Train the Trainers Workshop @ NCC Montenegro: Agentic AI – From Core Concepts to Real-World Applications

Agentic AI is emerging as a powerful enabler of next-generation digital transformation, business automation, and real-time decision-making. Unlike traditional AI solutions, Agentic AI systems operate as autonomous, goal-driven agents capable of planning, reasoning, and adapting over time, making decisions without continuous human intervention, and collaborating with tools, systems, and dynamic environments. Recognising its growing relevance, NCC Montenegro organised a Train the Trainers workshop for NCC members, focused on the application of Agentic AI within experience-driven industries.

Train the Trainers Workshop @ NCC Montenegro: Agentic AI

The workshop was delivered by the NCC representative, Dr Armin Alibasic, who combined academic and industry expertise with his international and interdisciplinary experience across the automotive, airline, and theme park industries. The session highlighted the potential of real-time analytics enabled by Agentic AI, demonstrating how autonomous intelligence can support instant, data-driven decision-making. These concepts were illustrated through real-life industry applications and a hands-on demonstration on Databricks, a leading Data and AI platform.

Presentation of Dr Armin Alibasic

The Train the Trainers approach addressed two complementary dimensions. The first focused on capacity building, providing participants with a structured and in-depth understanding of Agentic AI concepts, system architecture, required skills and tools, as well as the key challenges associated with designing and deploying agent-based AI solutions. These foundations were reinforced through business-oriented use cases, ensuring a clear link between theoretical principles and real-world industry practice. The second dimension emphasized knowledge transfer, equipping participants with the competencies needed to design, adapt, and deliver high-quality training activities tailored to SMEs, complex organizational systems, and strategic decision-makers.

Why Agentic AI?

By empowering trainers with both deep technical insight and practical training capabilities, NCC Montenegro ensures that Agentic AI knowledge can be effectively disseminated, scaled, and transformed into business value for industry, SMEs, and the broader digital innovation ecosystem.

NCC Montenegro team

New training at Faculty of Electrical Engineering – Practical MPI Programming: Message Passing Fundamentals with mpi4py

This MPI programming training will take place on December 23, 2025, and is designed for anyone who wants a hands-on introduction to parallel programming on distributed-memory systems. The course covers the SPMD approach, communicators (COMM_WORLD), process rank/size, and point-to-point communication (Send/Recv, blocking and non-blocking). Through practical examples in Python (mpi4py)—including a simple parallelization demo such as numerical integration using the trapezoidal rule—participants will learn how to write and run MPI programs using mpiexec.

Date: December 23, 2025
Location: University of Montenegro, Faculty of Electrical Engineering
Room: Coinis (L2)
Time: 15h – 18h

Hands on for MPI with mpi4py

Successful Training on Convolutional Neural Networks and Multi-GPU HPC at the University of Montenegro

On 12 December 2025, the University of Montenegro, as a member of the NCC Montenegro (EuroCC) team, successfully organized a short training titled “Building a Neural Network, Code Preparing for Multi-GPU HPC and Running Large-Scale Training” at the Faculty of Science and Mathematics.

The training gathered around 30 participants, including students, young researchers, and industry professionals, all interested in learning how to effectively use High-Performance Computing (HPC) resources in their research and development work.

The course combined theory and hands-on practice through a concrete use case. After an introduction by Prof. Enis Kočan, Prof. Igor Jovančević, together with his colleagues Velibor Došljak and Nikola Pižurica, led an informative, hands-on technical session. Participants first learned how to build a simple neural network for vision-based defect detection in manufacturing, with the goal of deploying it on an edge device with limited computational power. Optimizing the neural network requires many experiments, clearly demonstrating the need for HPC resources.

The focus then shifted to preparing a local development environment using Docker, transferring the environment to an HPC system, and finally running multiple training experiments on a multi-GPU HPC infrastructure.

Throughout the session, participants actively engaged in questions and discussions, particularly regarding the practical and technical aspects of applying for and using HPC resources. The training inspired participants to plan several applications to open calls for HPC resources, particularly in the context of master’s theses and startup projects.  

An important takeaway from the training was that the EuroCC2 / NCC Montenegro team provides continuous support — not only during the application process for HPC resources, but also during their actual usage, including environment setup, code adaptation, and performance considerations. This event confirmed strong interest in HPC and AI-related topics and highlighted the importance of hands-on, application-oriented training in bridging the gap between local development and large-scale HPC execution.

EuroCC4SEE Forum on HPC/AI-Enabled Business Innovation & PoC Demonstrations

NCC Monetenegro will host the EuroCC4SEE Forum on HPC/AI-Enabled Business Innovation & PoC Demonstrations on 13–14 December, bringing together representatives from academia, industry, government, and the startup community. The two-day event will highlight how High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can accelerate innovation, strengthen national capacities, and support Montenegro’s digital transformation.

Day 1 will focus on business innovation and policy perspectives, featuring opening remarks from national institutions, a keynote on the role of HPC and AI in economic growth, and a high-level panel on building Montenegro’s innovation ecosystem. The program will also include technical sessions, with PoC demonstrations developed through EuroCC4SEE in sectors such as energy, agriculture, health, and mobility, followed by a session on MLOps approaches moderated by the NCC Montenegro team. A networking and poster exhibition will showcase student work and local startup projects.

Day 2 will shift toward skills, education, and collaboration. Participants will explore national competence development in HPC/AI, talent pipeline building, and business–academia cooperation models through panels and an interactive workshop. The event will conclude with an overview of EU funding opportunities (Horizon Europe, EuroHPC JU, Digital Europe Programme) and a roadmap for further collaboration within the EuroCC4SEE network.

The forum aims to strengthen Montenegro’s position in the regional HPC/AI landscape and foster partnerships that empower innovation and research excellence.

Short course: Building a Neural Network, Code Preparing for Multi-GPU HPC and Running Large-Scale Training

University of Montenegro, a member of NCC Montenegro team, is organizing a short training dedicated to students, young researchers and professionals from industry, willing to learn about using HPC in their work, through a practical example. After learning how to create a simple neural network, training participants will be trained to prepare local environment for the development and then to copy and run the code on HPC, thus enabling model training on multi-GPU HPC.

  • Date: 12.12.2025 at 12:00h
  • Venue: Faculty of Science and Mathematics, University of Montenegro, Room 210
  • Title: Training on Building a Neural Network, Code Preparing for Multi-GPU HPC and Running Large-Scale Training
  • Designed for: students, researchers, and professionals with basic Python knowledge
Short course on Neural networks using Multi-GPU HPC and Running Large-Scale Training

Training content overview

  • Creating simple neural network for defect detection in manufacturing (1h)
  • Explaining docker containerization tool, and preparing local environment for development (2h)
  • Copying local environment to HPC (0.3h)
  • Running model training on multi-GPU HPC (1.2h)

Modern Conversational AI – From Classic NLU to LLMs

On 21.11.2025, NCC Montenegro successfully delivered a short course as part of the EUROCC 2 and EUROCC4SEE initiatives. The program brought together an excellent cohort of students, researchers, and industry professionals who demonstrated remarkable curiosity, teamwork, and practical problem-solving skills throughout the training.

The course was delivere by mr Dejan Babic and mr Ivan Jovovic

The course explored the evolution of conversational AI, beginning with traditional natural language understanding (NLU) approaches based on intents and entities, and progressing toward modern Large Language Model (LLM) architectures and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Participants were introduced to prompt design, tool and function calling, and essential aspects of safety, privacy, and guardrails in AI systems. The curriculum also covered embeddings, vector indexes, hybrid search techniques combining BM25 with dense vectors, and re-ranking strategies for improving retrieval quality.

A significant component of the course was a hands-on laboratory session where participants built a small RAG-based chatbot using domain-specific documents. The HPC perspective was also highlighted, including batch embedding generation, large-scale indexing considerations, and methods for stress testing AI pipelines. The course concluded with live demonstrations using Azure AI Foundry, showcasing Prompt Flow, Evaluate, and AI Search capabilities.

There was around 20 participants in the event

Participants quickly absorbed the theoretical concepts, engaged with thoughtful and challenging questions, and worked independently during practical sessions. By the end of the course, they delivered functional prototype systems featuring grounded answers and clear evaluation reports—demonstrating both strong technical understanding and applied competence.

Short course: Modern Conversational AI — From Classic NLU to LLMs

This short course covers the foundations of conversational systems—classic NLU (intents, entities, slot filling, dialogue design) and modern LLM workflows (prompt engineering, function calling, RAG). Participants build a practical chatbot grounded in their own documents, evaluate quality and safety, and deploy a lightweight interface. An HPC module is included for large-scale embeddings and offline evaluation/load testing.

  • Date: 21.11.2025 at 11:45
  • Venue: PS, UDG
  • Registration required: https://forms.gle/SRW6GYiRAbi8pFBe8
  • Designed for: students, researchers, and professionals with basic Python and web/API skills.
Short course on NLP and LLMs

Course content overview

Session 1 (90 min) – theoretical framework

  • From classic NLU (intents/entities/slots) to LLM “agents”
  • Dialogue design: state machines vs. tools/functions
  • RAG essentials: indexing, chunking, hybrid search, source citations
  • Evaluation & safety: relevance/groundedness, moderation, PII
  • HPC view: when batch embeddings and batch evaluation matter

Session 2 (90 min)- hands-on lab

  • Project setup and starter RAG pipeline
  • Document import/index, prompt + function calling
  • Quick evaluation and guardrails
  • Deploy a web chat

Learning outcomes

  • Contrast intent-based vs. LLM-based chatbots.
  • Design dialogue and implement a grounded RAG pipeline with citations.
  • Ship a lightweight production chatbot with evaluation and safety.
  • Apply HPC techniques to scale embeddings and offline performance testing.