Baltic DB&IS 2026 brought digital business and intelligent systems researchers to Tartu

The 17th biennial International Baltic Conference on Digital Business and Intelligent Systems (Baltic DB&IS 2026) took place in Tartu, Estonia, from the 28th of June to the 1st of July 2026. The conference was attended by more than 60 participants from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, France, Sweden and many other countries.

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Building on its strong heritage and steadily expanding international reach, Baltic DB&IS provides a vibrant environment for scientists, practitioners, and doctoral students to exchange research findings, discuss emerging trends, and explore transformative ideas shaping modern digital ecosystems. The conference welcomes work spanning conceptual modelling, business process optimisation, intelligent computing, data science, semantic and knowledge technologies, trustworthy and human-centred AI, digital twins, cybersecurity, emerging infrastructures, and other domains where digitalisation is reshaping society.

In addition to the main conference program and invited keynote talks, the conference featured a Forum and a Doctoral Consortium.

The aim of the conference Forum was to provide a platform for researchers and practitioners to present new ideas, case studies, and exploratory work and to receive early feedback from the community.

The Doctoral Consortium offered PhD students the opportunity to present their research to senior researchers (mentors) and peers with diverse academic and industrial backgrounds. The event provided a supportive, open environment for young researchers to discuss their work, receive constructive feedback, and further develop their scientific writing and presentation skills. The Doctoral Consortium also facilitated networking and the establishment of connections with peers and future colleagues.

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The Doctoral Consortium featured a keynote talk, “From Ideas to Impact: Verification, Validation, and Evaluation of Design Artifacts” by Dr. Jolita Ralyté from the University of Geneva (Switzerland). Watch the recording here.

The Baltic DB&IS 2026 main program included three keynote speeches.

• “From Powerful to Responsible: Rethinking Digital Twin Architectures” by Prof. Jelena Zdravkovic, Stockholm University (Sweden). Watch the recording here.
• “The Enduring Value of Conceptual Modelling - Fundamentally Understanding What We Are Reasoning, Explaining, and Coding About” by Prof. Henderik Proper, TU Wien (Austria). Watch the recording here.
• “Towards an Era of AI in Data Driven Decision Support - SensusQ’s Winning Mind” by Dr. Jaan Übi, SensusQ, (Estonia). Watch the recording here.

Recordings and presentation slides from the keynote speakers are also available on the
conference website

The conference also included a special session of the CHESS consortium, during which partners presented research articles published in international journals. The topic ranged from the Internet of Secure Things, security certification, and verification of trustworthy systems to security preservation in blockchain technology and human-centric aspects of cybersecurity.

Here you can find a small
photo gallery

Conference Awards

• The winner of the Best Doctoral Consortium Paper Award is Kaspar Ābelnīca (Riga Technical University) for the paper Towards a Method for Secure Management of Manufacturing-as-a-Service Platforms.
• Runner-up for the Best Paper is “A Dual-Stage Cascade Deep Learning Framework for Automated Road Defect Detection and Severity Assessment”, by Lauma Jokste, Viesturs Pavlovs, Edijs Ilvess, Martins Gailis and Janis Vempers (Riga Technical University).
• The winner of the Best Paper Award is Roberto Cortes-Morales (Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica), Carine Souveyet and Rébecca Deneckère (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) for the paper on “Information Systems Engineering: A Journey Through Half a Century of History”.

• Conference proceedings
• Main conference
• Forum and Doctoral Consortium