Dear Bled eConference friends,

we concluded the 36th edition of the Bled eConference. We met in beautiful Bled and from Sunday, June 25th to Wednesday, June 28th, we listened to:

• seven Doctoral Consortium presentations,
• two inspiring keynote speakers,
  Marko Grobelnik, (co-leader at the Department for Artificial Intelligence Jozef Stefan Institute, co-founder at UNESCO International Research Center on AI (IRCAI), CEO at Quintelligence.com, Slovenia) with his presentation “ChatGPT to solve hard AI tasks”
  &
  Franc Bračun, (Chief Data Officer and Executive Assistant to the Management Board at the NLB Group, & AI for Slovenia Executive Board Member, Slovenia) with his presentation “Enabling an enterprise AI solution at scale – Experience in the NLB Group”.
• 54 research paper presentations,
• four Students Bazaar prototype presentations,
• a workshop on Integrating Digital Content and Digitalization of High Schools – iDADOHS,
• two ENVISION Alliances project meetings,
• three separate panel discussions: “Uncovering the affordances which are hindering the legitimization of blockchain technology”, “The future of eHealth” & “Intelligent analytics in eHealth”,
• and five journal presentations in the “Meet the Editors” session.

This year we had great trouble deciding on the best paper, so we awarded two outstanding papers:

• “Toward Sovereign Data Exchange Through a Meta-Platform for Data Marketplaces: A Preliminary Evaluation of the Perceived Efficacy of Control Mechanisms”
  by Antragama Ewa Abbas, Wirawan Agahari, Hosea Ofe, Anneke Zuiderwijk & Mark de Reuver (the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands)
  &
• “Towards Principles For a Data-Driven Business Model Innovation Process – A Design Science Case Study”
  by Michael Fruhwirth (previous at Know-Center GmbH, Graz, Austria, where the research has been conducted; now at Silicon Austria Labs GmbH, Austria) & Viktoria Pammer-Schnidler (Graz University of Technology & Know-Center GmbH, Austria).

We proudly handed an outstanding review award to our long-time contributor Koen Smit from HU University of applied sciences Utrecht, The Netherlands.

On Tuesday afternoon, four teams from Germany and the Netherlands presented their prototypes at the Renee W. Wagenaar Students Bazaar.
Ultimately the first place went to “MedEdBot” (aka. a robot head named Furhat) by Susan Bruggeling and Hanne de Deckere, from the HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, The Netherlands.

We have no data on how many people reconnected, or connected this year at the conference, nor how many cream cakes and coffees were had over the four days. We know
we had plenty.
We laughed and we laugh-cried. And although the conference always feels so brief, we were happy to meet with everyone and we hope you were able to seize this opportunity to the max as well.

For those of you who are still reading, the conference photo gallery is available on the website: https://bledconference.org/conference-photogallery/

Thank you for being a part of the Bled eConference community! We hope you have a great summer, please keep in touch and we’ll let you know in autumn when the 2024 Call for papers is announced. 😉

We hope to see you again next year,
Andreja, Mirjana and Doroteja