AI2FUTURE 2026

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.

Pooja Narayan is the AI & Computing Fast Track Lead at Airbus, where she spearheads the development and execution of enterprise-wide artificial intelligence and advanced computing roadmaps. A strategic leader at the intersection of aerospace innovation and digital transformation, she advises executive leadership on integrating cutting-edge AI technologies to drive operational excellence and sustainable aviation. With a deep technical foundation in machine learning and data science, Pooja has become a prominent voice in the global deep-tech ecosystem. She frequently contributes to international AI governance standards and has shared her insights on panel stages at major forums, including the IATA World Digital Summit, Fly AI, and the World Artificial Intelligence Cannes Festival. Passionate about scaling agile, high-impact AI solutions, Pooja is dedicated to shaping the future of digital-first aerospace engineering.

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.

Valentina is the Director of AI at Gideon, where she develops AI models for robotics and physical AI. She has over 20 years of experience in the field, working at the intersection of LLMs, computer vision, and 3D understanding models. Valentina obtained her PhD in AI from the University of Zagreb in 2017, focusing on weakly supervised learning and traffic safety. After completing her PhD, she joined Rimac Automobili to work on scene-understanding models, and later moved to Gideon to contribute to autonomous mobile robotics. She spent the last few years at Yaak AI GmbH, where she trained VLA models and contributed to the HuggingFace LeRobot platform. She has now returned to Gideon, working to make robotics in Croatia great (again). Valentina is a mother of three and serves as an ambassador for the Female Engineer of the Year initiative in Croatia.

Toma is a Senior Software Engineer at Daytona. He started his career in a robotic-chef company 10 years ago and now he is focused on platform engineering, working on building Agent-native Infrastructure at Daytona. He enjoys giving conference talks, especially on topics about AI Agents, infrastructure and product development.

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.