Collaboration with NCC Germany

As a follow up to the “speed date” event organized by EuroCC/Castiel projects, NCC Montenegro and NCC Germany organized a meeting to explore opportunities for future collaboration between two NCCs. It was interesting to discuss the differences and better understand the grounds for future collaboration. Both NCCs introduced their teams, progress and results achieved so far. A possibility to include members of German NCC into the training and research support activities in Montenegro were discussed. Concrete proposals were discussed for the Fall training on AI/ML and parallel programming. NCC Montenegro also informed German NCC team about the priorities of Montenegrin S3 Smart Specialisation Strategy that may be a good inspiration for thematic areas for joint collaboration.

.Discussion the collaboration between NCC Germany and NCC Montenegro

Master Thesis: Practical Use of ML in the Fight Against COVID-19

Mr Bogdan Laban, a master student at the University of Donja Gorica, defended his Master thesis titled “Practical Use of Machine Learning in the Fight Against COVID-19”. The thesis was done at the Master academic studies “Information Management in Health Care” at the Faculty of International Economics, Finance and Business, under the supervision of his mentor prof. dr Tomo Popovic.

Mr. Bogdan Laban defended his MSc thesis on the use of ML to fight COVID-19
The presentation included interested real-life examples

ABSTRACT – This study aims to find applicable combination of recent AI technologies and its uses during the COVID-19 pandemic. As AI has shown great improvements in the last few years, with many new feature-filled tools out on the market, it is almost certain that AI can help find ways to circumvent the dangers of COVID-19, in the form of noticing it, and preventing it. Authors cited in this work are AI professional, specializing in neural networks and their appliances in real world, in the form of visual processing and understanding, which will provide me with a solid hypothesis to base my master thesis on.

As this pandemic still has a solid grasp on the world, especially on less developed countries like Montenegro, I believe it makes a great testing ground for attributes like – percentage of people abiding pandemic specific laws (social distancing, mask wearing, etc.). Unfortunately, people of Montenegro are very divided on this issue, ranging from avid abiders, to those who completely ignore all safety procedures, even the most basic ones. As such, I believe this study will provide me with an insight into the right tools and tests for the residents of Montenegro, which vary a lot.

Another Master Thesis in Applied Machine Learning

Another Successful Event: AI and Mathematics by Petar Velickovic (DeepMind)

University of Donja Gorica and HPC NCC Montenegro invited a special guest, prof. dr Petar Velickovic, an Affiliated Professor at the University of Cambridge and Scientific Researcher at DeepMind. Prof. Velickovic gave a very interesting talk on machine learning, a few practical applications of AI/ML used by Google Maps, pharmaceutical industry, and mathematics. Prof. Velickovic presented his latest research activities and results, most notably the AI/ML applications in mathematics that was published in Nature journal. There was around 80 attendees that included high school and college students (undergraduate and graduate), representatives of industry. Prof. Velickovic then had a meeting with Prof. Veselin Vukotic, UDG Rector, professors and young researchers. This was Petar’s fist lecture he gave in Montenegro!

Prof. dr Petar Velickovic (DeepMind, University of Cambridge)
Prof. Velickovic gave a talk titled “Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics”
There was over 80 attendees and a very lively discussion after the presentation

Open Mind Academy: Programming and Game Development in Python

Open Mind Academy, implemented with support of UDG and NCC Montenegro, is offering a hands-on course “Programming and Game Development in Python”. The course is designed for high school and college students to learn Python, programming concepts, and apply those to game development.

First four terms will be held online:

  • Introduction, tools installation, concepts
  • Basic data types, conditionals, loops
  • Lists, dictionaries, functions
  • Object oriented programming

Then, the course will have a live portion that will be organized into minimum of three days of intensive work and team collaborations. This part will take place at the University of Donja Gorica. The flyer for the course is available here.

The online terms will be on 3, 7, 10 and 15 of July. The live part will be arranged with students to best fit everyone’s availability. Applying for the course needs to be done at the following link.

This attractive course is designed for high school and college students

An Invited Lecture “Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics” by Petar Veličković (DeepMind)

An invited lecture “Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics” by prof. Petar Veličković will be given at the University of Donja Gorica in the context of NCC Montenegro activities. The lecture will take place in the Amphitheater AP, University of Donja Gorica, 24 June 2022, 11am.

Petar Velickovic to give an invited lecture “Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics”

Petar is currently engaged as an Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, Department of Computer Science and Technology, where he earned his PhD degree. He has worked for several companies around the world, and he currently works for DeepMind as a Scientific Researcher. He has published a large number of scientific papers, most notably the paper “Advancing mathematics by guiding human intuition with AI”, that was featured on the cover of the journal Nature. Peter was a speaker at a number of workshops, conferences and other events. More details about the lecturer can be found on his on his website: https://petar-v.com/

Due to limited space, please apply via the form available on the following registration link.

EuroCC Montenegro website has over 10000 visits

EuroCC Montenegro website has over 10000 visits in last year and over 11000 visits total. There was over 5000 visitors. As expected the number of visits is in correlation with the dynamics of events and presentation. It can be seen that we were fairly active last 6 months. The website was created in Jan 2021. The statistics is enclosed.

Over 10000 visits during the last 365 days
Yearly hits visualization
Search engine referrals

New Sites Selected for Next Generation EuroHPC Supercomputers

University of Donja Gorica and HPC NCC Montenego participated in the consortium led by GRNET – Greek Research & Technology Network that applied for support from EuroHPC JU to implement a regional petascale cluster that will be a part of the next generation supercomputers in Europe. Members of the consortium come from Greece, Cyprus, North Macedonia, and Montenegro. The announcement just came in – link.

EuroHPC JU announced the locations for new supercomputer clusters