CECIIS 2021 has finished, next conference will be in Dubrovnik

At the beginning of the conference, on Wednesday, October 13^th, the participants were addressed by the President of the Program Committee Prof. Neven Vrček, Dean of FOI Prof. Nina Begičević Ređep and on behalf of the patron and sponsor of this year's conference, Varaždin County Prefect Mr Anđelko Stričak and Varaždin Mayor Mr Neven Bosilj.

After the opening, Professor Henry Muccini from the University of L'Aquila (Italy) gave a lecture on "Architecting Sustainable Software through Machine Learning: an experience report", and Professor Dunja Mladenić from the Jožef Stefan Institute (Slovenia) on "Artificial Intelligence in/for the Society “.

During the three days of the conference, 43 peer-reviewed scientific papers by 111 authors were presented through nine scientific sections, which will be published in the Proceedings of the CECIIS 2021 conference. The scientists whose papers were presented at the conference are from 15 different countries, which confirms the international significance of the FOI conference.

The conference program also included two academic panel discussions, in which more than 150 participants from Croatia and abroad actively participated. The first panel discussion on "Accelerating smart industry and digital transformation" was moderated by Prof. Neven Vrček from FOI and it was held on the first day of the conference, on Wednesday, October 13^th, 2021. Panelists were Prof. Rastislav Igliar (Slovakia), Prof. Dimitris Karagiannis (Austria), Prof. Slavko Vidović (Croatia) and Prof. Henry Muccini (Italy) and together with the moderator Prof. Neven Vrček, they discussed what the state and society can do to improve the development of smart industry, ie what interaction of the main stakeholders - business entities, the scientific community and regulators is needed for the development of smart industry and contribution to the general development of modern companies.

On the second day of the conference, Thursday, the 14^th of October, 2021, participants in the second academic panel discussion "Emerging research areas: the vision of journal editor", had the opportunity to hear about visions of new topics in educational technology research from four editors from different journals. The panel was moderated by Prof. Igor Balaban, and the panel participants were Prof. Wim Van Petegem (Belgium), Prof. Josep M. Duart (Spain), Prof. Denise Whitelock (UK) and Prof. Alen Lovrenčić (Croatia).

Among the parallel events, student papers were presented during the conference, as part of the Student Section, which brought together about 20 young researchers from Europe and the United States. Student section enabled students to exchange experiences in an international environment. The heads of the section were Prof. Violeta Vidaček Hainš and Prof. Victoria Appatova with the great support of Prof. Enrique Mu and Prof. Kamal Gella from the USA, and Prof. Jozef Bushati, Asst. Prof. Sidita Duli and Virtit Lesha from Albania.

This year's CECIIS was sponsored by InfoDom (golden sponsor), Oracle and DignetSoftware (silver sponsors), which presented themselves within the Sponsor Section. The conference was also supported by Varaždin County and the City of Varaždin.

On the eve of the closing of the conference, the scientific paper named Mobile Continuous Authentication in eHealth: A case study for the ProTego project written by authors Luis de-Marcos, Carlos Cilleruelo, Javier Junquera-Sánchez, was declared as the best scientific paper of CECIIS 2021. The awarded paper was presented in the section 'Trends in Software Engineering'. Congratulations to the authors!

The next edition of the conference - CECIIS 2022, which will be held from the 21^st to the 23^rd of September 2022 has been announced, with the theme 'Smart Industry in post Covid-19 society'!

See you next year!