Editorial: Intelligent Systems and the Next Wave of Digital Innovation

The field of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and intelligent automation has become pervasive in our modern digital world. It extends from business and public services to environmental management and even into people's daily experiences with technology. In this special issue "Intelligent Systems and the Next Wave of Digital Innovation," published in the Journal of Informatics and Web Engineering, reviews several studies to explore the increasing role of intelligent systems in current society and their importance. Some of the more significant areas of discussion are how to formalize the expectations for explainable AI, evaluating face recognition models in the real world, how trust and transparency of AI models are evaluated and more. It also highlights a promising and emerging frontier of intelligent automation — from swarm intelligence and optimization within manufacturing to the ubiquity of multimodal interfaces, such as sign language chatbots. Furthermore, smart environmental analytics techniques such as neuro-intelligent techniques for drought prediction and IoT-generated flood intelligence systems help communities to plan for disaster events are also being studied. All of these contributions in turn reinforce the notion that intelligent systems can be developed more responsively and contextually through data-driven architectures. These also reflect a wider digital innovation trend: an era when decision-support tools and algorithmic intelligence and real-time data and other technologies converge toward reliability, efficiency, inclusivity, and resilience in increasingly complex social and technical ecosystems.