Warm welcome to the 8th International Conference on Digital Health (www.acm-digitalhealth.org), supported by UCL Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction and The Web Conference 2018, held in-cooperation with ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD) in Lyon, France on 23rd-26th April 2018.
Leveraging a growing success of previous editions (2008 London, 2009 Istanbul, 2010 Casablanca, 2011 Malaga, 2013 Rio de Janeiro, 2014 Soul, 2015 Florence, 2016 in Montreal, 2017 London), the International Digital Health succeeded in becoming a unique prime interdisciplinary venue with world class networking opportunities highly praised by participants every year. A DH 2017 participant highlighted: This has been an amazing conference. So many interesting people and presentations. More importantly, it's been like meeting a group of friends.
From a small interdisciplinary scientific conference bringing together IT researchers and health professionals, DH embraced the third angle of triangle: the start-ups and innovators in digital health. DH 2018, again co-located with the Web conference 2018, will bring together the three core audiences essential for cutting edge innovation transforming the future of health: IT / big data, public health and industry / start-ups in digital health. With focus public health informatics, global health, social media and big data analytics, pandemics preparedness, precision medicine and emergency medicine, in 2018 we achieved the widest topical outreach. Through a strategic stakeholder collaboration with digital incubators in Lyon DH will again offer an exciting programme including SME clinic and the Digital Health Innovator Prize. We were also proud to achieve a diversity - a gender balanced panels, women serving as Programme Chairs but also growing diversity of geographical representation including speakers from low and middle-income settings (Brazil, Nepal, etc.).
Following the successful publication strategy, DH 2018 proceedings again are included in the ACM Digital Library and extended papers published in the Frontiers Digital Health.
