Universities, institutes, summer schools

Artificial intelligence R&D is not a new thing in Serbia, as AI has been studied at universities and scientific institutes for several decades now. Additionally, there have been summer schools dedicated to AI, such as the Petnica Summer Institute: Machine Learning. One of the results of this work at universities and summer schools has been the textbook Artificial Intelligence, by professors Predrag Janičić and Mladen Nikolić. In the spirit of sharing so common in this field, the authors kindly allow their book to be downloaded for free.

Industry

The last few years have witnessed novel applications of AI in Serbian industry as well. An excellent example of this new trend is the collaboration of teams from Microsoft Serbia and EPS. In this work, the teams used AI to improve prediction of the fluctuations in electrical power consumption. By increasing the prediction accuracy, they were able to reduce the use of reserve power production capacity, thus accomplishing savings of about a million euros a year.

Meetings, societies

The number of Serbian scientists, researchers, and engineers interested in artificial intelligence has been steadily growing over the years. This growth has motivated the founding of several grassroots societies and meetings, such as Serbian AI Meeting, Serbian AI Society, and WonderlandAI.

Government, AI strategy

The Government of Serbia has recognized the economic and societal benefits of investment into AI expertise in Serbia and has created the Strategy for development of artificial intelligence in the Republic of Serbia: 2020-25. Following this document, the Government is promoting activities in education: four new master study programs in the field of artificial intelligence have been approved: two at the University of Novi Sad (one at the Faculty of Technical Sciences and the other at the Faculty of Sciences) and one each at universities in Niš and Kragujevac. The University of Belgrade already has similar master programs.

Furthermore, the Government is also supporting scientific research in the field of artificial intelligence through twelve funded scientific projects. This work has been promoted by the Serbian media, and through the exhibition at the Kalemegdan Fortress. The National Geographic reported in detail on one of the projects.

Finally, the initiative to establish our Institute also originated from the AI Strategy document.