About AIFORS Workshops on Industry – Academia Collaboration 

Industry-academia collaboration workshops are half-day events that would consist of panel discussions around topics of innovation related to intelligent robotics. The aim is for participants from industry to meet with academic counterparts to share their challenges and opportunities and to establish collaboration agreements with industrial partners.

The 1st AIFORS Workshop on Industry – Academia Collaboration took place on July 9, 2024 at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (UNIZG-FER). To reach a broader industry community, the workshop was organized in collaboration with the local European Digital Innovation Hub: Crobohub++ - CROatian Industry and Society Boosting, and the coordinator of EDIH: ARTES 5.0 in Pisa, Italy, Prof. Paolo Dario was invited as a keynote speaker to the workshop.

The workshop program included the speeches of Prof. Fabio Bonsignorio and Prof. Ivan Petrović and of invited speakers with rich international experience in research and development in robotics and artificial intelligence who presented their past collaborations with industry and the latest research and views on the future.

The workshop was attended by 70 participants, 25 of whom came from 18 companies.

The workshop agenda with the brief info about speakers and their talks can be found here.

The AIFORS Workshop on European Charter for Researchers and the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers and Gender Analysis in Research was held on July 4, 2024, at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (UNIZG-FER). The workshop was divided into a training course about compliance with the European Charter for Researchers and the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers (morning session) and a course about sex or gender analysis in research (afternoon session), was organized by the ERA Chair holder.

The morning session was dedicated to discussing the European Charter of Researchers and its role in fostering the creation of a fully functional, globally competitive, just and inclusive European Research Area, and to the principles and requirements of the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers.  

The afternoon session was dedicated to the assessment of the current situation, discussing how to make further progress on gender equality and inclusion issues in research, globally, in the ERA, and, in particular at the University of Zagreb and UNIZG-FER. 

Panel Discussions held at the end of each session, which also involved professors Ivana Podnar Žarko, Ana Sović Kržić and Mirna Gržanić Antić as the panelists, created opportunities for speakers of varied backgrounds and viewpoints to present the multiple perspectives on the subjects and to provoke interaction with the audience. 

The workshop was attended by 55 people, 36 of whom came from UNIZG-FER and 19 from other higher education and research institutions in Croatia. 

Agenda with brief info about the key speakers and their talks is available here.

About DEC training sessions

A series of Dissemination, Exploitation and Communication (DEC) training sessions were included in the AIFORS work program to build the capacity of researchers and we have organized two training sessions.

The first DEC training, which took place on March 20, 2024, focused on networking skills, communication, dissemination of research results and intellectual property rights (IPR) the agenda, and the second DEC training, which took place on March 28, 2024, the agenda, focused on oral presentation of research papers and writing scientific publications. Both were held at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (UNIZG-FER).

The target audience of these training sessions were the members of the ERA Chair team as well as the doctoral students and postdocs of LAMOR and UNIZG-FER, who were therefore invited to the training sessions. 

Summary of presentations from both days can be found here.

About the AIFORS Colloquia

The AIFORS Colloquia is a series of small, invitation-only, face-to-face group meetings that focus on a small number of important research questions in the field of AI and robotics. They aim to open up new avenues of research, propose solutions and strategies for theoretical, technological, and societal problems, and establish fruitful new collaborations. High-level, internationally recognized researchers from diverse backgrounds in terms of gender, nationality, and career stage are invited. The style of the meetings is informal, and allows for in-depth, unconventional discussions, and encourages informal exchanges between participants.

The 1^st AIFORS Colloquium on Natural and Artificial Intelligence was held on March 19, 2024 and focused on the research challenges and the potential enormous synergies arising from the fusion of (physics-aware) deep neural networks, soft robot and agent embodiments, and neuromorphic computing. What are the challenges? Where are the potential solutions? What research strategy do we need?

The colloquium was attended by 45 people, with 25 of the participants being professors from UNIZG-FER and other faculties of the University of Zagreb, who were interested in learning from the experience of the Prof. Bonsignorio, the ERA Chair holder, and Prof. Gordon Cheng, Chair of Cognitive Systems at TUM, Germany (and partly also from Y. Sandamirskaya from Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland) in developing research strategies, planning and performance monitoring in addition to scientific achievements.

Further information on the 1^st AIFORS Colloquium can be found on the Colloquium homepage, which you can find here.

A tailor-made one-week training course on grant proposal writing and project management was held from 23 to 27 October 2023, suitable for both members of the Research Support Center (RSC) of UNIZG-FER and researchers. 

The training was conducted by EFMC OU, Tallinn, Estonia, at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (UNIZG-FER). It provided a comprehensive understanding of EU Horizon Europe and enabled participants to gain practical experience and knowledge on how to write a successful project proposal and how to implement/manage a successful project. The training also enabled participants to gain a better understanding of the main research funding programs and learn the methodology for writing successful proposals.

In addition, the training included examples of pitfalls to avoid and common mistakes for each topic to enable participants to better understand the concept and gain practical knowledge of proposal key innovations and requirements. The presentations were complemented by practical tips, personal experiences, good and bad experiences in preparing proposals and implementing projects from a practitioner’s perspective. The presentations were complemented by practical exercises that gave participants the opportunity to experience for themselves the key steps in proposal preparation and
project implementation.

About 25 people from AIFORS, LAMOR, RSC and some other laboratories of UNIZG-FER participated in the course.