BulAIS Hosts International Workshop on Digital Innovation in Sofia

The Bulgarian chapter of the Association for Information Systems, known by its local acronym BulAIS, convened its first full-format international workshop on digital innovation at Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski" in early October. The event, held over two working days at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics on the central Sofia campus, drew an audience of more than seventy registered participants — a respectable turnout for a maiden edition in a country whose IS research community is small but increasingly organized.

The workshop's stated aim, set out by the organizing committee in opening remarks, was twofold. First, to provide a stable annual venue for Bulgarian and broader Balkan IS researchers to present in-progress work without having to compete for the limited reviewer attention at the major European IS conferences. Second, to use the venue as a platform for inviting senior international scholars into the regional conversation in a setting more sustained than a single keynote slot at a larger event.

Programme themes

The two-day programme was organized around three thematic strands. The first, and clearly the most populated, was digital innovation in the narrow sense: digital business model transformation, platform economics, and the institutional conditions under which mid-sized European firms successfully reorganize around data. A second strand addressed cybersecurity in financial and public-sector information systems, picking up a thread that several Bulgarian research groups have been developing over the past three to four years. A third, smaller strand brought together work on AI-assisted software engineering and the implications for IS curriculum design.

Paper sessions ran in two parallel tracks for most of the workshop, with combined keynote sessions opening each day. The opening keynote, delivered by a senior European IS scholar, made the case for treating regional workshops not as second-tier venues for work that did not place at top conferences, but as the natural primary venue for a particular kind of cumulative, locally grounded contribution. The framing landed well with the room.

"A workshop like this is not a consolation prize. It is where you actually build a research community, because it is where people return year after year and where the conversation has continuity."

Regional reach

Although BulAIS is by mandate the Bulgarian national chapter, the workshop was visibly regional. Roughly a quarter of accepted papers came from authors based at institutions in Romania, Serbia, North Macedonia, and Greece, with smaller contributions from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia. Several visiting senior scholars from Germany, Austria, and the United Kingdom were present, in some cases as discussants for the doctoral consortium that ran in parallel with the second day's main sessions.

The doctoral consortium itself was one of the workshop's more substantive components. Roughly a dozen PhD candidates from Bulgarian and neighbouring institutions presented work in progress to panels of senior discussants. Topics ranged from formal models of consent in GDPR-aligned health information systems to applied work on intrusion detection for retail banking infrastructure. The feedback format was deliberately slower and more detailed than at larger conferences — twenty-five minutes per candidate, with structured written feedback delivered after the session.

Institutional context

The choice of Sofia University as host was not incidental. The Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics has spent the last several years deliberately positioning itself as the natural Bulgarian anchor for IS research, expanding its doctoral programme in informatics, growing its publication output in international venues, and hosting an increasing number of visiting scholars under EU mobility schemes. We cover that institutional trajectory in a separate piece here.

BulAIS itself is a relatively young chapter — formally established within the past several years — and the workshop represents its most ambitious public outing to date. Chapter leadership confirmed to the Review at the closing reception that a 2025 edition is being planned, with at least one neighbouring country expressing interest in co-hosting a future edition on a rotating basis.

Assessment

Three observations seem worth recording. First, the technical quality of the accepted papers was substantially above what one might expect from a maiden workshop edition; the reviewer pool appears to have done its job. Second, the doctoral consortium, more than the paper sessions, may turn out to be the workshop's most durable contribution to the regional research community — the kind of slow, mentor-dense format that simply does not exist at larger conferences. Third, the chapter has placed itself in a useful structural position: BulAIS now sits alongside emerging national chapters elsewhere — including, for instance, the Indonesian chapter AISINDO, which we have noted runs a comparable annual symposium — as part of a wider pattern of national IS communities building their own stable venues rather than depending on the major flagship conferences.

The workshop closed with a brief business meeting of chapter members and an informal reception. The 2025 edition is expected to be announced in the first half of next year.