Belgrade Data Innovation Hub

The European Big Data Value Association's regular meeting was held on Monday, May 27, 2024. The meeting discussed participation in the next cycles of European projects, the European Data Week in Leuven, and the rules for obtaining i-Spaces labels for this year.

Students of our Software Engineering and Computer Science departments presented the results of their project in the Belgrade office of the "Tom Tom" company, which they worked on during professional practice. The partnership between our school and this company began in mid-2023 by donating laboratory equipment and computers with powerful graphics cards.

A member of our laboratory, Uroš Radenković, completed his doctoral dissertation last Wednesday, titled "Speculative execution of instructions with imprecisely predicted operands." The defence committee was composed of: Dr. Miloš Cvetanović, associate professor, Dr. Boško Nikolić, full professor, Dr. Vladimir Milovanović, associate professor, Dr. Dragomir El Mezeni, assistant professor, and Dr. Živojin Šuštan, assistant professor. We congratulate Uroš on the Doctor of Electrical Engineering and Computing title and wish him much success in his future scientific work!

Our laboratory members participated in The Third Serbian International Conference on Applied Artificial Intelligence (SICAAI) held in Kragujevac on May 23th and 24th. Our members held presentations on the topics of detecting hate speech in the Serbian language, data analysis techniques and detecting propaganda in the Serbian language and ChatGPT for writing parallel code. Our paper entitled "Applied Artificial Intelligence in detecting Hate Speech" received the award for the best paper for young researchers.

We love it when alumni of our school and now professors at prestigious world universities hold a lecture at ETF. On Monday, May 27, Dr. Saša Misailović, Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will give a lecture, and the title of the lecture is: "Programming systems for the reliability and efficiency of artificial intelligence applications".

Important details:
Time: May 27, 2024, 4 p.m.
Place: ETF, classroom 62

For more information, visit the LINK.

The Regional Open Data Challenge 2024 (RODC 2024) aims to promote the innovative reuse of open data in ReSPA members (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia) in order to improve transparency, accountability, inclusiveness and efficiency in providing service and design. Innovators are invited to offer ideas for solving societal problems using open data sets published by public sector bodies in ReSPA's member countries. Challenges include Mobility and Transport Data, Labor Mobility, Tourism Atlas and Demographic Trends.

Important details:
Application deadline: May 3, 2024, until 11:59 p.m.
Prizes: Total prize pool of $20,000, distributed among winners

For more information on how to apply and the competition itself, visit the LINK.

At the regular BDVA meeting, the attendees discussed the final report of the EUhubs4data project and other potential calls (Digital-2024 and COST actions) for European projects to which interested institutions could apply.

Yesterday, our team members participated in a conference dedicated to the development of artificial intelligence, organized by the Science Fund of the Republic of Serbia and the National Science Foundation of the Republic of China. The aim of the conference was to introduce researchers from the two countries and to present previous projects in this field. We thank the Science Fund for being part of this interesting scientific event.

On Wednesday, March 20, 2024, a celebration was held on the occasion of five years of existence of the Science Fund of the Republic of Serbia. During the celebration, the attendees were addressed by the acting director of the Fund for Science Ms Milica Đurić-Jovičić, PhD, the Minister of Science, Technological Development, and Innovation, Ms Jelena Begović, PhD, as well as representatives of the European Union and the World Bank. At the celebration, managers of approved projects from the PROMIS 2023 call and projects that were awarded and received two-year funding from the Science Fund of the Republic of Serbia were especially highlighted.

As part of the jubilee 30th national scientific and professional conference "YU INFO", our team organized a special event - an expert panel, on the topic "Cyber security trends and challenges in the protection of large systems", on Tuesday, March 12, 2024 in the congress hall "Pancic A" in the hotel "Grand" at the ski resort Kopaonik.

The panel was moderated and designed by the PI of our "STOP" project, Prof. Dr. Dražen Drašković. The following researchers took part in this panel: prof. Dr. Slavko Gajin (Faculty of Mathematics in Belgrade), Ass. professor Dr. Maja Vukasović (School of Electrical Engineering in Belgrade), Master of Legal Sciences Bojana Marinković (University Newcastle, UK) and B.Sc. Eng. Marko Džida (Serbia And Montenegro Air Traffic Services Smatsa Llc).

In the past few years, cyber threats have become increasingly important for organizations and their large systems, and user data is very often under attack by malicious users (hackers). In the last year, many large software systems crashed in Serbia and the region. The panel discussed effective security measures, regulatory requirements (such as GDPR and HIPAA), good practices in organizations in Serbia and the world, the boundaries between the application of robust security measures and system maintenance, which data are dangerous to misuse, and many other questions. The panel attracted interested conference participants with interesting questions, so the discussion was fruitful and useful.

From March 10 to 13, 2024, the jubilee 30th ICT conference, "YU INFO 2024," and the 14th international conference, "ICIST 2024," were held at the ski resort Kopaonik, in which more than 350 participants from Serbia and the world took part. This year's conferences were mostly about artificial intelligence, big data processing, and large language models. At the conferences, 73 papers were presented in seven sessions at the national level and 92 papers at the international level. The conference program is available at the following link.

In the meeting room of the School of Electrical Engineering, the STOP project team held an initial meeting on Wednesday, January 10, 2024. The Principal Investigator distributed the tasks to the members for the first month of the project and presented an overview of the half-yearly goals. You can find out more about the project on the project website.

Our research team and the Laboratory for Data Analysis and Application of Artificial Intelligence wish you a happy, healthy and successful New year 2024 and a pleasant Christmas holiday.

A member of our laboratory, Vladimir Jocović, assistant, defended his doctoral dissertation today in the field of deep learning in computer vision, under the title: "Automated evaluation of paper tests using artificial intelligence techniques". The defense committee was composed of: Dr. Miloš Cvetanović, associate professor, Dr. Jelica Protić, full professor, Dr. Dušan Starčević, professor emeritus, Dr. Igor Tartalja, full professor, and Dr. Goran Kvaščev, associate professor. We congratulate our colleague Jocović and wish him much success in his further work!

The head of our laboratory and the European project, Dr Dražen Drašković, presented the results of the experiments performed in 2023 in the most famous TV show about science, "Studio of Knowledge", on the national public service of Serbia "RTS".

You can watch the show at the following link.

Member of our team, MSc Mihajlo Ogrizović, presented a scientific paper about the development of virtual 3D environments, at the 31st TELFOR IEEE conference in Belgrade, Serbia.

Belgrade DIH coordinated this experiment, entitled Process Health Check. This included all activities related to efficient management and organization, effective communication, and coordination in the consortium. From the technical side of the project, after the activities in the first part of the project (M01-M05) on the design, development, and implementation of the PoC (proof of the concept), participation in the development of the model and its integration into the platform (WP1 and WP2), in the second half of the project our hub took the most activities in testing the platform, visualizing the obtained results, in cooperation with engineers from the company (WP2), and we managed the complete dissemination process - participation in the National Fair of Books, Education and Research, two international conferences and one professional event for engineers (WP3).

Before the start of the testing process, a detailed test plan and design of all test suits and test cases with prerequisites, post-conditions, and acceptance criteria were implemented. The developed MVP has been tested with functional, performance, and security tests.

Cooperation with other DIHs was at the highest level. DIH2 (Teralab-IMT) and engineers from SME, contracted the precise cloud services needed to build this AI system and we brokered all the deals between them, and discussed those activities together. DIH3 (RISE) was actively involved in MVP development and integration testing.

In our laboratory, after arriving from Valencia, from the European big data forum, we were visited by journalists from the national television station RTS. Dr. Dražen Drašković, head of the laboratory, gave a statement about what everyone was talking about in Valencia and why our laboratory received the award.

On the occasion of the recognition that our hub received in Valencia, the news was broadcast by RTS National Television. ! Link to news !

The European Big Data Value Forum was held in Valencia from October 25 to 27 during Spain's presidency of the European Union. At that event, the Laboratory for Data Analysis and Application of Artificial Intelligence of the School of Electrical Engineering (ETF) in Belgrade received a silver award for its contributions to the European data community in seven areas: infrastructure and technological development, services, projects and applications, impact on the ecosystem, business strategy and sustainability, opportunities within European Federation of Data and Ethics.

The prize is awarded by the Big Data Value Association (BDVA), with the support of the European Commission. On behalf of the ETF, the award was received by laboratory coordinator, prof. Dražen Drašković. He thanked the organizers for the award, stressing that the members of the laboratory will try to be even better and more successful in the coming years.

Our laboratory joined the European project "EU hubs for data" at the end of 2021, through the program "Horizon 2020", under the name Belgrade Data Innovation Hub. In the first year, the laboratory was recognized as one of the important nodes in the European data network, so in June 2022, Belgrade was one of the four European capitals where the European Data Week was held, hosted by the School of Electrical Engineering in Belgrade.

During the first two years of operation, the laboratory distinguished itself with successful experiments in the field of artificial intelligence and data analysis in the field of medicine, optimization of industrial processes and detection of anomalies in production. Also, members of the laboratory collaborated with foreign universities and business partners, and organized a large number of lectures, professional workshops and conferences in Serbia and the region. This laboratory is considered the successor of one of the first laboratories for data processing in this part of Europe, which was formed at ETF in 1971.

Belgrade Data Innovation Hub (Belgrade DIH), within the University of Belgrade - School of Electrical Engineering, fully supports the SME in carrying out this experiment. The experience that professors and researchers from Belgrade DIH have in designing and testing software systems, applying artificial intelligence, and training models using modern machine learning techniques, and R&D projects in industrial plant monitoring and data-driven industry proved to be very significant for this project. As the largest regional center for the development of intelligent software systems and the application of machine learning, Belgrade DIH will support some activities that were not planned in the original plan.

The Big Data Value Association (BDVA, formerly: DAIRO - Data, AI and Robotics) is a European network of institutions that focuses on enabling the digital transformation of the economy and society through data and artificial intelligence, covering topics such as big data technologies and services, the use artificial intelligence in various fields, development of data platforms, services and datasets, industrial artificial intelligence, data-driven value creation, standardization and application of skills.

BDVA gathers 230 institutions in this field from Europe, among them small, medium and large companies, research institutions and universities, such as Universidad Politechnica de Madrid, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Universitat Politechnica de Valencia, University of Amsterdam, TU Wien, Politechnico di Milano, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Technical University of Denmark, University of Oslo, University of Helsinki, University of Sheffield, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, etc., then companies and development centers IBM Haifa Research Lab, Intel Labs Germany, Huawei European Research Institute, Microsoft, SAP SE, Siemens AG, Orange Labs, Nokia, Volkswagen Group and others.

BDVA/DAIRO is an open and inclusive community, eager to welcome new members who share these ambitious goals. ETF was accepted as an associate member at the meeting of BDVA directors on November 17, 2022, and the decision will be confirmed at the Association Assembly on December 13 this year.