AI2FUTURE 2026

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.

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.

Dušan Omercević is CEO and founder of *codeplain, an AI-powered code generation platform that turns production-ready software from specifications written in ***plain language. Previously, Dusan 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.