Season’s Greetings!

Thank you to everyone for their hard work in developing Digital Futures into a leading research environment in Europe focused on the sciences for digital transformation. I wanted to take a moment to reflect on some highlights from 2022 and preview some upcoming activities in 2023.

We are a community of over 200 research leaders, working with our teams of PhD students and postdocs on over 100 projects and other activities. Digital Futures invest in fundamental cross-disciplinary research to understand the impacts of autonomy, machine learning, data privacy, and cybersecurity on society and how digitalization can create a more sustainable and human-centric world.

We also prioritize investing in research talent and enabling the development of future leaders. We have established new research pairs through funding for junior faculty members to develop their cross-disciplinary research ideas. Our scholars-in-residence program has been a great success, with international visitors engaging in mentorship and research collaboration during their time at Digital Futures. This year, 13 scholars have spent time at Digital Futures, and we will welcome more at the beginning of 2023.

In April 2022, we launched the Industrial and Societal Partnership Program, with the City of Stockholm, Region of Stockholm, Ericsson, Scania, and Skanska as our first partners. Recently, AstraZeneca also joined, and we will soon announce a few more partners joining the network. We are preparing to launch several new partnership projects and a mobility program to encourage exchange between our partners.

Digital Futures is engaged with the broader industrial, societal, civil, and academic communities, as evidenced by the over 3,350 people who subscribe to our newsletter and the many followers on our social channels on Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as on our YouTube channel, which features distinguished lectures and other seminars, including all the keynote talks and panels from Digitalize in Stockholm in October 2022. This annual flagship conference, organized in collaboration with our partners, was a hybrid event this year with a few hundred on-site participants in Kista and online participation from more than 30 countries. We expect Digitalize in Stockholm 2023 to be a hybrid event with a significantly larger physical presence.

We have many more activities planned for 2023, welcoming several new international postdocs, including our first few industrial postdocs. We will continue with our successful matchmaking workshops for researchers and stakeholders. We have also planned international conferences and summer schools on physics-informed machine learning and artificial general intelligence. And our exciting summer internship program for undergraduate students to learn about digitalization and the life of a researcher will return.

Last but not least, the new KTH leadership is on board. Yesterday KTH President Anders Söderholm, along with incoming and outgoing Deputy Presidents Mikael Lindström and Mikael Östling, visited Digital Futures to discuss how the research environment should continue to flourish under the new KTH leadership.

I want to extend a special thank you to our fantastic operations team: Anna, Johanna, Vendela, and Sissi. You are doing an outstanding job running Digital Futures and creating a warm and welcoming atmosphere for us all to enjoy.

Wishing you a happy and safe holiday season and a wonderful 2023!

Karl H Johansson, Director Digital Futures