Academic CentreShortly after the three Baltic states – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – regained their independence from the USSR at the beginning of the 1990’s, two organisers of the Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) conference – Prof. Janis Bubenko jr. (Sweden, born in Latvia) and Prof. Arne Sølvberg (Norway) – decided to invest a small balance of the VLDB Fund to introduce computer science researchers in the Baltic States into Europe. In 1994, the first computer science conference, called “The Baltic Workshop on National Infrastructure Databases: Problems, Methods, Experiences”, was organized in Trakai, Lithuania, where colleagues from Europe and the United States participated with researchers from the Baltic States. Ever since the conference became an international biennial (International Baltic Conference on Databases and Information Systems), rotating between Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. The conference is classified consistently in category B by Excellence for Research Australia (ERA), its articles are indexed on the Web of Science, SCOPUS, DBLP, etc.
The aim of Bubenko and Sølvberg to unite Baltic and European researchers has long been achieved, and after the 14th International Baltic Conference on Databases and Information Systems (Tallinn, 2020) the conference steering committee decided to extend the conference with more modern topics and to decipher the acronym Baltic DB&IS as Digital Business and Intelligent Systems. Although the conference has grown out of the Baltics scope, the conference name still carries it as a reference to its origins and long history.