Dubravko Culibrk is a Professor of Information and Communication Systems at the University of Novi Sad, Serbia and an NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute University Ambassador. His research interests are in the domain of computer vision, machine learning, knowledge discovery and artificial intelligence, favoring biologically inspired approaches, neural networks and, in the last decade, deep learning. He has spent two years as a research fellow in the Multimedia and Human Understanding Group of the University of Trento, Italy.

A serial entrepreneur, he has co-founded two companies and is passionate about bringing university-generated inventions to market and spent a year manning the post of the Senior Scientist at Tandemlaunch Inc., a unique start up foundry based in Montreal, Canda.

Prof. Culibrk received his B.Eng.degree in Electrical Engineering and an M.Sc.degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Novi Sad, Serbia, in 2000 and 2003, respectively, as well as a Ph.D. degree in computer engineering from Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, USA, in 2006

Christophe is a Software Engineer with over 8 years of experience in Software development and various fields of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. He is the founder of Beirut AI, the applied Artificial Intelligence community in Lebanon, where he organizes community events and technical workshops to help people understand and apply AI. He’s also the founder & CEO of Zaka, an Artificial Intelligence consulting company that aims to develop the AI sector in the local community and abroad.

The main motive for my studies is the explanatory gap between the brain and the mind. My interest is in how the physical world of neuronal activity produces the mental world of perception and cognition. I am associated with the Max-Planck Institute for Brain Research, Ernst Strüngmann Institute, Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, and the University of Zagreb.

I approach the problem of explanatory gap from both sides, bottom-up and top-down. The bottom-up approach investigates brain physiology. The top-down approach investigates the behavior and experiences. Each of the two approaches led me to develop a theory: The work on behavior and experiences led me to discover the phenomenon of ideasthesia (meaning “sensing concepts”). The work on physiology resulted in the theory of practopoiesis (meaning “creation of actions”).

The empirical work in the background of those theories involved simultaneous recordings of activity of 100+ neurons in the visual cortex (extracellular recordings), behavioral and imaging studies in visual cognition (attention, working memory, long-term memory), and empirical investigations of phenomenal experiences (synesthesia).

The ultimate goal of my studies is twofold. First, I would like to achieve conceptual understanding of how the dynamics of physical processes creates the mental ones. I believe that the work on practopoiesis presents an important step in this direction and that it will help us eventually address the hard problem of consciousness and the mind-body problem in general. Second, I would like to use this theoretical knowledge to create artificial systems that are biologically-like intelligent and adaptive.

Richard Knox is a senior data engineer at eBay, working in the data team at mobile.de (an eBay classifieds group company). Since joining in 2018, he has mostly been focused on bringing relevancy search to the mobile.de platform, and, as part of this, introducing machine learning to our search infrastructure in production. Prior to this, he was an engineer in a venture capital backed fintech startup in Scotland, focused on building brokerage software for small to medium sized investment banks.

Last 8 years Stanislav is involved in Java world and for the past two years, he is the part of eBay family, working as Tech Lead at Data Team of mobile.de.

As Data Team at mobile.de@eBay he spent the last two years on the development of Machine Learning solutions and brought to production a number of them, such as Estimation of car prices, user profiling, and improved search solution. Stanislav will show and explain ideas, architecture and implementation specifics of different approaches of bringing machine learning into an enterprise platform, especially highlight the integration with Elasticsearch.

Dr. Helgi Páll Helgason is CTO of Activity Stream which is developing next generation business intelligence solutions for the Live Entertainment and Sports domain based on machine learning. He holds a PhD degree in Computer Science with focus on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), having previously completed BSc and MSc degrees in the same discipline. An academic paper he co-authored and was based on his thesis received the Kurzweil Award for Best AGI Idea at the AGI 2012 Conference at Oxford University. Helgi also has over two decades of working experience in software development in a number of different domains, having been a developer and data scientist himself and managed teams of developers and data scientists before becoming CTO. He is currently focused on application of machine learning to real world business data to generate actionable intelligence for enterprises at scale.

Ricardo Kawase is a data scientist at mobile.de GmbH, the leading online automotive marketplace in Germany. He is the lead data scientist on topics such fraud fighting/prevention (accounts take over, customer ratings, and fraudulent items), user profiling, customer behavior prediction and personalization. He holds a Ph.D in Computer Science (Doctor rerum naturalium, Dr. rer. nat.) from the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany. Before joining mobile.de he worked as a researcher for over 7 years at the L3S Research center in Hannover on several topics such as data mining, information retrieval, semantic web, e-learning, social networks, crowdsourcing and Web science in general. He has written, collaborated, and published over 60 peer reviewed academic articles and journals.

Dragana Djermanovic is digital transformation advisor & keynote speaker proclaimed as “Woman of the Decade in Social Media and Leadership“ at the international Women Economic Forum (WEF17) in New Delhi & the only Serbian businesswoman enlisted in The Hundert’s top 100 female entrepreneurs of Europe. The list has been confirmed by the renown Forbes magazine.

As a representative of The European Public Relations Education and Research Association (EUPRERA) and Euroblog Association, she was an honorable jury member for the Social Media Awards and the respectable ambassador of WebIT committee of Internet Practitioners of South-Eastern Europe. Also, she was a jury member for European ICT awards in Luxembourg, as noble representative. This Serbian entrepreneur is a guest and keynote speaker at the world’s biggest conferences and professional events in ICT, such as Women Economic Forum (New Delhi, India), WebCom (Montreal, Canada), CeBIT (Hannover, Germany), WEF Los Angeles (USA), ICT Spring (Luxembourg), DigIT (Ljubljana, Slovenia), Le Web (Paris, France), Rise (Hong Kong), Web Summit (Dublin, Ireland), Next (Berlin, Germany), ICGR (Rome, Italy) and many more. Business Women Association of Serbia presented her “The Flower of Success,” a prestigious award for the most successful female entrepreneur in her home country. Dragana Djermanovic holds a Ph.D. in Technical Science.

After originally being employed in the process control industry, Dobrica has been working in the betting industry for over six years. Having started this journey as a Data Visualisation Engineer and Game Mathematician, he has been leading the Analytics team in Mozzartbet, the biggest betting provider in Serbia, since 2016. Together with his team, he works on improving business data pipeline and insight, with emphasis on using predictive modelling and machine learning methods to sustain business decision in this specific industry, and deliver a personal experience to an expanding number of players worldwide. He is currently enrolled on a PhD track in Applied Mathematics at the University of Belgrade, with special research interest in the field of Recommendation systems.

Dragan Pleskonjić is Senior Director Application Security at international company IGT (previously GTECH). In his current role, he directs, coordinates and oversees application security efforts on global organization level. Dragan is a well-known expert and influential strategic thinker in the area of information security, privacy, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). He is an experienced leader and has held top positions at international companies, working with clients and partners from various sectors worldwide, including: finance and banking, technology, telecommunications, services, lotteries, gaming, education, government and others. He possesses rich experience in creating and managing start-ups, new businesses development, proven leadership and talent for creation, management and organization of successful teams. Initiated and has held leading positions in a number of industry projects, as well as in research and development projects. Dragan is an adjunct professor for various cybersecurity and computer science courses. He is author of ten books so far, including well-known university textbooks on topics such as cybersecurity, operating systems, and software. Dragan is inventor with set of patents granted by USPTO and also CIPO, EPO and WIPO patent offices. He published more than seventy scientific and technical papers at conferences and journals. His current research and development focus is intelligent predictive security (INPRESEC), exploring the paradigm shift in information security and privacy with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Dragan is initiator and founder of INPRESEC project and solution. For more information, please visit his personal website at https://www.dragan-pleskonjic.com/.

Mladen Jovanovic is the Head of Data Science at Enetel Solutions.

Mladen spent a decade developing software and web applications in cooperation with domestic and foreign partners, after which he decided to devote himself fully to analysis and data processing.

He was the Lead Bioinformatics Analyst in the Serbian-American startup company Seven Bridges. He participated in and led several projects in collaboration with the American National Institute of Health (NIH) and National Cancer Institute (NCI), as well as with numerous pharmaceutical and biotech companies in genomic data analysis.

His main goal now is to spread awareness of how important the quality of data preservation, processing and analysis is. In addition to his work on data analysis and machine learning projects, he invests a lot of time in team development and business environment with a positive working atmosphere.

He graduated from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Belgrade.

In his spare time, he is into deep sea exploration. He is the current national record holder and national champion in free-diving. He’s also in the world of sport climbing. He greatly enjoys spending time in nature.