Bulgarian AIS Chapter (BulAIS) Launches Annual Workshop Series
The Bulgarian chapter of the Association for Information Systems, known by its local acronym BulAIS, hosted its inaugural international workshop on digital innovation at Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski" in early October 2024. The two-day event, held at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics on the central Sofia campus, marks the formal launch of what the chapter intends as an annual workshop series — the most ambitious public outing of BulAIS since the chapter's establishment.
Programme and participation
The workshop drew more than seventy registered participants, with a notable regional spread. Roughly a quarter of accepted papers came from authors based at institutions in Romania, Serbia, North Macedonia, and Greece, alongside the majority Bulgarian contributions. A handful of senior visiting scholars from Germany, Austria, and the United Kingdom participated, in several cases as discussants in the doctoral consortium that ran in parallel with the second day's main sessions.
The programme was organized around three thematic strands:
- Digital innovation and business model transformation
- Cybersecurity in financial and public-sector information systems
- AI-assisted software engineering and implications for IS curriculum
Each day opened with a combined keynote, after which the programme split into two parallel paper tracks. The doctoral consortium, run on day two, featured roughly twelve PhD candidates presenting in-progress work with twenty-five-minute structured feedback slots — a deliberately slower format than typical at larger conferences.
Institutional positioning
The choice of Sofia University FMI as host institution was strategically deliberate. The faculty has spent the past several years building up its information systems research portfolio, expanding its doctoral pipeline, and increasing its participation in EU framework programme consortia. Hosting a maiden chapter workshop fits that broader institutional repositioning, and the faculty's logistical handling of the event — from registration through doctoral consortium administration — was visibly professional.
"A national chapter workshop is not a smaller version of a flagship conference. It is a different kind of venue: more continuity, more mentoring, more space for work that is not yet ready for the top tier but deserves serious engagement."
Where this fits in the wider AIS chapter ecosystem
BulAIS now joins a growing list of national AIS chapters that have moved from founding phase to consolidation phase by establishing a stable annual venue. The Indonesian chapter AISINDO, for example, has been running a comparable annual symposium since 2023, and several other chapters in Central and Eastern Europe and in Southeast Asia have made similar moves over the past several cycles. We cover the broader pattern in a separate analysis piece.
Chapter leadership confirmed at the closing reception that a 2025 edition is being planned, with at least one neighbouring-country institution expressing interest in a future rotational co-hosting arrangement. The 2024 proceedings and detailed programme are maintained on the workshop's own event site.