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 studentsA 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 activitySpeakers engaged with students in the discussionTomiwa Ademidun started the Pasts/Presents/Futures workshopEveryone had a great time while discussing future of MontenegroDiscussing innovation and technology as a platform to co-create a vision for Montenegro 2.0Looking forward to the follow up event
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.
Within the FF4EuroHPC experiment, DigitalSmart Montenegro, together with DunavNET, University of Donja Gorica, Radinovic Company, and Meso-promet Franca, used HPC and AI to develop ML prediction models for computer vision that can be ported on Edge AI and integrated into Smart agriculture systems for poultry farms.
The smart agriculture solution developed within this experiment could boost the productivity of poultry farms by potentially reducing both manual labor costs and chicken mortality rates by about 10% each. This is accomplished because assessing the weight of chickens in real-time increases the uniformity of the finished product and reduces the impact of stress on both the chickens and manual labor. Furthermore, real-time insight into poultry barns allows for improving disease management due to early detection.
HPC provided the technology organisations DigitalSmart Montenegro and DunavNET needed to develop smart agriculture solutions quickly and efficiently using machine learning and computer vision, in this case for the needs of the poultry industry. The computer kit has become a part of the PoultryNET platform offering, and there is an opportunity to sell such components to third-party vendors active in the market of smart agriculture solutions.
EUROCC2 project was presented at the 27th IEEE International Conference – Information Technology – IT2023. The conference took place 15-18 February in Zabljak Montenegro. NCC Montenegro team presented the project on the first day of the conference within the special session dedicated to presentations of EU projects. EUROCC2 project is a continuation of the success we achieved with the previous EUROCC.
Presenting EUROCC2 at IT2023Dr Luka Filipovic presenting NCC Montenegro team and activities in EUROCCPresentation took place during the first day of the conference
The presentation covered the results from EUROCC and introduced the activities for the upcoming period in EUROCC2. Also, this event was a great place for newly extended NCC Montenegro team members to meet and discuss the activities in the upcoming period. Our team now includes representatives from University of Donja Gorica (UDG) and University of Montenegro (UCG). IEEE IT2023 conference program is available at the following link.
Dr Tomo Popovic and Dr Luka Filipovic answering the questions from the audience
New reearch project HPC4S3ME was presented by prof. Tomo Popovic and dr. Luka Filipovic at the 27th IEEE International Conference – Information Technology – IT2023. The conference had a special session dedicated to presentation of project results for the projects implemented in Montenegro and the region. The conference program is available at the following link.
The full title of this new project is “Building scientific and innovation potential to utilize HPC and AI for S3 Smart Specialisation in Montenegro – HPC4S3ME” and it is funded by the through IPA II program, call reference EuropeAid/172-351/ID/ACT/ME.
Proposing the use of HPC for research in Montenegrin S3 priority domains
Project was presented by prof. Popovic and dr. Filipovic
The overall objective of HPC4S3ME project is to contribute to straightening research excellence by building scientific and innovation potential based on the use of high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) for applications in industrial domains proposed by the Smart Specialisation Strategy (2019-2024) for Montenegro. The implementation of this project will provide a state-of-the-art environment for young researchers to gain experience in research and development in computer science, more specifically to apply machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) algorithms supported by HPC in order to create innovative information-communication technology (ICT) solutions for applications in agriculture and food value chain, health and tourism, energy and sustainable environment., i.e. priority domains identified by the smart specialisation strategy. More information on the project available at the HPC4S3ME website.
HPC4S3ME focuses on HPC capacity building and support for young researchers
In the period from 15th – 18th of February the 27th international scientific and professional conference “INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES 2023” (IEEE IT 2023) will traditionally be hosted in Zabljak. The conference will be held in the organization of: University of Montenegro – Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Donja Gorica – Faculty of Information Systems and Technologies, IT Society Montenegro, University of Belgrade – Faculty of Organizational Sciences, IEEE Association and IEEE Section for Serbia and Montenegro, with full support of the company Cikom from Podgorica. The chairman of the conference is prof. dr Bozo Krstajic from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Montenegro.
IT2023 – click on image to open website
Lectures and round table discussions will be organized at the Conference on trends in the development of information and communication technologies in the world, as well as current events in this field in Montenegro. Special session dedicated to project presentations will include EuroCC2 project – National Competence Centres for HPC, two H2020-MSCA projects TRACEWINDU and ODDEA, H2020 projects NI4OS-Europe and DEMETER, Eureka TRADE, Erasmus DigNest, and others.
The conference will include: a short course for Edge AI in IoT solutions (organzed by ANSO and EuroCC Montenegro), an HPC/AI workshop with applications, a presentation of the European cloud of open science and the results of successful international projects. This year, a student workshop will also be held as part of the DigNEST project, which will focus on IT innovations in the field of health and agriculture. In addition to the above mentioned, the papers that have arrived and refer to topics from these areas will also be presented at the Conference.
Click to watch
All those interested can follow the activities at the Conference online as well, through the video conference access links available on the official website of the Conference (link).
Researchers from UDG and NCC Montenegro presented a scientific paper at the 2022 International Arab Conference on Information Technology (ACIT). The conference took place at the Al Ain University – Abu Dhabi Campus on November 22-24, 2022. The paper “Overcoming Limitations of Statistical Methods with Artificial Neural Networks” was authored by M. Grebovic, L. Filipovic, I. Katnic, M. Vukotic, and T. Popovic. More information about the conference is available here. The paper is available at IEEE Xplore at the following link.
ABSTRACT – Traditional statistical models as tools for summarizing patterns and regularities in observed data can be used for making predictions. However, statistical prediction models contain small number of important predictors, which means limited informative capability. Also, predictive statistical models that provide some type of pseudo-correct regular statistical patterns, are used without previous understanding of the used data causality. Machine Learning (ML) algorithms as area in Artificial Intelligence (AI) provide the ability to interpret and understand data in more sophisticated way. Artificial Neural Networks as kind of ML methods use non-linear algorithms, considering links and associations between parameters, while statistical use one-step-ahead linear processes to improve only short-term prediction’s accuracy by minimizing cost function. Disregarding that designing an optimal artificial neural network is very complex process, they are considered as potential solution for overcoming main flaws of statistical prediction models. However, they will not automatically improve predictions accuracy, so several artificial neural networks and traditional statistical methods are evaluated and analyzed through accuracy measures for prediction purposes in various fields of applications. Based on gained results, couple of techniques for improving artificial neural networks are proposed to get better accuracy results than statistical predictive methods.
