AI2FUTURE 2026

Dušan Omerčević is CEO and founder of *codeplain, an AI-powered code generation platform that turns production-ready software from specifications written in ***plain language. Previously, Dušan founded Cleanshelf, a SaaS management platform, which was acquired by SAP LeanIX in 2021. He holds an M.Sc. in Computer Vision from the University of Ljubljana.

Marko is a Staff Software Engineer at Google where he work on Gemini model improvements for multimodal and educational usecases. Previously he worked at Photomath, Meta (Facebook), Styria, LEGO (as consultant), University of Zagreb and has entrepreneurship experience. He won many awards including the ones from Microsoft and NVIDIA. Marko holds PhD and MBA degrees. Marko is also a lecturer at Algebra University. He is interested in ML research and practical applications in real life scenarios.

With over a decade of software development experience, Nedim has taken on the Chief Architect Officer role at Bloomteq. He excels in navigating complex challenges with rapid problem-solving skills. Renowned for simplifying complexities, Nedim leads by example with a dedication to excellence. His specialty is optimizing dev team delivery at scale, ensuring streamlined processes and efficient outcomes.

Ivan Nikolov is a Machine Learning Engineer working in Celtra. At Celtra, he has worked on the Creative Intelligence solution, focusing on operationalizing ML systems, Bayesian modeling, and AI engineering with frontier foundation models. His work spans unstructured image and video understanding, as well as transparent and explainable ML decision-making.

Dr. Zlatan Ajanović is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Chair for Machine Learning and Reasoning of RWTH Aachen University, with Prof. Hector Geffner. Before, he was a postdoctoral researcher at TU Delft with Prof. Jens Kober. He earned his PhD degree from the Graz University of Technology. His main research interest lies in the Decision-making and Control for Autonomous Robots based on Planning, Learning, and Control Theory. He is the recipient of the IFAC Young Author Award, Hans List Award, and DAAD AInet PostDoc Fellowship. He has co-organized several workshops and conferences, the most notably AAAI25 and ICAPS25 Bridging the Gap Between AI Planning and Reinforcement Learning (PRL), ICAPS25 Workshop PlanRob: Planning and Robotics, ICRA 2023 Workshop on Life-Long Learning with Human Help (L3H2), 2023 BeNeLuX AI Conference, and ICAPS 2024 Conference.

Nikolina Kosanović is a Senior ML Engineer with over 5 years of experience in Machine Learning. She works on the Data Science team at Njuškalo, Croatia's leading classifieds marketplace. Classification is a recurring thread in her work: recently, she has focused on multimodal classification models and agentic systems, and she was part of the team that won second place in the AI4Health 2025 competition, working on BI-RADS categorization of mammography images. At AI2Future, she will share how she reengineered category classification by fusing text, image, and hierarchy.

Eldar Kurtić is a Principal Research Scientist at Red Hat and Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), specializing in efficient inference techniques for large language models (LLMs), with a particular focus on pruning, quantization, and speculative decoding. His work centers on developing methods to accelerate inference within the vLLM engine, bridging cutting-edge research with practical deployment solutions.

Vlatko Kosturjak is VP of Research at Marlink Cyber, with over two decades of experience in information security and cybersecurity. His varied roles have given him both a comprehensive understanding of security governance and deep technical expertise.

He has discovered numerous vulnerabilities in software and hardware, ranging from widely used DNS servers such as ISC BIND and Unbound to the Linux kernel. He also holds several professional certifications, including CISSP, CISA, CISM, and OSCP.

Across many years of commercial work in the field, he has gained successful M&A experience in various areas of cybersecurity and in different roles.

Stjepan Picek is a full professor at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, an associate professor at Radboud University, and an adjunct professor at the University of Bergen. His research spans security and cryptography, machine learning, and evolutionary computation, with particular interests in security of machine learning.

He earned a PhD (double doctorate) in computer science in 2015 from the University of Zagreb and Radboud University, and a PhD in mathematics in 2024 from the University of Paris 8. Before his current appointments, he held positions at TU Delft, MIT, and KU Leuven, alongside experience in industry and government.

Professor Picek has delivered more than 70 invited talks and published over 200 refereed papers. His work has been recognized with several awards, including the Vera Johanides Award, the Rikard Podhorsky Award, and the IEEE Croatia Section Award. He is a Senior Member of IEEE, a member of ELLIS, a Fellow of the Young Academy of Europe, and serves as an associate editor for several international journals.

David Puljiz is a researcher and project coordinator at Neura Robotics, a German company building Physical AI and cognitive robots, such as the 4NE1 humanoid. His work focuses on easing the programming of and interaction with robots — spanning robotics, human-machine interaction, mixed reality, and AI — with the goal of making robots easier to deploy and genuinely useful in the real world.

A graduate of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing at the University of Zagreb, David went on to work as a research assistant at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), following an internship at Robert Bosch GmbH in machine vision and image processing. He obtained his PhD from KIT in 2024 for his work on using augmented reality to make industrial robots more intuitive to use. At AI2Future, he will share how AI is reshaping robotics and the way humans and robots work together.

Jelena Lončar has more than five years of experience in the research and development of innovative AI-based solutions. She is currently a Machine Learning Research Engineer at Atomic Intelligence, where her work on the CopyDat–Synthetic Data project focuses on novel methods for generating high-quality synthetic tabular data from sensitive and complex datasets. The project aims to enable safer data use and sharing while preserving the original data's statistical and analytical value. Previously, she worked as a consultant on ADAS systems, developing and optimizing production Computer Vision algorithms for the real-time detection and tracking of vulnerable road users.

Filip Mirković has more than three years of experience in the research, development, and deployment of production-grade deep learning systems. He is currently a Machine Learning Research Engineer at Atomic Intelligence, where he works on the CopyDat–Synthetic Data project, developing novel methods for generating high-quality synthetic tabular data from sensitive and complex datasets. The project aims to enable safer data use and sharing while preserving the statistical and analytical value of the original data, combining prior-data fitted networks (PFNs), variational autoencoders, and flow matching with methods for quantifying privacy risk. His work also extends to AI for music and biomedicine, including deep learning models for audio source separation and predictive models fusing peptidomic biomarkers with prostate MRI segmentation to support prostate cancer detection. He holds an MSc in Physics from the University of Zagreb, with a thesis on symmetry-aware graph neural network frameworks for modeling complex systems.

Dr Paul Duncan is a Principal Scientist at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL), where he leads the Informatics group within the Data Science & AI department. With a background in data modelling and uncertainty evaluation, his work focuses on developing data quality frameworks and methodologies for understanding uncertainty in complex, interconnected systems. Dr Duncan is the Technical Lead (2022-present) for NPL’s involvement in the AI Standards Hub, where he plays a key role in shaping national and international approaches to Trustworthy AI and related standards. Dr Duncan is currently the co-chair of the BIPM Task Group on Data Quality & FAIR Practices in Metrology which aims to standardise approaches to Data quality across the world of metrology. His current research explores how metrology can underpin the development of reliable, transparent, and accountable AI systems. He is actively involved in cross-disciplinary projects that span data science, semantic technologies, and AI governance, and frequently collaborates with government, academia, and industry to advance confidence in the use of AI.

Prof. Jonatan Lerga is Full Professor of Electrical Engineering and Associate Dean for Education at the University of Rijeka, Croatia. He received his PhD from the University of Zagreb in 2011. He founded and directs the University of Rijeka Center for Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity and heads the Information Processing Laboratory. Prof. Lerga has authored more than 110 scientific papers, including 30 Q1-ranked journal articles, and has led numerous EU Horizon, Digital Europe, and national research projects. His work has been cited over 1,100 times (Google Scholar). Honors include the 2022 Croatian State Science Award, the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts Award, and several regional and university prizes. He serves on editorial boards of international journals, reviews extensively, and is a member of UNESCO’s International Research Centre on AI and Croatia’s National Council for Digital Transformation. His research focuses on digital signal processing, artificial intelligence applications, coding, and cryptography.