Vilnius University Kaunas Faculty, Institute of Social Sciences and Applied Informatics, continues the series of seminars initiated by Professor Vladas K. Gronskas, dedicated to analyzing sustainable state development in the context of a mixed economy.

The sixty-fourth seminar will take place on 22 October 2026 at 14:00 in the 5 auditorium, via MS Teams.

The topic of the seminar is “AI Can Do Your Work – But Can It Build Your Career? Learning, Understanding and Cybersecurity in the Age of Marshmallow AI” (language of the presentation is English)—speaker: Stephen Fedtke, PhD.

The speaker will introduce his experience and research on how Artificial Intelligence is changing the way we learn, teach, work, and build careers. AI can already write our texts, create presentations, program software, analyze data, pass exams – and increasingly make decisions for us.

So why should we still learn to do things ourselves?

The seminar introduces the picture of “Marshmallow AI”: the irresistible temptation to take the instant AI-generated result instead of investing time and effort in developing our own knowledge and capabilities.

But what happens if we repeatedly choose the AI marshmallow? What should students still learn from scratch? What should universities still teach? How should we assess results when AI can produce excellent assignments in seconds? And perhaps most importantly for students: Which skills will actually make you valuable in tomorrow’s job market when everyone has access to the same powerful AI?

Rather than providing ready-made answers, the seminar will put seven provocative theses up for open discussion. Students, faculty, and academic staff are explicitly invited to challenge them, disagree, and contribute their own perspectives.

And finally, we will put the idea to the test in cybersecurity. AI is rapidly transforming both cyberattack and cyberdefense. But what happens when a future security analyst knows how to monitor an AI-driven XDR or SIEM dashboard without understanding what is happening beneath the surface?

When the dashboard turns red, will you know what to do?

This question also provides a bridge to the speaker's Cyber Defense lecture proposed for Spring 2027:

Hack the Hackers – Detection and Defense Against Cyber Attacks via SIEM, XDR, and SOC

The lecture goes beyond simply operating modern security tools. It explores what happens behind the dashboard: how attacks work, how they can be detected, how security events are correlated and investigated, and how defenders can understand and respond to attacks – even when AI does not provide the right answer.

Because in an AI-driven world, knowing how to use the tools is important. Understanding what they are telling you may be what makes you the expert.

About the speaker:

Dr. Stephen Fedtke is a cybersecurity and compliance specialist, CTO of Enterprise-IT-Security.com, author of several books, and also editor of Springer Nature’s new book series “AI – Best Practices in Industry, Services, and Administration” (https://link.springer.com/series/17447). During the Spring semester 2026, he gave the lecture “TÖL401M: Hack the hackers: Detection and defense against cyber attacks via SIEM, XDR and SOC” at the University of Iceland.

Contact e-mail:

On behalf of the organizers

Prof. (HP) Dr Remigijus Čiegis

International Translators’ Day is celebrated in honour of St. Jerome, considered one of the first translators. In the 4th and 5th centuries, translators were primarily concerned with conveying the form and meaning of the original language as accurately as possible. Today, this profession has changed significantly.

As translation tools have improved and the nature of the texts being translated has changed, the translation process itself has evolved, and the demands placed on translators have grown. Today, what matters is not a literal reproduction of the original text, but conveying its meaning, content, style, and context. A translator must possess not only excellent linguistic competence but also cultural knowledge, the ability to understand different contexts, and the ability to apply various translation strategies. Translation has become a creative process during which the original text is reinterpreted. This allows the work to reach a new audience.

For a decade now, the Kaunas Faculty of Vilnius University has been celebrating International Translators’ Day

On September 30, the Kaunas Faculty of Vilnius University celebrates International Translators’ Day. The tradition of celebrating this day has continued for ten years. The initiator of this tradition is Assoc. Prof. Dr. Jurgita Kerevičienė, a faculty member at the Institute of Language, Literature, and Translation Studies. Initially, this day was celebrated at the initiative of faculty members and students from the Department of Germanic Philology. In 2017, the department became part of the Institute of Language, Literature, and Translation Studies.

“Ten years ago, we were pioneers in the field of audiovisual translation, as well as in subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing and audio description. Until then, neither practical experience nor research had been conducted in this field in Lithuania. In 2016, a new study program—English and Another Foreign Language (Swedish)—conceived and developed by my team was launched. We thought, since our faculty would be training translators in various languages, why not mark our professional holiday? “We weren’t thinking of anything serious; we just decided to have some fun and organise enjoyable activities for our faculty community, while drawing everyone’s attention to the complex yet creative work of translators,” says J. Kerevičienė.

Vilnius University (VU) invites school students and anyone interested in higher education to take part in its traditional 'Student for a Day' event, taking place on 12–16 October. Registration is now open.

The event offers participants a unique opportunity to experience university life firsthand and get to know VU from the inside — from study programmes and academic subjects to extracurricular activities, university spaces, lecturers and the wider VU community.

As part of the event, participants can attend a range of lectures and practical sessions and experience what it is like to study at Vilnius University. However, places for 'Student for a Day' activities are limited, so participants are encouraged to register responsibly. All activities will take place according to Lithuanian local time. Registration is available here.

The Kaunas Faculty of Vilnius University is offering 50 in-person and online lectures in which high school students will be able to delve into the narratology of video games, learn what connects Lithuanian philology, advertising, and creative communication, learn more about product monetization strategies and how digital products are purchased, hear about the connections between artificial intelligence and language, and explore other topics. This is an opportunity not only to learn about a field of interest but also to experience what it’s like to study at the Vilnius University faculty located in Kaunas’s Old Town. You can find more information about the Kaunas faculty’s programs here.

Vilnius University Kaunas Faculty, Institute of Social Sciences and Applied Informatics, continues the series of seminars initiated by Professor Vladas K. Gronskas and dedicated to analysing sustainable state development in the context of a mixed economy.

The sixty-third seminar will take place on 1 October 2026 at 14:00 in Room 5 and online via the Microsoft Teams platform.

The topic of the seminar is “Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of Gender Bias in Social Media Discourse: Science-Based and Technology-Assisted Solutions to Digital Communication Challenges”. The presentation will be delivered in English.

Speaker: Postdoctoral Researcher Līga Romāne-Kalniņa, PhD

The speaker will introduce her research on multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) as an interdisciplinary approach to studying the construction, performance, and negotiation of gender in social media discourse. The presentation will examine how gender in social media discourse functions as both socially constitutive and socially constituted, and how it is often shaped by cognitive shortcuts, including historically embedded stereotypes and biases. These, in turn, are negotiated across macro (societal), meso (platform), and micro (discursive, semiotic, and linguistic) levels of analysis.

Drawing on a corpus of social media data, the presentation will discuss how gender stereotypes and biases emerge through specific discursive strategies realised through linguistic means and other multimodal resources, such as images, emojis, and hashtags. The speaker will also reflect on preliminary research findings showing how different social media platforms and their affordances shape these dynamics in different ways.

The presentation will further address an unanticipated but significant finding emerging from the MCDA of the corpus data: the considerable presence of hate speech targeting not only marginalised groups but also individuals and institutions, particularly in comment sections. This finding points to a new and developing avenue of inquiry.

The talk will conclude by considering how science-based and AI-assisted tools can help identify and address these emerging challenges, while also reflecting on the value of interdisciplinary and industry cooperation in this field of research.

About the speaker

Postdoctoral Researcher Līga Romāne-Kalniņa, PhD

Līga Romāne-Kalniņa, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of English, Faculty of Humanities, University of Latvia, working at the intersection of Gender Studies, Critical Discourse Studies, Corpus Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, and Digital Humanities.

She holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Latvia (2022). Her doctoral research applied corpus-based critical discourse analysis to the rhetoric of the presidents of the Baltic States between 1918 and 2018, earning her the University of Latvia Annual Award (2022) and the Young Scientist Award of the Latvian Academy of Sciences (2023).

She has published several scientific articles and presented her research at numerous international conferences and symposia, including at the University of Cambridge (2025). She has also undertaken research visits at the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University (2026) and the University of Granada (2026).

Her current ERDF- and Latvian Council of Science-funded interdisciplinary and industry-oriented postdoctoral research project, titled “Gender Bias Through a Digital Lens: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus-Based Platform Development for Analysing Gender Bias in Latvian Social Media”, combines linguistics (MCDA), gender studies, and computer science to develop an AI-assisted MCDA platform for detecting and analysing gender bias and stereotypes in social media. The study has also opened a developing line of research into online hate speech and misogyny, including manipulative and covert forms of hate speech, such as so-called soft hate speech.

She is also a contact person and member of the newly established Gender Studies Research Group and Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis Research Group at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Latvia.

Alongside her research, she works as a leading expert at the Ministry of Smart Administration and Regional Development and has complemented her academic career with professional training in artificial intelligence, cognitive linguistics and neurolinguistics, data science, cybersecurity, AI ethics, project management, and intellectual property.

Contact e-mail:

On behalf of the organisers

Prof. (HP) Dr Remigijus Čiegis

This year, we are celebrating the International Translators’ Day at the Kaunas Faculty of Vilnius University for the 10th time!

We invite you to kick off this anniversary with an open discussion about the day-to-day life of a translator, the challenges they face, unexpected discoveries, and the future prospects of this profession. The specifics of a translator’s work will be discussed by Kristina Sprindžiūnaitė, a translator of Lithuanian fiction and non-fiction, a journalist, and a board member of the Lithuanian Literary Translators’ Union; Lina Abraitienė, a member of the Lithuanian Translators’ Association, founder and director of the translation agency and language school “Bella Verba”, and a lecturer; and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Jurgita Astrauskienė, chair of the Study Programme Committee for the Bachelor’s and Master’s degree programmes in Audiovisual Translation at the Kaunas Faculty of Vilnius University and an audiovisual translation specialist. The discussion will be moderated by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Jurgita Kerevičienė. 

Following the discussion, lecturer Indrė Bagdžiūtė will invite the academic community to participate in a creative activity—together, we will create a multilingual poem in which different languages will come together to form a single work. This will be an opportunity not only to take a creative look at linguistic diversity but also to take part in this anniversary celebration. We will also reflect on the ten-year tradition of celebrating International Translators’ Day at the Kaunas Faculty of Vilnius University, review photos from past celebrations, and watch short films created by the students. The festive programme will conclude with a fiesta at Žalčio Menė, where a cosy atmosphere and sweet treats await. 

Event date: September 30 at 10:00 a.m.

Event location: Vilnius University Kaunas Faculty, Muitinės St. 12–14, Building IV

On September 25, Mariam Kasradze, a doctoral student in Social Sciences and Applied Informatics at the VU Kaunas Faculty (field of Social Sciences, branch of Economics (S 004)), successfully defended her doctoral dissertation titled "Corporate Social Responsibility in the Energy Sector".

On September 22, Aistė Kukytė—a doctoral student at the Institute of Social Sciences and Applied Informatics, VU Kaunas Faculty (field of Social Sciences, Management discipline (S 003))—successfully defended her doctoral dissertation titled "The Impact of Team Vitality on a Member's Intention to Leave the Organization."