Tag women in science

Rii Forum 2023 “Innovation 5.0: Navigating shocks and crises in uncertain times Technology-Business-Society” & a plenary debate “Advances in ICT & the Society”

Anastasija Nikiforova Leave a comment

This April the next edition of the Research and Innovation Forum (Rii Forum) on which I posted previously will take place. For those, who are not familiar with Rii Forum yet, it is an annual conference that brings together researchers, academics, and practitioners in conceptually sound inter- and multi-disciplinary, empirically driven debate on key issues influencing the dynamics of social interaction today. Such a wide scope makes it a great event for those who do not want to be limited to a particular area or research question and want to be aware of everything that happens in today’s dynamic and multidisciplinary world. This, in turn, allows you not only to see another perspectives and topics, but also reconsider your topic, revealing something new, i.e. taking a look on it from a different angle, which is exceptionally valuable!

Technology, innovation, and education, as well as issues and topics located at their intersection, define the key dimensions of all discussions held during the Rii Forum. In continuously fragile international and domestic contexts, characterized by shocks, crises, and uncertainty, the Rii Forum 2023 seeks to address the multifaceted question of how to navigate these shocks, crises and uncertainty and deliver value to our society. Thus, the topic of Rii Forum 2023 is “Innovation 5.0.: Navigating shocks and crises in uncertain times Technology – Business – Society” with seven tracks:

  • TRACK 1: Education in times of shocks, crises and uncertainty
  • TRACK 2: Smart cities and communities
  • TRACK 3: Big data, business and society: Managing the distributed risks and opportunities
  • TRACK 4: Management: Rethinking management in times of profound change
  • TRACK 5: Innovation, entrepreneurship, and innovation management in the era of Industry 5.0.
  • TRACK 6: ICT and the medicine and healthcare cluster
  • TRACK 7: Data-driven approaches & human resource management in the era of digitalization

As part of Rii Forum 2023 a plenary debate “Advances in ICT & the Society: threading the thin line between progress, development and mental health” will take place, where I was honored to be invited as one of four plenary speakers, particularly considering that according tot he invitation, the organizers see me as the person whose “expertise and your contribution to the academic debate make you one of the trendsetters in current debate on open data and data quality management”, as well as leading voice and influencer. The other three panel discussants are Prof. Dr. Marek Krzystanek, Karolina Laurentowska & Prof. Marek Pawlicki. Hope this will be an interactive, fruitful and productive discussion with further involvement of the audience!

rii2023-final-full-program-27.03.23

Read more here and stay tuned for more information and reflections on the conference, in case you will not be able to attend it.

Participate in the European Digital Skills Certificate (EDSC) feasibility study!

Anastasija Nikiforova Leave a comment

📣📣📣 This is a short post to let you know that we have reached the most important phase of the consultation process for the European Digital Skills Certificate (#EDSC) feasibility study, and on behalf of EDSC – as EDSC Ambassador – I sincerely invite Public authorities, Policy makers, Education & Training providers working in the fields of education, digitalisation, and employment, and to education and training providers at the national, regional and/or local level to participate in this last survey.

🎯🎯🎯This survey aims to get an overview of the potential demand for an EDSC, the needs and gaps in the current digital skills certification ecosystem, the expected value and potential benefits of an EDSC, and of the key requirements for an EDSC. 


The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion has initiated Action 9 of the Digital Education Action Plan (DEAP 2021-2017), that is, to develop a European Digital Skills Certificate (EDSC) that may be recognised and accepted by governments, employers, and other stakeholders across Europe. This would allow Europeans to indicate their level of digital competences, corresponding to the Digital Competence Framework (DigComp) proficiency levels.

In order to participate, you have to first register. If you are not yet registered, please fill in the form available at the link: https://edsc-consultation.eu/register/ 

The survey takes around 30 minutes,  and it will be open until the 7th of April 2023. 

Thank you in advance for taking the time to complete the questionnaire! 

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 by Universidad de Sevilla, Cátedra Metropol Parasol, Cátedra Digitalización Empresarial, IBM, Universitat Politècnica de València 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.

CFP: The International Conference on Intelligent Data Science Technologies and Applications (IDSTA2023)

Anastasija Nikiforova Leave a comment

On behalf of the organizers and as a publicity chair, I sincerely invite you to consider submitting the results of your recent research to The International Conference on Intelligent Data Science Technologies and Applications (IDSTA2023), which will be held in conjunction Kuwait Fintech and Blockchain Summit.

Huge amount of data is being generated and transmitted everyday. To be able to deal with this data, extract useful information from it, store it, transmit it, and represent it, intelligent technologies and applications are needed. The International Conference on Intelligent Data Science Technologies and Applications (IDSTA) is a peer reviewed conference, whose objective is to advance the Data Science field by giving an opportunity for researchers, engineers, and practitioners to present their latest findings in the field. It will also invite key persons in the field to share their current knowledge and their future expectations for the field. Topics of interest for submission include, but are not limited to:

💡Applied Public Affairs, incl. but not limited to Campaign Management, Mass Communication Politics, Political Analysis, Survey Sampling
💡Business Analytics, incl. but not limited to Stock Market Analysis, Predictive Analytics, Business Intelligence
💡Finance, incl. but not limited to Risk Management, Algorithmic Trading, Fraud Detection, Financial Analysis
💡Computer Science, incl. but not limited to Database Management Systems, Scientific Computing, Computer Vision, Fuzzy Computing, Feature Selection, Neural Networks, Deep Learning, Meta-Learning, Process Mining, Artificial Intelligence, Data Mining, Big Data, Web Analytics, Text Mining, Natural Language Processing, Sentiment Analysis, Social Media Analysis, Data Fusion, Performance Analysis and Evaluation, Evolutionary Computing and Optimization, Hybrid Methods, Granular Computing, Recommender Systems, Data Visualization, Predictive Maintenance, Internet of Things (IoT), Web Scraping
💡Sustainability, incl. but not limited to Datasets on Sustainability, Sustainability Modeling, Energy Sustainability, Water Sustainability, Environmental Sustainability, Risk Analysis
💡Cybersecurity, incl. but not limited to Data Privacy and Security, Network Security, Communication Security, Cryptography, Fraud Detection, Blockchain
💡Environmental Science, incl. but not limited to GIS, Climatographic, Remote Sensing, Spatial Data Analysis, Weather Prediction and Tracking,
💡Biotechnologies, incl. but not limited to Gnome Analysis, Drug Discovery and Screening and Side Effect Analysis, Structural and Folding Pattern, Disease Discovery and Classification, Bioinformatics, Next-Gen Sequencing
💡Smart City, incl. but not limited to City Data Management, Smart Traffic, Surveillance, Location-Based Services, Robotics
💡Human Behaviour Understanding
💡Semi-Structured and Unstructured Data
💡Pattern Recognition
💡Transparency in Research Data
💡Data and Information Quality
💡GPU Computing
💡Crowdsourcing

🗓️🗓️🗓️ IMPORTANT DATES

  • Paper submission:  March 15, 2023  
  • Acceptance notification:  May 20th, 2023
  • Full paper camera-ready submission: October 1st, 2023
    Conference Dates: October 24-26, 2023
IDSTA2023Download

All papers that are accepted, registered, and presented in IDSTA2023 and the workshops co-located with it will be submitted to IEEEXplore for possible publication. 
For any inquiries, contact intelligenttechorg@gmail.com.

Submit the paper and meet our team in Kuwait in October, 2023!
 

With best wishes,

IDSTA2023 organizers

Towards data quality by design – ISO/IEC 25012-based methodology for managing DQ requirements in the development of IS

Anastasija Nikiforova Leave a comment

It is obvious that users should trust the data that are managed by software applications constituting the Information Systems (IS). This means that organizations should ensure an appropriate level of quality of the data they manage in their IS. Therefore, the requirement for the adequate level of quality of data to be managed by IS must be an essential requirement for every organization. Many advances have been done in recent years in software quality management both at the process and product level. This is also supported by the fact that a number of global standards have been developed and involved, addressing some specific issues, using quality models such as (ISO 25000, ISO 9126), those related to process maturity models (ISO 15504, CMMI), and standards focused mainly on software verification and validation (ISO 12207, IEEE 1028, etc.). These standards have been considered in worldwide for over 15 years.

However, awareness of software quality depends on other variables, such as the quality of information and data managed by application. This is recognized by SQUARE standards (ISO/IEC 25000), which highlight the need to deal with data quality as part of the assessment of the quality level of the software product, according to which “the target computer system also includes computer hardware, non-target software products, non-target data, and the target data, which is the subject of the data quality model”. This means that organizations should take into account data quality concerns when developing various software, as data is a key factor. To this end, we stress that such data quality concerns should be considered at the initial stages of software development, attending the “data quality by design” principle (with the reference to the “quality by design” considered relatively often with significantly more limited interest (if any) to “data quality” as a subset of the “quality” concept when referring to data / information artifacts).

The “data quality” concept is considered to be multidimensional and largely context dependent. For this reason, the management of specific requirements is a difficult task. Thus, the main objective of our new paper titled “ISO/IEC 25012-based methodology for managing data quality requirements in the development of information systems: Towards data quality by design” is to present a methodology for Project Management of Data Quality Requirements Specification called DAQUAVORD aimed at eliciting DQ requirements arising from different users’ viewpoints. These specific requirements should serve as typical requirements, both functional and non-functional, at the time of the development of IS that takes Data Quality into account by default leading to smarter and collaborative development.

In a bit more detail, we introduce the concept of Data Quality Software Requirement as a method to implement a Data Quality Requirement in an application. Data Quality Software Requirement is described as a software requirement aimed at satisfying a Data Quality Requirement. The justification for this concept lies in the fact that we want to capture the Data Quality Software Requirements that best match the data used by a user in each usage scenario, and later, originate the consequent Data Quality Software Requirements that will complement the normal software requirements linked to each of those scenarios. Addressing multiple Data Quality Software Requirements is indisputably a complex process, taking into account the existence of strong dependencies such as internal constraints and interaction with external systems, and the diversity of users. As a result, they tend to impact and show the consequences of contradictory overlaps on both process and data models.

In terms of such complexity and attempting to improve the developing efforts, we introduce DAQUAVORD, a Methodology for Project Management of Data Quality Requirements Specification, which is based on the Viewpoint-Oriented Requirements Definition (VORD) method, and the latest and most generally accepted ISO/IEC 25012 standard. It is universal and easily adaptable to different information systems in terms of both their nature, number and variety of actors and other aspects. The paper proposes both the concept of the proposed methodology and an example of its application, which is a kind of manual step-by-step guidance on how to use it to achieve smarter software development with data quality by design. This paper is a continuation of our previous study. This paper establishes the following research questions (RQs):

RQ1: What is the state of the art regarding the “data quality by design” principle in the area of software development? What are (if any) current approaches to data quality management during the development of IS?

RQ2: How the concepts of the Data Quality Requirements (DQR) and the Viewpoint-Oriented Requirements Definition (VORD) method should be defined and implemented in order to promote the “data quality by design” principle?

Sounds interesting? Read the full-text of the article published in Elsevier Data & Knowledge Engineering – here.

The first comprehensive approach to this problematic is presented in this paper, setting out the methodology for project management of the specification for data quality requirements. Given the relative nature of the concept of “data quality” and active discussions on the universal view on the data quality dimensions, we have based our proposal on the latest and most generally accepted ISO/IEC 25012 standard, thus seeking to achieve a better integration of this methodology with existing documentation and systems or projects existing in the organization. We suppose that this methodology will help Information System developers to plan and execute a proper elicitation and specification of specific data quality requirements expressed by different roles (viewpoints) that interact with the application. This can be assumed as a guide that analysts can obey when writing a Requirements Specification Document supplemented with Data Quality management. The identification and classification of data quality requirements at the initial stage makes it easier to developers to be aware of the quality of data to be implemented for each function during all development process of the application.

As future work thinking, we plan to consider the advantages provided by the Model Driven Architecture (MDA), focusing mainly on its capabilities of both abstraction and modelling characteristics. It will be much easier to integrate our results into the development of “Data Quality aware Information Systems” (DQ-aware-IS) with other software development methodologies and tools. This, however, is expected to expand the scope of the developed methodology and consider various feature related to data quality, including the development of a conceptual measure of data value, i.e., intrinsic value, as proposed in.

César Guerra-García, Anastasija Nikiforova, Samantha Jiménez, Héctor G. Perez-Gonzalez, Marco Ramírez-Torres, Luis Ontañon-García, ISO/IEC 25012-based methodology for managing data quality requirements in the development of information systems: Towards Data Quality by Design, Data & Knowledge Engineering, 2023, 102152, ISSN 0169-023X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.datak.2023.102152