Welcome to DEBEST 2023, which takes place in the tradition of the IEEE Digital Ecosystems, Science and Technologies conference of the 8th series. Sponsored by IEEE Industrial Electronic Society in 2007, the conference had emerged at the same time as the EU 6th Framework Initiative in 2006 on Digital Business Ecosystems. In the last 15 years, this conference series has extended the concepts and expanded the studies across Europe, Asia Pacific, and North America.

The newly positioned DEBEST 2023 (or ‘the best’) is the best conference for cyber information engineering, digital democracy and human space computing for the future of our Digital Ecosystems and embraces emerging technologies to make contributions for Sustainable Transformation. It complements perspectives of Digital Ecosystems to build a resilient society and infrastructures for our Cyber Physical World aimed at advancing prosperity and quality growth for social, economic and ecologically sustainable development to define the core of the DEBEST conference series.

The DEBEST conference was hosted in “the best” venue in the world as shown by the 2023 General Chairs Professor Elizabeth Chang and Professor Achim Karduck.

The Digital Ecosystem inherits “the best” concepts from bio-ecological systems, where “balanced” and “self-organization” environment are the key for sustainable systems and in the cyber-physical world, it should be open, loosely coupled, demand-driven, domain clustered, agent-based self-organized collaborative environment, where species or agents conserve the environment for their own benefit and profit instead of unbridled competition.

The Ecosystem is “the best” form of coordination and collaboration spirit, where agents form a temporary coalition (or longer term) for a specific purpose or goal. The essence of Digital Ecosystems is bio-and ecological inspired technology development with the motto of creating value by making connections. It promotes collective intelligence and a collaborative spirit to produce network enriched industrial domains such as health, energy, resources, agriculture, transportation, and education as well as safe digital ecosystems against cyber infiltration and attacks.

During DEBEST 2023, the aim is to begin to elaborate as well the DEBEST Cadenabbia Agenda with the participants. The Agenda will focus on Trust and Security for achieving long-term quality growth and sustainability. Please refer to DEBEST Cadenabbia Agenda for the context.

Please view as well the video statements about the link between Digital Ecosystems and Sustainable Development from key participants at IEEE DEST in Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, USA [here].

It is to be highlighted that the past IEEE DEST conference papers had the highest citation rate among all IEEE IES conferences.

The conference proceedings will be published by IEEE Explorer and selected papers will be invited to publish in the Special Issues in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, and International Journal of Engineering Intelligent Systems.