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

As of today, the conference proceedings from the 36th Bled eConference are published and available through open access.

You can find the proceedings here: https://press.um.si/index.php/ump/catalog/book/834

Dear 36th Bled eConference participants, we are ready and are counting down until we meet in Bled.
You will find the detailed program for the conference here: https://bledconference.org/conference-programme/
The conference will take place in the Rikli Balance Hotel congress centre.
Doctoral Consortium will be held on Sunday (from 13:00 to 17:00 in Voda Hall) before the official start of the conference. If you are already in Bled by then, join us and support the discussion.
Afterwards, we will meet for a social dinner on Sunday at 19:00.
The conference opening is on Monday, at 9:00 in Arnold Hall.
We are looking forward to meeting with all of you once again.
Have a safe trip, and we’ll see you in Bled!
The Bled eConference team

Marko Grobelnik is co-leader at the Department for Artificial Intelligence at Jozef Stefan Institute, co-founder at UNESCO International Research Center on AI (IRCAI), and CEO at Quintelligence.com, Slovenia

Marko Grobelnik’s presentation “ChatGPT to solve hard AI tasks” will focus on less-known features of ChatGPT in terms of reasoning (deductive, inductive, abductive, causal, commonsense), knowledge extraction & semantic consolidation. He will talk about a collaborative version of ChatGPT (AutoGPT, etc.), where many instances of ChatGPT work together to solve complex problems, …and more.

About Marko Grobelnik (.pdf)

You can view it here:

https://bledconference.org/conference-programme/

We are pleased to announce that on Monday, 26.6., Bled eConference will host an eHealth panel Intelligent Analytics from 16:00 – 17:30 in the Arnold II Hall.

Panel Outline:
As technology continues to advance, more and more opportunities to incorporate these solutions into the provision of healthcare have grown. One area that has expanded rapidly is around data and applications of various forms of intelligent analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Co-chairs:
Nilmini Wickramasinghe, Swinburne University of Technology and Epworth
Juergen Seitz, Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University, Germany

Panellists:
Laurie Hawkins, AITIA Global, Estonia and Australia
Presentation title: Data for everyone

Živa Rant, National Institute of Public Health, Slovenia
Presentation title: Analysis of Data on the discharge letters in Slovenia

Nilmini Wickramasinghe, Swinburne University of Technology and Epworth HealthCare, Australia
Presentation title: Digital Twins

Juergen Seitz, Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University, Germany
Presentation title: The next pandemic: How can we benefit from Data?

Oren Tirosh, Swinburne University Of Technology, Australia
Presentation title: Tele Assessment

Doug Vogel, Harbin Institute of Technology, China
Presentation title: Generative AI and Beyond

More on the panel (.pdf)

On Monday, June 26, 2023, Bled eConference will host a panel on Uncovering the affordances which are hindering the legitimization of blockchain technology moderated by Trevor Clohessy and panellists Sandy Schumann and Sergi Bray.

Panel Aim
Blockchain is a decentralized, secure, transparent and unchangeable ledger technology that allows multiple parties to record and verify transactions without the need for a central authority. The main objective of this panel is to reveal specific affordances of blockchain technologies which are serving as barriers to the legitimization of blockchain technologies. The panel will also discuss the positive impacts of blockchain technologies along supply chains.

Chair:
Trevor Clohessy, Atlantic Technology University, Ireland

Panellists:
Sandy Schumann, University College London, United Kingdom
Sergi Bray, University College London, United Kingdom
Trevor Clohessy, Atlantic Technology University, Ireland

More information on the panellists and the panel theme (in .pdf)

We are happy to announce a Digital Health Panel that will take place at the 36th Bled eConference on Monday, June 26, 2023.

Panel outline

What are some of the main challenges or opportunities for the future of eHealth? For example: what impact can be expected from generative AIs like chatGTP? Is a reliable physician AI in the making? Or: how will telemedicine evolve, following the jump it made during Covid-19? Will wearables or home health sensors finally make a big dent (prevention, empowerment, cure)? Which science & technology innovations may become game changers? Or: what are opportunities for more sustainable and effective health care in 2050?

Co-chairs:

Luuk Simons, Delft University, The Netherlands
Juergen Seitz, Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University, Germany

Panellists:

Nilmini Wickramasinghe, Swinburne University of Technology and Epworth HealthCare, Australia
Presentation title: Intelligent Analytics: a brave new world for Healthcare Delivery

Juergen Seitz, Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University, Germany
Presentation title: Data Analytics in Healthcare: a competition between the Western World and China?

Doug Vogel, Harbin Institute of Technology, China
Presentation title: Healthcare Transformation

Luuk Simons, Delft University, The Netherlands
Presentation title: The 2050 Self-Health Promise: Could Bioinformatics Quantified Self-Help Avoid 80% of Diseases?

Open panel information in .pdf.

We are happy to announce that the first keynote speaker at the 36th Bled eConference is Franc Bračun.

Dr Bračun is a Chief Data Officer and Executive Assistant to the Management Board at the NLB Group, with over 25 years of experience in the fields of banking, data management, business intelligence, advanced analytics and artificial intelligence. He is also AI for Slovenia Executive Board Member.

In his keynote speech, Dr Bračun will focus on Enabling an enterprise AI solution at scale – Experience in the NLB Group.

For more information on the keynote speaker click here.

Here is the preliminary program of the 36th Bled eConference.
All papers scheduled for presentation are currently listed by their ID numbers. A more detailed program will be published in the next week, including the titles of all presentations and their authors.

To open the .pdf version of the program please click here: 36th Bled eConference preliminary program