Digital transformation in the industry and in the society

After the globalization phenomena, the world is experiencing new transformations driven by knowledge and technology developments, as well as by the critical need to assure the sustainability of the planet. Digital became a critical and omnipresent word with disruptive impact in the way people, organizations and things are connected, in the generalized used of robots for industrial, services or home applications, in the advances of virtual or augmented reality, or in the remarkable progresses in high performance computing and artificial intelligence. New paradigms in this area, as quantum computing have already been announcement.

This digital transformation is accelerating processes and changes in the great majority of activities as well as in current standards of work and living. Furthermore, it is followed by a biological revolution, where synthetic biology, genetics and tissue engineering are opening new frontiers for life and challenging the foundations of modern societies. The merge of these two revolutions is blowing borders between knowledge domains and application areas, leading to auspicious crossroads between, until now, relatively confined worlds, namely the physical and the cyber; the real and the virtual; and the bio and the technological. Is also confronting humankind with critical challenges, namely in the ethic concepts associated to life and to human-machine interactions.