FER students show a growing interest in mobility

The 44 th International ICT Convention MIPRO 2021 will be held from 24 to 28 May 2021 in Opatija , with the technical co-sponsorship of the IEEE. This year's slogan of the conference is "ICT in Renewable Energy Technologies" , and it will cover various areas of ICT application, from microelectronics, electronics, data science, biomedicine, telecommunications, through computers in education, engineering education to intelligent and business intelligent systems, robotics, digital economics, law and many other areas. This year, MIPRO gives special importance to hydrogen energy and a new conference called "Regional Hydrogen Energy Conference - RHEC" has been established and will take place for the first time. Although the convention consists of conferences, special session, various interesting workshops, round tables, invited presentations and lectures and other program segments, this announcement is primarily intended for authors of scientific and professional papers. The deadline for abstract submission is Monday, 18 January 2021. Papers can be submitted to 15 different conferences and/or 1 special session. All papers will undergo two double blind peer review, and the same author can submit multiple papers. Presented papers in English will be sent for inclusion in the IEEE Xplore Digital Database. Paper instructions for authors, deadlines, registration fees and other important details are available at www.mipro.hr   or via contact e-mail mipro@mipro.hr .

We invite all interested parties, especially those who are considering starting their own startup or are in the development phase of an existing one, to join us at a webinar called "Exploring the Startup Ecosystem of India & Croatia" , which will be held on December 22, 2020, at 11:00 a.m . In addition to the Ambassador of India to Croatia, H.E. Raj Kumar Srivastava, and the representative of the Indian Ministry of Commerce, Mr. Shri Anil Agrawal, the Vice Dean for Research at FER, professor Nikola Mišković, Ph.D., will also be speaking at the webinar. The event can be followed live via Youtube channel and social networks Facebook , Twitter and LinkedIn .

Ambassador of the Republic of India to the Republic of Croatia, HE Raj Kumar Srivastava , visited the University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing on Thursday, 26 November 2020, where he was greeted by the Dean, professor Gordan Gledec , PhD; Vice Dean for research, professor Nikola Mišković , PhD; Head of the Innovation Centre Nikola Tesla, professor emer. Nedjeljko Perić , PhD, and professor Darko Žubrinić , PhD, from the Department of Applied Mathematics. The Ambassador was accompanied by Mr. Hemant Kumar Pandey, Second Secretary for Political, Commercial and Consular Affairs, and Mr. Ivan Delić, PR, Information and Cultural advisory. The subject of the meeting was the position and importance of FER within the academic and scientific research community and its positioning at the international level. Special emphasis was placed on strengthening bilateral cooperation with universities in India , primarily in the form of student and teaching staff exchanges. After the meeting, HE Srivastava visited three FER laboratories: Smart Grid Laboratory ( SGLab ), where he was received by associate professor Hrvoje Pandžić , PhD; Laboratory for Autonomous Systems and Mobile Robotics ( LAMOR ), where he was welcomed by professor Ivan Petrović , PhD, and Laboratory for Renewable Energy Systems ( LARES ), where he was hosted by professor Mario Vašak , PhD. Selected photos of the meeting of the two delegations can be found below the gallery , and more photos can be found in the detailed news content.

Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing at the University of Zagreb has joined RISC-V International. RISC-V International is a global nonprofit association based in Switzerland, which was founded in 2015 as the RISC-V Foundation and is now a global organization with over 700 members in more than 50 countries. Its goal is to promote RISC-V as a free and open Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) enabling a new era of processor innovation through open standard collaboration. The initiative to join RISC-V came from FER’s HPC Architecture and Application Research Center . Major focus of the research in the Center are various future generation high-performance computing processor and accelerator architectures. As a result, the Center is involved in several research projects that feature RISC-V, most notably, the European Processor Initiative where members of the Center are developing and demonstrating fully European processor IPs based on the RISC-V ISA. Using RISC-V will allow leveraging open-source resources at hardware architecture and software level enabling European technology independence. By joining RISC-V, FER will be able to more proactively participate in global RISC-V activities and promote the results of FER research.

A group of FER researcher s from the Department of Electronics, Microelectronics, Computer and Intelligent Systems (ZEMRIS), led by professor Siniša Šegvić, PhD , won the first place in the international competition Robust Vision Challenge , in the discipline of semantic segmentation . The method which the ZEMRIS team used in the competition was developed within the doctoral dissertation of the institute's associate Marin Oršić, while assistant Petra Bevandić, junior researcher Ivan Grubišić and institute associate Josip Šarić also participated in the preparation of the submission. Competition propositions required learning a single model that could implement predictions on multiple data sets. Such models are particularly interesting for industrial applications because they behave best in the presence of unexpected scenes. FER's model achieved first place in the absolute competition at the WildDash 2 set. It is the most demanding set for the semantic segmentation of automotive scenes because it contains images which were specifically selected by the experts as difficult for machine-learned models. Model learning and evaluation was performed on an NVIDIA DGX computer. It is a computer system with eight NVIDIA Tesla V-100 GPUs, which simplify the software execution of procedures for learning large models. Our winning team’s method, titled "Effective Semantic Segmentation by Pyramid Fusion" , was published at the last year’s CVPR conference, which Google Scholar lists as the 5th most prestigious scientific source according to the h5-index metric. It was also published in Pattern Recognition , journal which is ranked 10th out of a total of 220 most prestigious sources in the field of artificial intelligence according to Scopus. "There are three main motivations for our participation in the competition. First, such ventures force us to step out of our comfort zone and "pick up" knowledge that we would otherwise gain much more slowly. Second, we wanted to increase the scientific impact of our publications. Third, this participation showed that our expertise is competitive on a global scale, so we hope to find projects to continue funding our research. We are interested in industrial projects, mainly because they confront us very effectively with the real limitations of our science. In addition, industrial research is important because public sources of funding in Croatia are not sufficient to conduct research at the global level", explains the team leader, professor Šegvić . You can find more information in the detailed news content.

GlobalLogic Croatia and the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing of the University of Zagreb (FER) have launched an educational module for FER students on the topic AUTOSAR ( Automotive Open Systems Architecture ), which represents the automotive standard established with the aim of creating an open and standardized software architecture. This way students will be given an opportunity to learn highly wanted skills at the software market so that they can increase their competitiveness in the labor market. The educational module is organized as a skill (extracurricular course) at FER during which students acquire practical knowledge of relevant technologies in the labor market through a partnership between the faculty and the industry that employs such profiles.  FER students were given the opportunity to gain practical knowledge about AUTOSAR in the summer semester of this academic year. The interest of students was great since the quota of 30 students for the first year of the course. was completed soon with more students interested to join the course in the future. Classes will last until June and and 10 software engineers from GlobalLogic with many years of experience working on digital innovations in the automotive industry, will hold the lectures and lab work. GlobalLogic prepared the education module in cooperation with its business partner, the German automotive software supplier Elektrobit . Elektrobit secured specific thematic materials for the module and also supports the project with its highly sophisticated commercial software used in the design and development of AUTOSAR systems for individual ECUs ( Electronic Control Unit ) for all modern cars.