Zuzalu Workshop with world-leading innovators: Vitalik Buterin with UDG students

We had a pleasure to host one of the greateast minds of digital world, Vitalik Buterin (founder of Ethereum), and his fellow Zuzaluans, habitants of pop-up city in Montenegro.

World-leading innovators presented their ideas of Montenegro’s golden age, shared their ideas of Montenegro’s future reinforced by the most modern technologies and game-changing concepts. An amazing afternoon will have it’s second part in May! Stay tuned!

Vitalik Buterin with UDG students
A fantastic lineup of speakers

Speakers shared their path, where they once were and how they got to where they are now. They shared their dreams and their vision for the future, and what brought them to Montenegro. At the same time, this workshop was a platform for UDG students to showcase their creativity, ideas and perspective, which are critical to shaping the future of any industry. Speakers at the event were Vitalik Buterin, Milojko Mickey Spajic, Tomiwa Ademidun, Gary Sheng, Veronica S. and Zoja Šćekić. The event was moderated by Nela Milošević.

Vitalik Buterin with students during the workshop work group activity
Speakers engaged with students in the discussion
Tomiwa Ademidun started the Pasts/Presents/Futures workshop
Everyone had a great time while discussing future of Montenegro
Discussing innovation and technology as a platform to co-create a vision for Montenegro 2.0
Looking forward to the follow up event

InnovateYourFuture: a successful 2-day ANSO workshop on IoT and AI

A very successful two-day workshop for students and industry tool place on 22-23 April 2023. The workshop was done in the context of tge training project called “Competency Training for IoT and AI – InnovateYourFuture” supported by ANSO – Alliance of International Science Organizations, China. The organization is done in collaboration with EuroCC Montenegro and Montenegrin AI Association. Edge AI devices obtained with the support from  NVIDIA Academic Grants. During the event, UDG also presented relevant projects currently implemented at UDG such as H2020 DEMETER, DEP EUROCC2, IPA HPC4S3ME. The agenda for the event is available here.

ANSO InnovateYourFuture Workshop on 22-23 April 2023
Introduction to AI and ML
ML and Decision Support
Data Science lecture
IoT i agriculture and DEMETER project
ML/AI in medicine

During the first day, attendees had a chance to interactively participate in lectures coverin Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and MAchine Learning, Data Science and Analytics. Lectures were given by Luka Filipovic, Marko Grebovic, Stevan Cakic, Ivan Jovovic, and Dejan Babic. During the second day, the focus was on practical training and hands on experience. Students worked with Stevan Cakic, Zoja Scekic, Ivan Jovovic, Dejan Babic, Igor Culafic, and Vesna Calasan. The hands on included work tools for dataset preparation, computer vision model training, edge AI devices and porting the prediction models to edge IoT. The students were split into groups and worked on solving practical problems in domains such as agri-food sector, health and medicine, and energy.

Around 40 people took part in the workshop

There was almost 40 people attending the event. We used the breaks for coffee and pizza to network, mingle and discuss interests and exchange experiences. It was also an excellent opportunity for young people interested in IoT and AI to network and get to know each other.

AI/ML and edge device NVIDIA Jetson Nano
Learning about data preparation
Second day took place in the Entrepreneurial nest collaboration space at UDG
Teams working on their group projects
Hands on with mentors

InnovateYourFuture – Competency Training in IoT and AI

UDG team continues with the implementation of a training project called “Competency Training for IoT and AI – InnovateYourFuture” supported by ANSO – Alliance of International Science Organizations, China. The organization is done in collaboration with EuroCC Montenegro and Montenegrin AI Association.  Edge AI devices obtained with the support from  NVIDIA Academic Grants.

Competence training on IoT and AI supported by ANSO

A two-day training workshop is organized for 22-23 April. The workshop will take place at the UDG. The workshop will include lectures on IoT, Data Preparation, AI, ML and Edge IoT/AI. The target audience is MSc, BSc, and high-school students, but also representatives from the industry and public interested in some hands on training on IoT and AI. are welcome, too. You can register for the event filling the form here.

Also, the workshop program is available for download:

Click to open Agenda in new window tab

EuroCC at SmAgTech EXPO VIRAL!

Within the two-day SmAgTech EXPO VIRAL event held at the University of Donja Gorica in the period from February 23 to 24, 2023 the results of the EuroCC project were presented with a special focus on the application of HPC and Ai/ML for computer vision in smart chicken farms.

Ms. Bojana Malisic presented the project to the visitors

The event gathered over 300 visitors from Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Slovenia, the Netherlands, including agricultural small and medium-sized enterprises, representatives of the IT sector, and academy. In addition to the aforementioned, the event was attended by students and high school pupils attending educational programs complementary to agriculture, information technology and food technology.

Mr Stevan Cakic presenting a HPC/AI use case in agriculture

Numerous companies in the field of agriculture, food industry, as well as information technologies and systems that presented their products and services at the fair, had the opportunity to learn about the EuroCC project and the advantages offered by advanced computing in the form of HPC technology.As part of the EXPO, the representatives of NCC Montenegro presented a pilot project-experiment within Horizon 2020 for innovative small and medium-sized enterprises, which is related to the application of HPC technologies in agriculture, specifically in poultry farming, where with the help of HPC technology, diseases among poultry are monitored and predicted by applying machine learning.

NCC Montenegro team at VIRAL EXPO 2023
VIRAL EXPO 2023 video (longer version)

Short course and student workshop on IoT and AI

A short course and student workshop on AI and IoT took place on 16 February, 2023 within a dedicated session at the IEEE IT2023 conference. This training event is organized by UDG and NCC Montenegro as a part of implementation of the project called “Competency Training for IoT and AI – InnovateYourFuture” supported by ANSO – Alliance of International Science Organizations, China. The edge AI devices were provided through NVIDIA Academic grant. The workshop is includes introduction to AI and IoT (AIoT), software tools for AI/ML, edge AI, and IoT, and presentation and practical demonstrations. The target audience is MSc, BSc, and high-school students, but others are welcome, too. The conference program is available at the following link. The presenters at the workshop were Tomo Popovic, Stevan Cakic, Ivan Jovovic, Zoja Scekic, Dejan Babic and Igor Culafic. The event involved around 60 attendees, 30 on-site and 30 online.

Live demo for the audience (Edge AI with NVIDIA Jetson Nano)
Around 30 students in-person and 30 online attended the event

More information about the conference is available at the IT2023 conference website (link). The workshop will include introduction to AI and IoT (AIoT), software tools for AI/ML, edge AI, and IoT, and presentation and practical demonstrations. The target audience is MSc, BSc, and high-school students, but others are welcome, too. The conference program is available at the following link.

I. Culafic
Z. Scekic
I. Jovovic
D. Babic
S. Cakic
T. Popovic

IEEE IT2023: Disease Prediction Using ML Algorithms

Researchers from NCC Montenegro presented a paper at the 27th IEEE Conference on Information Technology IT2023 on 17th February 2023. The paper is titled “Disease Prediction Using Machine Learning Algorithms” and authored by I. Jovovic, D. Babic, T. Popovic, S. Cakic and I. Katnic.

ABSTRACT – This study aimed to investigate the application of machine learning techniques for disease prediction. Three popular machine learning algorithms, Random Forest, Support Vector Machines and Naive Bayes, were employed and their performance was evaluated. Results showed that the best performing model was based on Random Forest algorithm with the average accuracy of 87%. This model has been additionally tuned in order to achieve even better performance, which resulted with 90% accuracy. This study highlights the potential of AI in disease prediction and provides insights into the importance of algorithm selection and tuning for optimal performance.

Mr. Ivan Jovovic presenting at IEEE 2023 conference
The paper will soon be available through IEEE Xplore

IEEE IT2023: Vision-based Vehicle Speed Estimation Using the YOLO Detector and RNN

Researchers from NCC Montenegro presented a paper at the 27th IEEE Conference on Information Technology IT2023.  The paper is titled “Vision-based Vehicle Speed Estimation Using the YOLO Detector and RNN” and authored by Andrija Peruničić, Slobodan Djukanović and  Andrej Cvijetić

ABSTRACT : The paper deals with vehicle speed estimation using video data obtained from a single camera. We propose a speed estimation method which uses the YOLO algorithm for vehicle detection and tracking, and a recurrent neural network (RNN) for speed estimation. As input features for speed estimation, we use the position and size of bounding boxes around the vehicles, extracted by the YOLO detector. The proposed method is trained and tested on the recently proposed VS13 dataset. The experimental results show that the box position does not bring any improvement in the speed estimation performance. The proposed RNN-based estimator gives an average error of 4.08 km/h using only the area of bounding box as input feature, which significantly outperforms audio-based approaches on the same dataset.

Link : https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10078639