March, 2021 (#3)

In this issue:

Alumni

• Major deals by Dalia Lasaite’05, Svens Dinsdorfs'98 et al. we missed last month
• Three Alumni companies recognized among fastest growers in Europe
• One of us — Märt Lume'01: Prison that transformed me

Association

• Aušra Kropaitė'08 takes over leadership of the Lithuanian chapter
• Aleksandr Vatagin’05 opens virtual home for alumni in Sweden
• Events (discussion with Rihards Garančs'12, virtual social 'Cheers Alumni')

School

• AA president Inese Jureviča'00 has met SA president Kristīne Polija
• What internships (besides finance) are Y1s interested in?
• Events (public lectures, Alumni Career Advice session: Management)

Feature by Maija Kāle'02 

• The Impossible Food Research (text or podcast)

It’s officially been a year in this strange reality. For one whole year we have been adapting and trying to make sense of these mounting changes. How was your transformation going? Did you slow down? Have you celebrated the possibility to spend more time with your family? Did you feel lonely like never before? Change lets us transform into the best possible versions of ourselves, and the craziest risks we accept might take us to the greatest destinations.

Today we contemplate on the powerful waves of opportunities that changes bring around. Let's contemplate together. Let's stop for a moment and feel togetherness. Read more about our fellow alumni who decided to swim against the stream and imagine what heights you could reach if you once dared to transform to who you want to become.

cheers,
Marta Metuzāle’20,
Viktoryia Pilinko’14,
Katya Firyan'03,
Akmis Lomsargis’00

Dalia Lasaite’05 has raised $9.5 million in B series while Svens Dinsdorfs'98 has actually lent EUR 20 millions in addition to those 3 which have (over)heated the Alumni FB page. At the same time, a company co-founded by Aigars Kesenfelds’06 (and managed by at least 9 more alumni) has borrowed EUR 30 million. By the way, the last two bond issues were implemented by the same bank. Kristiāna Janvare'05 has later publicly commented on bond issue opportunities (in Latvian) but did not reveal to Alumni Insider to what extent alumni from the bank have contributed to those EUR 50 million issues.

This news could stop here.. but just a reminder that Sun Finance and Mogo Finance were co-founded by Aigars Kesenfelds’06 while Toms Jurjevs'12 made his way from Y1 to MD in infamous 4finance (which has made the fortune to Aigars through (legal) usury), an off limit according to SSE Riga ethical standards. Ranking compiler admits possible incompleteness but does not report any exclusions for non-numeric reasons.

Click on the photo for the full story..

A swap from heavy gaming to real stock trading in his teens brought Justas Šaltinis'11 from Jurbarkas to SSE Riga. That's where he has revealed the truth of the unbeatable stock market index, learned to collaborate in teams, work under stress, & choose what to do first... but also made friends for life including his wife Lauryna'11 (Genytė at the time).

After shaping his strategy at SSE Riga, life seems like a piece of cake: a job in corporate finance, promotion after 3 months (into 100 hours working week), co-founding a company, being its only employee with the annual salary of EUR 48 and then exit within the next 3 years.. Justas admits he has often been somewhat lucky but one can not notice his steadfast strive to step up any game. After 3 years of triathlons, now he's more into swimming and reading books. What is the next game he is going to beat?

After flying Anders from Stockholm to Vilnius just for a dinner with SSE Riga Alumni in 2017; sending a full bus of Lithuanian school children for the excursion to the school in 2016, 2017, 2018; taking Lithuanian alumni on company visits and many other stories in her track record as a Board Member of the Alumni Chapter since 2012, Aušra has proven herself as a great match for Chairwoman position.

Some of us might remember Aušra as the Chief of the SA Info Committee. After SSE Riga she got an MSc from Aarhus School of Business and Social Sciences and taught Business Communication for a few years in Vilnius Gediminas Technical University. Nowadays, besides managing the Program Management Office, Aušra is active in professional organizations and the City Alumni of her native Panevėžys.

SA team: Oskars Bauers (bus.), Harro Rannamets (President), Kalvi Nõu (Vice-president), Aušra Kropaitė (Info) & Jekaterina Jaroslavceva (PR) (all class of 2008 in Dec, 2006)

Petras Jurkunėnas'06 with Hardy Rock

Our book has reached alumni in Poland, Germany, Finland and even Canada as it is on its way to South Africa. They all have been ordered from the Alumni Bookshop.

Presidents have exchanged their annual plans in the presence of their teams. SA Board is prepared with virtual, real and mixed scenarios but a miracle is needed for the Summer Symposium to take place this year.

Meet SA'2021

Last autumn, a survey was run among students to see in which industries they would be most interested to have an internship in. The students could choose several industries without prioritizing their answers. The most popular industries among the 55 Y1 respondents were finance, management and real estate. The least popular — education and research (20%), IT & telecommunications (18%) and wholesale (18%).

(intended for slow reading or listening as 9 min podcast)

There is something unique about the research related to food. No one is indifferent to this topic. After all, food provides a large part of hedonistic components that our lives consist of, and the pleasure related to food can be derived from reading, writing and talking about it too. Before embarking on my PhD studies, I thought about what kind of research literature I would prefer reading during the late evenings and weekends in my free time after a full-time work, and the topic of food felt like a natural choice. The topic itself is scarily vast, but one of the angles that caught my attention was the combination of food and technology.

In 2018 I started my PhD studies at the Faculty of Computing, University of Latvia, under the supervision of Professor Jurģis Šķilters, who is also the Director of the Lab for Perceptual and Cognitive Systems at the same university. Until now it has been an exciting research journey that somewhat resembles composing the impossible burger, albeit academically – i.e., exploring the human-food relationship by mixing a DNA from the cognitive science into the computer science.

The Big ‘Why’

It seems that we live in a world that is increasingly controlled and yet controllable. The presence of technologies and our abilities to trace behaviours are growing and getting palpable even in our everyday lives. Personalized health apps, large-scale databases of food recipes, left-over food tracing are just some of the entrepreneurial artefacts manifesting the merge between food and tech. However, if we look at the global health data, we can see that the global society, also in Latvia, is hardly becoming healthier. Such lifestyle-induced maladies as obesity, Type-2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases are prevalent and even on the rise, so it seems that the transformation of humans from ‘hunter-gatherers into superconsumers’ has not been overly successful in terms of health. Considering the rising level of interaction between humans and computers, however, this challenge should be solvable – with smart nudging technologies and in-depth understanding of how the human mind actually functions pertaining to food consumption. So far, the bulk of global research has been focused on the corrective aspects of the human relationship to food. Much less attention has been paid to the positive factors, which with the help of multiplication and scale-up could raise the quality of life – on the planet Earth and even, potentially, on our future space travels.

Futurism as an Essential Additive

Manifestos, sweet manifestos… In 2018 a group of academics, practitioners and food producers came up with the Manifesto on the Future of Computing & Food , with the primary goals of promoting a healthy debate and an inclusive futurism. And it seems that the manifesto did contribute to making food as a topic more visible in the academic tech community globally. For instance, the leading Human-Computer Interaction conference of ACM, the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, CHI 2021, will host several food-related workshops, one of them focusing on the future of human–food interaction in particular.

Futurism has always been important for releasing imagination. The ‘additive of futurism’ is beneficial not only for the tech community but also for art, because the visual representations of future food are a necessary component of science communication. If you cannot visualize the future (including the future of food), you are lagging behind. Food futurists have proven to be skilful in future visualizations – see e.g. Project Nourished, Future of Food and SkyLab.

Futuristic food (published with permission by Project Nourished).

Your Potato Steak

What matters is not only the ‘Instagrammable’ visual means but also the words we use, because they change our perception towards food. The way we name the dish changes its taste – literally. Every word in a well-written menu can raise the total price of the food by up to 18 eurocents.

We tend to describe unhealthy foods in a different manner from the healthy ones. We talk about wine as sexy, seductive and broad-shouldered, while we would never use such terms for describing, say, a cabbage soup. When we see a ‘reduced fat’ label on the chocolate, our brain instantly signals that this chocolate will be less tasty than its usual, less healthy alternatives.

Words and stories surrounding the food change our perception of it. So next time you are about to consume your daily portion of fried potatoes, just imagine that you have been served a delicious well-done potato steak – it will taste differently, I guarantee you that.

A Sonic Sweetener for Dessert?

Another exciting field of the food research concerns the multisensory aspects of food consumption. Did you know, for example, that red-coloured drinks taste sweeter or that with a sonic sweetener (a very sweet musical sound) you could avoid adding unnecessary sugar to your coffee? If you are in food production, this kind of knowledge could help you manufacture products with less sugar. Currently, processed foods contain way too much sugar, and our total daily intake of snacks can oftentimes lead to a heavy overdose of sugar (see SugarCat for tracing your daily sugar intake). For instance, if you know that the decisive appreciation of any snack comes (and stays) with the first bite, it can result in less added sugar in the rest of the snack...

It turns out that our appreciation of taste is determined by a tiny part of our brain. Everything else – context, surroundings, food description, its visual representation – actually matters much more than the taste! Coming back to the sonic sweetener option… One could also use a specific audio for crispiness, because crispiness is generally perceived as a signifier of fresh – and thereby tasty – food. And fresh food, to our minds, is equal to good food, as we have learned through the entire evolution and our experience with food safety.

Concluding Digest

A research area that operates at the intersection between the computer science and the cognitive science is as exciting as it is challenging. In practice it means a constant fight for justifying an inter-disciplinary research that does not fully belong to one or another scientific discipline.

The basic premise of my work is the utility of the increasing amounts of large-scale data for the existing cognitive science research that is based on the experimental methodology. I believe that the analytical ‘playgrounds’ revealed by the large-scale data derived from the social networks, food blogs, or from the databases containing recipes and menus, are essential in understanding the relationship between the humans and food.

At the same time, the essential factors and the important trends related to healthy food intake can be understood, interpreted and analysed much more comprehensively via the lenses of the cognitive science rather than the computer science. Due to the growing amounts of large-scale data, we, the interdisciplinary researchers, can test various food- and society-related hypotheses, measure the changing attitudes and determine the prevailing public sentiment in relation to particular food items. So here comes in handy the Latvian Twitter Eater Corpus – a well-aged (9 years!) tweet corpus, where we can track food-related tweets in the Latvian language.

Turns out we are not only what we eat – we are what we tweet, too. And increasingly so.

Maija Kāle (right) with her BSc thesis co-author Dagmāra Dreiškena (both class of 2002) during the school times (photo from Maija's personal album).

Erratum in Alumni Insider #2

The correct email of Reinis Fals (Chief of Info Committee’21) is rfals@sseriga.edu 

If you've noticed any mistakes or omissions in this issue, kindly hit reply.

Alumni Insider
insider@alumni.lv

This newsletter aims to provide you with quality time by consolidating all you need to know about fellow alumni and our future generations in a single email, published monthly every fourth Thursday.

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Editorial Board
(in formation from Insider Chiefs):
Sergey Nizheborsky'96, Dmitriy Medvedjko'00, Irina Harlampjeva'01, Jonas Jokstys'03, Lina Banyte-Surpliene'05, Tomas Sudnius'06, Edgars Cerps'07, Marius Zemaitis'08, Vaidotas Lasas'09, Karolis Liaudinskas'10, Ginvile Ramanauskaite'11, Jekaterina Kolbina'12, Tatiana Arventi'13, Viktoria Pilinko'14, Valeria Gavrilan'16, Violeta Toncu'17, Maksis Gauja'18, Elizabete Fleišmane'??, Marta Metuzāle'20, Daniela Gerda Baranova'21, Una Narnicka'22, Kristers Šavalgins'23.

Old issues
Jan, 2021 (#1);
Feb, 2021 (#2).