AI2FUTURE 2026

Irja Straus leads testing for embedded software and electronic components at Jungheinrich Croatia, and is the founder of a consulting company specializing in quality engineering and testing. She began her career as a software tester and business analyst, later moving into a product manager role. After several years in product, she took on the challenge of establishing testing practices and embedding quality from the earliest stages of development. For the past few years, she has focused on contemporary exploratory testing, building quality engineering strategy and effective cross-team collaboration.

Abhishek Bhargava is the co-founder of Datum, an AI software and services company building a suite of AI products and delivering custom AI solutions for enterprise clients across industries. At Datum, he leads the work of translating frontier AI capabilities into production systems — spanning agentic workflows, voice agents, and domain-specific applications — and partners directly with clients to architect, deploy, and scale these solutions in real operational environments.

Before Datum, Abhishek founded Vectordash (Y Combinator W19), where he built low-latency GPU streaming technology that put real-time computer vision workloads in the cloud — a thread that runs through much of his career. He's shipped production ML and computer vision systems as an engineer at a robotics startup, conducted deep learning research at MITRE, and built quantitative trading infrastructure at a commodities hedge fund. He later launched his own crypto hedge fund, deploying strategies that outperformed the market. His published research spans bioinformatics (using data science to design HIV-inhibiting peptides), NLP (duplicate question detection with word2vec and CNNs), and reinforcement learning applied to equity markets using probabilistic guarantees from cyber-physical systems — a strategy that significantly outperformed the S&P 500 over a 15-year backtest.

Abhishek studied Computer Science, Computational Finance, and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon. At Datum, he focuses on turning deep technical expertise into AI implementations and partnerships that move the needle for clients.

Hrvoje Šamija is a technology executive and engineer who serves as the Chief Business Development Officer (CBDO) at Visage Technologies, a company specializing in computer vision, artificial intelligence, and machine learning solutions. Alongside his team, Hrvoje focuses on bridging the gap between deep-tech research and market-ready industrial applications, driving the commercialization and development of advanced solutions spanning robotics, automated driving, and edge AI. He holds a Master’s degree from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER) at the University of Zagreb, as well as an MBA from COTRUGLI Business School. Prior to his current position, Hrvoje built a strong foundation in software and hardware development, serving in various engineering and leadership roles.

Gordan Kreković is the CEO of Visage Technologies, a company providing R&D services and products based on edge AI and computer vision. With a PhD in Computing and a diverse career managing tech products, teams, and companies, Gordan has broad experience spanning research, engineering, and management. Alongside his main career, he has authored and co-authored numerous scientific publications, served as an Assistant Professor at the Academy of Music, remained active in the FER alumni community by serving as president of AMAC-Alumni FER, and continued his engagement in music and composition.

Ivan Nikolov is a Machine Learning Engineer working in AdTech. 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.

Mihael Španović is Lead Engineer at S.A.G.E., a public benefit company building an AI-native agricultural intelligence platform spanning soil and crop modeling, carbon intensity scoring, and insurance products for US agriculture. He previously worked as Head of Engineering at Protostar Labs, leading a 10-person team across BioTech, industrial vision, and space sector projects. Mihael holds an M.Sc. in AI from Johannes Kepler Universität Linz and conducted robotics research at the University of New Mexico. Outside of work: motorcycles, airsoft, board games, and hardware tinkering.

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.

Rinaldo Ugrina is Head of Product at Baymard Institute, a UX research firm whose research is used by 71% of all Fortune 500 e-commerce companies. He has run over 200 high-stakes sessions with product and design teams at companies such as Google, Amazon, Meta, Stripe and Nike, which gives him an unusually direct view of how large organizations actually make decisions. He is a keynote speaker on how ideas move inside organizations, securing organizational buy-in and on where value goes when AI makes execution cheap.