Anja Hula, a member of the FER Alumni Board , shared with the readers of the weekly "Nacional" the story of her journey from intern to the Director of Engineering at Croatian first unicorn company - Infobip and talked about how FER helped her in the career development. "FER opened doors for me and was a springboard in my career", Hula pointed out, explaining that she accepted the invitation of Dean Vedran Bilas to the Alumni Board precisely because she wants to give back to FER what she got from it during the studies, and because she thinks it is essential to help young talents at this early stage. "We must recognize their potential while they are still young and invest in it. The initiative I am participating in, at the Alumni Board, is a mentoring group where FER students can contact a mentor who will facilitate their path to further development. This is extremely important for young people." The goal, Hula also believes, should be to attract foreign students to Croatia and retain our own, because this is how a quality staff is built and maintained. The same applies to young scientists. "This is an exciting time for Croatia, and that is why the FER Alumni Board was founded. I think we will start the right thing and enable students to stay in Croatia to live and work", said Hula, who believes that the State should invest more in that goal, but also needs to promote STEM more. "Croatia must become a modern and open society that will attract talents from all over the world . To achieve this, the State must recognize the ICT industry as a strategic branch of the economy," concludes Hula. Read the entire interview with Anja Hula in the Nacional article .

The scientific paper "Normalizing Flow-based Feature Synthesis for Outlier-Aware Object Detection" has been selected as one of the top 10% of papers (conference highlights) to be presented at the CVPR 2023 - Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. It is a collaboration between Professor Siniša Šegvić and researchers Nishant Kumar and Stefan Gumhold from the Technical University of Dresden and Abouzar Eslami from Carl Zeiss Meditec AG. The article considers the rejection of detection responses in anomalous regions of test images. The presented approach is based on learning anomaly detectors on synthetic negative features. The presented experiments have shown that normalizing flows can generate much better synthetic negative features than classical generative models based on per-class Gaussian distributions. The full text of the article is available on Arxiv . CVPR is the central annual conference in the field of computer vision and one of the most prestigious conferences in the field of technical sciences. This year the conference will be held from June 18 to 22, 2023, in Vancouver, Canada. This year, CVPR accepted less than 26% of the received papers (a total of 9,155 papers were submitted), and only about 2.5% of the received papers entered the selection of the best articles at the conference .

Ambassador of the State of Israel to the Republic of Croatia, H. E. Gary Koren visited FER on March 15, 2023. The Ambassador was welcomed by the dean prof. Vedran Bilas, PhD, Vice Dean for Research and Innovation, prof. Stjepan Bogdan, PhD, and the head of LABUST, prof. Nikola Mišković, PhD. The purpose of the meeting was to further strengthen bilateral relations between the Faculty and the State of Israel in the fields of science, research and education. After the meeting with the FER Board, Ambassador Koren visited the Laboratory for Renewable Energy Source Systems - LARES and the Laboratory for Underwater Systems and Technologies - LABUST . More photo is available here .

In FER's Laboratory for Renewable Energy Systems - LARES , by using mathematical algorithms, it is resolved how to optimally consume energy in a building, while preserving the comfort of the building's users. Head of LARES, professor Mario Vašak, PhD , reveals in an interview for the news portal egradnja.hr what kind of measurements and calculations the Laboratory carries out, how to implement them in buildings and at the same time make even smarter use of energy produced from volatile renewable sources. A full translation of the article is available below.

Infineon Austria and FER at the University of Zagreb have launched academic cooperation in power electronics. The collaboration will advance the further development of energy-efficient technologies for decarbonization as well as strengthen one of the key areas of European microelectronics expertise. The cooperation focuses on research and development of microelectronic solutions that systematically reduce energy consumption as well as on training for these research fields. These include, for example, electro-mobility or the energy-efficient generation, transmission and use of electricity. The duration of this academic cooperation is initially set for six years. Prof. Željko Jakopović, PhD, has been appointed to lead the project. The collaboration is part of Infineon Austria's spillover activities within the Important Project of Common European Interest on Microelectronics (IPCEI ME). More information is available below and photos are in FER's Gallery .