. as opponent – sorry Liza and Eric), but you all did a great job and I really enjoyed our discussions!

And I will skip the part about published conference and journal papers, as well as submitted project proposals and those currently in development.  Instead, some disclaimer about what is to come, with some posting at later point:

  • in the very first weeks of January, meet my very good colleagues– Anthony and Nicolas – at HICSS presenting our paper “Artificial Intelligence as a Catalyzer for Open Government Data Ecosystems: A Typological Theory Approach”, which has been already spotlighted several times, including by The Living Library, whose main goal is to identify the “signal in the noise”
  • keep an eye open for several conferences for which together with colleagues of mine we organize (mini-) tracks, with probably the most important for me at the moment:
  • AMCIS mini-track Sustainable Digital and Data Ecosystems – Navigating the Age of AI;
  • DGO2025 – “Sustainable Public and Open Data Ecosystems for Inclusive and Innovative Digital Government” track we continue with Anthony Simonofski, Anneke Zuiderwijk;
  • EGOV2025 – Emerging Issues and Innovations Track – we continue in the updated form welcoming Paula Rodriguez Muller who will be joining me and Francesco Murredu!
  • And for Data for Policy CIC, we will slightly change the role we played the last year, and together with Sarah Giest, Bram Klievnik Iryna Susha, Florin Coman Kund, Leid Zejnilovic Laura, we are very excited to invite you to the Data for Policy CIC 2025 Conference (Leiden University, The Hague, Netherlands 🇳🇱) for which we serve as Regional Conference Committee
  • Finally, do meet me at European Open Data Days 2025 in March to discuss recent (and future) advances in the world of open data with me sharing insights on how Artificial Intelligence can serve as a catalyst for transforming public and open data ecosystems, exploring the various AI roles at data, portal and ecosystem levels driving innovation, enhancing governance, and boosting citizen engagement;
  • and meet me as a keynote for the International Conference on Innovative Approaches and Applications for Sustainable Development (I2ASD) in April with more details to come!

This is rather a very short list of the events and people I wanted to emphasize, and my apologizes if I missed someone (and I definitely missed). All in all, it was a busy and eventful year,  – really grateful for all the opportunities it brought to me and lessons (both positive and negative, rather willing to have positive ones only though) and people I met. I really hope that the next year will be even better. And in this regard, I wish us all a peaceful, joyful and productive year!

Thank 2024 and bye! Welcome 2025! Happy 2025!

Guest Lecture for the Federal University of Technology – Paraná (UTFPR) on “Unlocking the symbiotic relationship of Artificial Intelligence, Data Intelligence, Collaborative Intelligence, and Embodied Intelligence for innovative urban planning and governance of Smart Cities”

Anastasija Nikiforova 1 Comment

This May, I had a pleasure to deliver one more guest lecture for master and doctoral students of the Federal University of Technology – Paraná (Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná (UTFPR)) as part of Smart Cities course delivered by prof. Regina Negri Pagani. This time the topic of my lecture was “Unlocking the symbiotic relationship of Artificial Intelligence, Data Intelligence, Collaborative Intelligence, and Embodied Intelligence for innovative urban planning and governance of Smart Cities”.

In the pursuit of enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of Artificial Intelligence, it is imperative to explore synergies with other form of intelligence, such Data Intelligence and Collaborative intelligence. These forms of intelligence (along with Embodied Intelligence) constitute a new transformative paradigm of intelligence proposed by Verhulst et al. (2021) that offers potential for increased added value when synergized. However, their synergy requires understanding and harnessing the symbiotic relationship between these intelligences. The reimagination of decision making and problem-solving processes, is essential to unlock this symbiotic potential fostering more meaningful, but at the very same time more sustainable AI utilization. In other words, AI itself brings a certain value that can be (and must be) increased through integration with other forms of Intelligence. This, in turn, has a list of preconditions / prerequisites that must be satisfied by the above – Artificial, Data, Collaborative, and Embodied Intelligence – components. These prerequisites are diverse in nature and span both the artifacts in question, such as AI, data (type, format, quality, value, availability, accessibility, incl. openness), stakeholders’ skills and literacies, but also management and organizational aspects. In other words, each form of Intelligence influences the others, making it crucial to explore their interconnections. This talk endeavoured to uncover this intricate web of relationships between the three forms of intelligence, taking a step towards a more meaningful and intelligent approach to decision making and problem solving.

As part of this talk we referred to the theory of multiple intelligences by Howard Gardner presented in his famous book “Frames of Mind: A Theory of Multiple Intelligences”. Then, we referred to the above mentioned intelligence paradigm proposed by Stefaan G. Verhulst, Peter Martey Addo, Dominik Baumann, Juliet Mcmurren, Andrew Young, Andrew J. Zahuranec in “Emerging Uses of Technology for Development: A New Intelligence Paradigm“. Then, we finally turned to the actual discussion on the symbiotic relationship of Artificial Intelligence, Data Intelligence, Embodied Intelligence, Collaborative Intelligence, and Generative AI uncovering this intricate web of relationships between these forms of intelligence, putting the above into several contexts with a focus on public & public and open data ecosystems. The later topics, in turn, covered some of my previous research (such as “Sustainable open data ecosystems in smart cities: A platform theory-based analysis of 19 European cities, ” “Identifying patterns and recommendations of and for sustainable open data initiatives: A benchmarking-driven analysis of open government data initiatives among European countries“, “Transparency of open data ecosystems in smart cities: Definition and assessment of the maturity of transparency in 22 smart cities“ etc.). As such, we tried to indicate future avenues in the light of changing paradigms (or need for such) for intelligences, data ecosystems, mechanisms for citizen engagement & processes (incl., but not limited to data governance & data quality management) accompanying these ecosystems


This followed up by the fruitful discussion with the participants of the course that I enjoyed very much. I can only hope that this lecture was just a little bit as interesting as my dear Regina characterized it! There is nothing better than hear an immediate invitation for the next editions of this course – will be glad to continue this tradition!

Online International Training and Capacity Building Program-2024 (ITCBP-2024) for the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi and my talk on “Data Management for AI Cities”

Anastasija Nikiforova 1 Comment

Yesterday, I had the honor of serving as an Expert speaker for an Online International Training and Capacity Building Program-2024 (ITCBP-2024) on “Data Management for AI Cities”, organised by the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi (SPA FIRST) that invited me to deliver a talk on “Data Visualisation for Cities: City Based Applications”.

During this talk, we touched on several important aspects surrounding data management and visualization in and for cities, including:

  • Data management that was then deduced to data quality management of both internal and external data, departing from understanding these data to managing their quality throughout the DQM lifecycle (stressing that data cleaning is not the same as DQM), touching on several approaches to this with greater emphasis on the AI-augmented data quality management – existing tools, underlying methods, and weaknesses that should be considered when using (semi-)automatic data quality rule recognition, depending on the method they use for this purpose;
  • Data governance was then discussed, stressing how it differs from DQM, and what it consists of and why it is crucial, incl. within the context of this talk;
  • Data visualization & storytelling – role, key principles, common mistakes, best practices. As part of this, we covered strategies for selecting data visualization type with tips on how to simplify this process, incl. by referring to chart selectors, but also stressing why “thinking outside the menu” is critical, esp. within city-level data visualization (where your audience is often citizens or policymakers). We looked at the most common and/or successful uses of non-traditional types of visualizations, incl. tools to be used for these purposes, breaking them into those that require coding and those that are rather low- or no-code; noise reduction – simplicity – strategic accents’ use, as well as drill-down (aka roll-down) & roll-up use to convey the message you want to deliver while overcoming highlighting everything and thereby losing your audience. In addition, a UX perspective was discussed, including but not limited some aspects that are often overlooked when thinking about the design and aesthetic color palette, namely the color-blindness of the audience that might “consume” these visualizations and again, tips on how to use it easier – did you you known that there are 300 million color blind people? And that 98% of those with color blindness have red-green color blindness?

So what was the key message or a “takeaway” of this talk? In a very few words:

  • Understand your data, audience and story you want to tell! Understand:
    • your data,
    • the story it tells,
    • your target audience’s preferences and needs,
    • the story you want to tell
    • data suitability
    • data quality
  • Attention-grabbing visuals & storytelling is a key!
    • reduce noise to avoid audience confusion and distraction
    • use drill-down and roll-up operations to keep visualization simple
    • add the context to provide all necessary information for clear understanding
    • add highlights to focus their attention – add accents strategically
  • Consider design – the optimal visualisation type, chart design, environment design, potential color-blindness of your audience
  • Keep track of the current advances, but also challenges and risks, of data visualization in urban settings, incl. but not limited to (1) privacy concerns, (2) data silos, (3) technological limitations.

All in all, it was quite a rich conversation and I am very grateful to the organizers for the invitation to be part of this event and to the audience for the very positive feedback!

Call for Papers: Emerging Data- and Policy-driven Approaches for African Cities Challenges, Data & Policy, Cambridge University Press

Anastasija Nikiforova 1 Comment

On behalf of Guest Editors I sincerely invite you to consider submitting your work to our Special Issue ”Emerging Data- and Policy-driven Approaches for African Cities Challenges” as part of the open-access journal Data & Policy at Cambridge University Press.

This Special Issue aims to expand the reach and scope of urban data research, innovation and entrepreneurship activities and policies to address urban challenges in Africa through the digitisation of cities. It will compile recent expert work on the topic to advance and promote scientific advance / excellence, promote the digital transition and its benefits for creating, collecting, storing and using urban data to achieve sustainable development goals (SDG) in African cities.

African cities and their local actors and managers have been at the forefront of the digital transformation for several years now (Oke et al., 2020). Several urban projects across the continent, from north to south and east to west, are claiming to use the term “smart city” (Söderström et al., 2021). This apparently attractive name is often associated with an “isolationist” technical vision that is provided and marketed by operators with a very western and global vision. Digital and smart city projects are often implemented with citizens and the local ecosystem managed step by step by the municipalities, the digital transition can be primarily aimed at a “smart city of general interest”. In developing countries, and especially in Africa, where the young, female and urban population is becoming increasingly connected, the adoption of digital technologies is exponential and tends to occur without public intervention, including but not limited due to “datafication of cities” (Bibri & Krogstie, 2020; Plantinga, 2022; Oksman & Raunio, 2018). As a result, there is a risk that local authorities will “drop out” of the market, which may manifest itself in the development of alternative digital services by third parties that disrupt or compete with local public services. Another risk is that the local authority may have only limited or incomplete access to data produced by users and businesses within its territory, depriving it of the necessary material for its action. Local authorities in Africa, as in the North, are in a learning phase in their smart city or digital city policies and, in particular, policies regarding data collection / acquisition, storage and use to solve urban challenges (Plantinga, 2022; Oksman & Raunio, 2018).

Indeed, data is one of the essential pillars of an emerging smart or digital city that is best used to support decision making in urban planning and management to address the challenges of cities in Africa.  Therefore, it will be appropriate for this to cover all topics related to digital cities in Africa, including urban data and policy for urban planning applications, African smart city, Smart geoinformation systems (Smart GIS), smart governance, challenges of digital cities in Africa, urban sustainability, planning/management issues of emerging cities in Africa, urban socio-economic challenges (education, health, employment, youth, economy, food security, etc.), urban environment, information and communication technologies applied to the city. 

In addition to its thematic focus, it aims to advance interdisciplinary research by bridging the disciplinary divide between different academic cultures of the humanities, sciences, and application-oriented research, as well as the sectoral divide between urban development actors in Africa. Thus, this special issue will update and strengthen the existing literature on African cities through the results of scientific research based on qualitative and quantitative analysis techniques and methods on topics including, but not limited to data- and policy-driven approaches to address the challenges of African cities and mainly those related to:

💡Water and energy management;
💡Smart waste management and sanitation;
💡Digital management of education and health;
💡Digital mobility and transport management;
💡Quality of Life and social classes;
💡Strategies for digital and smart cities in Africa;
💡Digital and Smart African city stakeholders;
💡Digital and Smart city infrastructure;
💡Artificial intelligence and applications;
💡Digital governance for smart cities;
💡Citizen participation and engagement;
💡Datafication of smart cities;
💡Collective sensing & spatial big urban data;
💡Smart geo-addressing and participatory addressing;
💡Digital transformation and smart Governance;
💡Citizen and Collaborative Governance;
💡Climate and pollution. Environmental monitoring;
💡Disaster risks;
💡Urban Health


Papers to be submitted when ready, with final deadline: January 8, 2024.

Data & Policy publishes the following article types. Authors should consider which is the most appropriate category for their work before they submit:

  • Research articles: original work that uses rigorous methods to investigate how data science can inform or impact policy.
  • Commentaries: shorter articles that discuss and/or problematize an issue relevant to the special issue topic. (Approx 4,000 words in length).
  • Translational articles: focus on the policy setting or environment in which data science principles and approaches are being applied, with the aim of improving the transfer of knowledge from research to practice (and vice versa).
  • Data papers: provide structured descriptions of a data set relevant to the special issue. The data paper should describe the study design and methods that generated the data, but the focus should be to help others re-use the data rather than presenting new findings.

Guest Editors:

  • Jérôme Chenal, CEAT, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
  • Stéphane C. K. Tekouabou, Center of Urban Systems (CUS), UM6P, Benguérir, Morocco
  • El Arbi Allaoui Abdellaoui, ENS, Mouley Ismail University, Meknès, Morocco
  • Anastasija Nikiforova, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

References:

  • Bibri, S. E., & Krogstie, J. (2020). The emerging data–driven Smart City and its innovative applied solutions for sustainability: The cases of London and Barcelona. Energy Informatics, 3, 1-42.
  • Oke, A. E., Aghimien, D. O., Aigbavboa, C. O., & Akinradewo, O. I. (2020). Appraisal of the drivers of smart city development in South Africa. Construction Economics and Building, 20(2), 109-126.
  • Oksman, V., & Raunio, M. (2018, March). Citizen-centric smart city planning for africa: a qualitative case study of early stage co-creation of a Namibian smart community. In The twelfth international conference on digital society and egovernments (pp. 30-35).
  • Söderström, O., Blake, E., & Odendaal, N. (2021). More-than-local, more-than-mobile: The smart city effect in South Africa. Geoforum, 122, 103-117.
  • Plantinga, P. (2022). Digital discretion and public administration in Africa: Implications for the use of artificial intelligence. Information Development, 02666669221117526.