Academics in the front line of e-government problem-solving

September 20, 2023

by Peeter Vihma

Next Generation Digital State Research Group at the Department of Software Science at TalTech is a fine example of cooperation. It creates synergies between academia and the public and private sectors. According to Associate Professor Ingrid Pappel, the head of the Research Group, their main aim is to bring cutting-edge technology closer to people. This includes people who use it and implement technological solutions in the public sector. But how do they do it?

Connecting students to real-life problems

NextGen research group started alongside the creation of the e-governance MA program in 2013. This program produces students with a lot of potential and seeks to engage them in solving urgent problems outside academia. Since then, both MA and PhD students have been engaged with cooperative projects with which the leading NextGen group scientists are engaged.

An example of engaging students is the Future of Digital State Hackathon, organised jointly by NextGen Research Group and the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications (MKM) in October 2023. During two days, students will be able to tackle challenges and problems posed by the Ministry, present the solutions and win prizes. Topics include using voice or gesture commands, AI and blockchain to improve digital public services. The difference between a similar event in the private sector is that Estonian ministries will actually implement winning solutions.

MKM is only one of the public sector organisations that hurl challenges towards the research group. Similarly, The Innovation Team at the Government Office and RIA have been engaged in collaborative projects. With RIA, for example, the NextGen group studied the management of digital identities when EIDAS was implemented in Estonia.

Both short-term and long-term engagement of students in public sector-oriented research has proven extremely fruitful. Many former students are now employed by the public sector in Estonia and help to improve collaboration further.

Benefitting all sectors of society

The NextGen Research Group’s strength is engaging with the public sector. This creates a threefold connection between academia, the public and the private sector. One of the visible manifestations of such cooperation is the Eurora project. Triggered by the 2019 EU regulation that established the procedure for the transmission of VAT return data, Eurora Solutions OÜ wanted to take action. The company aimed to create a solution that would automatically help e-commerce providers calculate the amount of tax at the time of the purchase.

The goal was ambitious: to create a service platform software with wide-ranging benefits. The intended beneficiaries included e-commerce platforms, the EU and its member states, international couriers, logistic companies, tax administrators, and customs boards. The most difficult part of the project was to create a machine-learning algorithm that could determine the correct commodity code based on the description of the goods.

“It became clear very quickly that these calculations cannot be solved without the help of data scientists,” said Kaie Hansson, Innovation Manager of Eurora Solutions OÜ.

The cooperation with the NextGen group proved fruitful for both partners. During thousands of development hours, the data scientists created the core machinery to detect the commodity codes based on the product description. For Eurora Solutions, this resulted in the end product that numerous clients already use. For students and scientists, the process has produced several scientific articles and master’s theses.

Providing competence domestically and abroad

This three-dimensional cooperation has turned the NextGen group into a hub of knowledge extensively used domestically and internationally.

In Estonia, the group is one of the organisers of the Next Generation Government Symposium (NGGS) that brings together stakeholders from academia, government and the private sector to understand better next-generation government issues from interdisciplinary perspectives in technology, education, government, and law.

In cooperation with eGA, the NextGen group provides educational programs for CIOs abroad. It has also launched e-governance curriculums in Ukraine and Kenya. In Kenya, local academics are about to open a micro-degree program (an intense 1-year program) in digital governance in collaboration with the NextGen group.

“In all of our activities, we aim to benefit from and encourage interdisciplinary thinking,” says Ingrid Koppel. “We see that this kind of integration is increasingly valued and useful, and we as academics need to provide examples of how actually to do it.”

Resouce: e-estonia

Estonian EdTechs conquering the world

September 20, 2023

by Peeter Vihma

It is scientifically proven that Estonians are smart. According to PISA tests conducted by the OECD, Estonian students ranked first among European countries in all three assessment domains – reading, science and mathematics — in 2018.

“So what?” one might ask. Good for Estonians, but what is it for the rest? Education is so culture-specific that it is difficult or even impossible to export.

However, a way to take advantage of good education in one country is to use it as a platform for creating and testing education technology and then sharing the results with the world. And Estonia is bent on exactly this.

A boom in otherwise traditional field

Education is a rather traditional field, and it is also so in Estonia. Although education innovators have been contributing earlier, the real boom in education-related enterprises did not happen until about 5 years ago.

“More than 50% of successful startups have been created since then, making EdTech one of Estonia’s fastest-growing fields of the economy with 30-50% annual growth.”

The main hub where education meets technology in Estonia is EdTech Estonia, a growing organisation that brings together companies in Estonia to support their advancement nationally and internationally. It is a vibrant community that provides much more than just mentorship. As a strategic partner for the Ministry of Education and Research, it is involved in policy-making and implementation. It hosts its hackathon and co-creation program and engages in international research and development projects. Therefore, EdTech Estonia is a fruitful platform for new and established technology companies who are keen to improve their products and export them. There are several success stories to share.

Building trust is key for exporting EdTech

Exporters of education technologies in Estonia include various solutions from preschool up to higher education and professional development. They are so well spread globally that it is likely that a reader of this article already has used one. In addition to European countries, Estonian education technology is being used, for example, in India and Kazakhstan. However, this success is a result of many years of hard work.

To start from an early age, Eliis is a SaaS solution that enhances preschool operations, child development and communications. The most visible part to the average user is its teacher-parent interface, but it is mainly designed for teachers. And it is working well. According to feedback, 98.4% of teachers said Eliis saves them time. (From my personal experience, I can confirm that it is extremely intuitive to use for parents, too.) Due to its functionality, 80% of kindergartens in Estonia are using the software and 600 early childhood educational institutions in the rest of Europe.

Although well adopted domestically, according to Rasmus Gross, CEO of Eliis, their export success did not come easily.

“The main challenge in exporting education technology is the issue of trust,” says Mr Gross.

“Education is a field which contains highly sensitive personal data about children. Selling unfamiliar software from a distant, perhaps unknown country is complicated.”

Mr Gross has overcome this challenge by emphasising personal connections to potential clients.

“We have a local salesperson in each target market, and we also make the effort of travelling to be personally present at meetings. Many times, if necessary,” says Mr Gross.

Software contributing to widening horizons

Once a young person has completed the mandatory part of education, he or she awaits the tough task of applying for universities and summer schools. On the other end, simultaneously, higher education organisations have to deal with the surge of young applicants. On first look, it seems like an easy job. It is not.

“Our passion has always been to improve the education opportunities, and studying abroad brings double benefits for young people: both education and experience of another culture,” says Märt Aro, co-founder of Dream Apply, a student enrolment software company.

“Many years ago, we first started to offer marketing services for European higher education institutions, but soon realised that the actual bottleneck for international student mobility is the enrolment system. There are about 50 standard procedures, usually on paper, that a foreign student must go through during the application process, and most students are not even falling under any standards,” recalls Mr. Aro.

So, like Estonians often do, Mr. Aro, who, at the time, was a student himself, aimed to solve this problem with software. He and associates created an intuitive, paper-free application and enrolment management system and started relentlessly introducing it to European higher education institutions. Many years of hard work paid off and Dream Apply is currently used in universities from Ireland to Japan.

“It is difficult for a startup to overcome the risk adversity of higher education organisations,” says Mr. Aro. “It took a lot of personal convincing to make the first sale.”

Since then, feedback has been positive, and there is a track record of reliability to build upon. Dream Apply has reported that using their software has led to an average 75% increase in international applicants. The software is also extremely secure: the IT infrastructure and data centres are certified according to the highest standards.

Not just the curriculum

School curriculum and formal education are just one part of the child development and education equation. No child can study and grow if they struggle with mental health. This is why Triumf Health has been targeting the mental health of children aged 7-12 through evidence-based serious gaming in the context of education. In their subscription-based game environment, children are guided through a fun journey through Triumfland to empower them and teach them skills to build mental resilience.

“When we leave mental health issues to the medical system and don’t deal with them at schools or home, we are mostly focused on dealing with consequences,” says Kadri Haljas, founder of Triumf Health. “I am therefore pleased to see that countries worldwide are waking up to the fact that mental health needs to be addressed within the education system.”

It appears that Triumf Health is up to something important because not only has it been recognised as the best health startup in Scandinavia in 2021, but it was the world’s best tech in the health and wellbeing category in 2022 at the World Summit Award.

“If we consider that 10 years ago, Estonian-born Wise (then Transferwise) received the same award, and we look at how significant they are currently, we believe that there is similar potential for us,” says Dr. Haljas. “Increase in interest in our product from schools and individuals globally gives us grounds for confidence.”

How much money do we need to be smart?

Education technology clearly has its merits, as investments in education support people getting smarter. UN data shows that there is a significant correlation between GDP and level of education: the better off a country is, the more its inhabitants go to school.

However, it turns out that this trend also has a ceiling. From a certain income forward, any increase in income does not increase educational levels. And perhaps not coincidentally, Estonia occupies that sweet spot: the best education with the lowest GDP.

Therefore, while EdTech makes life better, it should not be fetishised. Having all the latest gadgets is not a prerequisite for a highly educated population. Also, software needs not to be very complex, it just needs to get the job done. Estonia proves it: having just enough is good enough.

Resouce: e-estonia

All eyes on AI at the Tallinn Digital Summit

September 13, 2023

by Justin Petrone

Governments in Europe and beyond are interested in deploying artificial intelligence. However, the uptake of AI by the public sector is likely to be more gradual and requires the deployment of rules and regulations that have not constrained AI’s rapid recent adoption in the private sector. 

At least these were the take-home messages that I came away with following a panel discussion at the Tallinn Digital Summit. The session was entitled “AI’s Impact on the Policy Making and State Governance: Future Challenges and Opportunities,” it was one of the final panels of the one-day summit held at Tallinn’s Kultuurikatel or Creative Hub. 

The summit featured talks by some rather impressive figures, including sitting prime ministers, former presidents, high-ranking EU officials, and representatives of digitisation efforts from Japan to Ukraine or North Macedonia to Cabo Verde. The speakers on the AI panel included Keith Strier, Nvidia’s vice president for worldwide AI initiatives; Benjamin Brake, director general of the German Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport; and Elsa Pilichowski, director of the OECD’s directorate for public governance. Florian Marcus, a project manager at the Estonian IT company Proud Engineers, moderated the panel. 

73% of countries deploy AI

According to Brake, governments have to contend with public scepticism around innovation, and as such, the challenges of introducing AI-supported services in the public sector are also hindered by people’s attitudes toward new technologies, as well as uncertainty regarding what these technologies even do. 

Larger, federated governments, such as Germany, however, believe that they need to use AI to continue offering services to their citizens, Brake said, and he noted that German delegations have been the most frequent visitors to the e-Estonia Briefing Centre to see how smaller, innovative states have begun to integrate AI into their public services. Brake said that governments need to push ahead with their plans. “Most governments need to become more resilient in testing and sandboxing these new technologies,” Brake said during the discussion. 

He noted that the German Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport has already rolled out some initiatives around AI. For example, the ministry announced investing €8.3 million into intelligent mobility and logistics projects last year.

Elsa Pilichowski from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development said that despite public scepticism toward AI, governments are slowly adopting it for use in pilot projects. Seventy-three per cent of the countries that report to her directorate have started using AI in their services, she said, to improve service delivery based on user experiences. But integrating AI more deeply in governance will require having data ethics and data management rules in place “because we know that AI can lead to biased decisions,” Pilichowski remarked. Governments also need to strive to include data from citizens who are not as present in the digital world as others, such as pensioners, she noted and should make investments to do so.

“It’s very important for governments to put these conditions in place so that when AI is put in place, we don’t have situations where failures could lead to less trust in government,” said Pilichowski. “Government is not a private company,” she added.

To regulate or not to regulate?

Brake pointed out that the OECD actually issued its AI Principles in May 2019 and said that the principles could be used to inform the deployment of AI-supported public services. Still, he said it would take “a bit of courage” to implement such services. Brake noted that decisions on where to apply AI solutions in state services should also be undertaken carefully. Brake maintained that initial AI services could provide automatic decision-making based on standard protocols, freeing public employees to focus on more complicated cases.

“We’re doing this for many reasons, but first of all, we can’t afford not to do so because there will be a lack of employees,” said Brake. “We need to use AI for automatic decision-making.”

For his part, Nivdia’s Strier tried to provide a historical perspective on AI adoption. He agreed with the other panellists that the deployment of AI in governance is still “extremely limited,” with a few early adopter countries testing the technology’s potential. However, he noted that the current dialogue regarding AI was no more than a decade old and that countries didn’t even start formulating an AI strategy before the World Economic Forum published its Fourth Industrial Revolution white paper.

“If you go back to 2017, there wasn’t a single country in the world with an AI strategy, and presidents and prime ministers were not discussing this topic,” Strier said. “So I think that within five years, we have made progress in terms of collaboration and policymaking and towards regulation,” he said. Strier compared AI to the development of regulations around the automotive industry, pointing out that from the invention of the automobile in the 1880s, it took about 80 years before manufacturers were obliged to put safety belts in their cars and a century until governments began mandating the use of safety belts.

Brake also noted that any regulations formulated at the moment would likely evolve as AI continues to develop. “We are talking about a bunch of questions to which we might not have the answer,” he said. Policymakers need to discuss what regulation is needed, as well as efforts at the EU level to regulate AI, such as the potential AI Act, are the right approaches to doing so.

Nothing is stopping AI

There is also the question of how to address failures of AI implementation. Florian Marcus noted that Australia had tried to roll out a national electronic identity card multiple times, but such projects have failed each time. “People are not ready to forgive the government,” he said. “If there is a government hack, too many politicians will be tempted to say, you know what, scrap the whole thing,” said Marcus. “There is a lot of scepticism regarding technology and perhaps an unrealistic expectation of perfection toward technologies.” 

Strier agreed. He noted that accidents involving autonomous vehicles are often highlighted in the media, while people accept car accidents by human drivers as a part of life. “About 1.3 million people die each year in car accidents. That has become a standard, accepted statistic.”

But here, private sector adoption of AI might help to eventually drive public acceptance of the technology, according to the OECD’s Pilichowski. “If the rest of society is moving with AI, citizens will have a requirement that the public sector uses AI to improve services where AI can be useful,” Pilichowski said. She noted that governments have to put all the necessary safeguards around AI going forward, but that there is no stopping AI’s eventual adoption.

“It’s inconceivable that we can continue to deliver services without using AI in the future,” she said. “How we deliver these public services is crucial for trust.”

If you missed the event, you can watch all the Digital Summit’s panels on YouTube.

Resouce: e-estonia