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)
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Change is the only constant (c) |
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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.
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cheers, Marta Metuzāle’20, Viktoryia Pilinko’14, Katya Firyan'03, Akmis Lomsargis’00
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Major deals we missed last month |
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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.
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Unreliable finance? |
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3 alumni companies — Europe's fastest growers |
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Sonaworks, Mogo Finance and Sun Finance were (the former two repeatedly) listed among the European Top 1000 fastest growing in 2020. Toms Jurjevs'12, CEO of the latter, his team and the Latvian mass media are euphoric for getting the silver (top2) at the first shot in this European business ranking compiled by a reputable UK publisher.
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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.
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How would you like Alumni Insider to treat such cases (click the box)? |
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Thanks! |
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If you feel like adding something, the box below if yours. |
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Most popular |
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Click on the photo for the full story..
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One of us: Märt Lume’01 |
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Professional video game Designer (Art Institute of Vancouver) and a serial entrepreneur specialized in virtual & augmented realities and their application in education. |
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Prison that transformed me
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“After graduating from SSER in 2001 I wanted an experience abroad, and despite 9/11 I managed to get a marketing research position through AIESEC in a bank in Wisconsin.
In just about 5 months on the job, which in a sturdy conservatism of American Midwest felt like a lifetime, I was fired. Somewhat relieved, I moved to New York where the next 8 months were some of the most beautiful in my life: building roof-top decks with another Estonian Business School graduate in Brooklyn, Midtown and Central Park; exploring New York in all its many textures and flavors; meeting people from all corners of the world. When it was time to fly back, I recounted what I had gathered...
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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?
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Aušra Kropaitė'08 — new leader of LT chapter |
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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.
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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)
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Our Swedish Place by Aleksandr Vatagin’05 |
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Aleksandr was keen to gather alumni since he moved to Stockholm. His newly created virtual meeting place on FB is meant to strengthen ties among at least 30 of us based in Sweden.
Kind reminder, some other local groups are listed here and if you’d like to join the ones of Belarus, Moldova or the USA, do not hesitate to ask Hardy Rock for the assistance.
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Hardy Rock Belongs to Your Class? |
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Still wondering who is this character who invites you to connect on social media? The proof that Hardy’s relationship with the school is no weaker than yours is below.
By the way, some time after visiting him in 2013, Petras Jurkuvėnas’06 has become the Chairman of Lithuanian Alumni Chapter. If you feel you might be missing some opportunities, connect to Hardy.
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Petras Jurkunėnas'06 with Hardy Rock
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SSE Riga’25 Book Travels |
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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.
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Indre Zliobaite’03 in Helsinki |
near a former water tower of Roihuvuori
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Baiba Auzāne’08 in Toronto |
her garden with some Latvian pūpoli
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- March 30, 18:00 Alumni Discussion Club with Rihards Garančs'12: Digital Transformation - What It Means for the Companies & How to Make It Successful
- April 15, 19:00 – 20:30 virtual social 'Cheers Alumni'.
While we miss the face-to-face, a virtual party is a great way to stay connected and enjoy our SSE Riga friends. Making the most of our online options? We’ve developed some, allegedly, mad skills for that. Highly interactive, no matter where in the world you are based, and promises to offer informal networking and fun. Reconnecting with fellow schoolmates is the goal.
Even a virtual party wouldn't be a party without guests, kindly register by April 9, and see you soon!
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AA president Inese met SA president Kristīne Polija |
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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.
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The summer is quickly approaching and it also means a new internship season for Y1 students. To introduce Y1s to the endless internship opportunities, the annual Days of Opportunities event will take place online on the 10th of April. While it's unfortunately too late to apply as a corporate participant, you could share your internship (and job) vacancies with students by emailing them to Reinis Fals, Chief of Info. com (rfals@sseriga.edu).
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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%).
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Nikita Stepanovs (Y3) — Anders Walls Scholar |
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Congrats — this year's Anders Walls scholarship was awarded to Nikita Stepanovs, a remarkable multitasker and nightlife enthusiast. Besides studies, he has managed to co-develop two AI-based solutions: a night club finder in Riga helping to hit all of the best parties in town in one night and a medical scan (MRI) improvement which could as well be useful for seeing the consequences of partying.
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Maija has always worked in the dynamic and challenging space between the public, corporate and civic sectors. Besides her work as an Adviser for Sustainability and Digitalization at the Nordic Council of Ministers' Office in Latvia, Maija is currently engaged in the doctoral studies in food computing at the Faculty of Computing of the University of Latvia. Maija graduated SSE Riga in 2002, and got her MA in social sciences from the Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg, Germany and Kwa-Zulu Natal University in South Africa in 2007. |
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The Impossible Food Research |
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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.
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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.
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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).
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Postscript by the Editor. Thank you for reading until the end. I leave you with a piece of contemporary art from the SSE Riga collection.
Chameleon by Juris Artūrs Putrāms, 1994 (a.k.a. "That Metal Mask Thing")
What is it? A flat, totemic mosaic made from several layers of various metals.
What does it mean? It is a "chameleon of meaning", which is to say that we have no idea.
Source: Elizabete Fleišmane'??, 2017, "What even is this?" - The SSE Riga contemporary art collection, Insider #150.
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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.
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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.
You can contribute by sharing relevant news (question, photo, idea) or a feature article to the alumni group and/or emailing to the editors. We will publish your news in the next (if received by the fourth Monday) or the following newsletter.
Bypass spam: you could stop this newsletter ending up in your spam folder by white listing our email address. How to do it, depends on your email provider - ask google or your tech support staff.
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).
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