AI2FUTURE 2026

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.

Nenad is Head of AI at Abysalto, responsible for shaping and executing AI solutions and physical AI (robotics) strategy while building the capabilities for effective adoption of AI innovation in business.

With more than 20 years of experience in banking, payment systems and digital transformation, he has a proven track record in delivering solutions where reliability, execution and business value are critical.

His current focus is on developing AI solutions including LLMs, NLP, RAG, agentic systems, automation, and robotics, with strong emphasis on bringing AI solutions into real-world applications.

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.

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.

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.

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.