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Prof. dr. Marjan Mernik gave a keynote lecture on March 16, 2023, at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence & Software Engineering, Kochi, Indija, https://icaise.cusat.ac.in/, entitled "From Grammar Inference to Semantic Inference". The best papers from the conference will be invited to the "Journal of Computer Languages" (https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-computer-languages) and "Applied Soft Computing" (https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/applied-soft-computing) journals , where prof. Marjan Mernik is acting as Editor-in-Chief and Associate Editor, respectively.

On Wednesday, 1. 2. 2023, assoc. prof. dr. Damjan Strnad, a member of Institute for computer science, attended the Omizje show aired at 8pm on TV Maribor (https://365.rtvslo.si/arhiv/omizje-tv-maribor/174933037). The discussion topics included safe use of Internet, Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence, in particular its impact on Internet safety and task automatization.

On January 24th 2023, Mladen Borovič, member of Institute of Computer Science, attended an open discussion event titled "How can ChatGPT increase your productivity?". Other speakers included Aleksej Miloševič, Miha Pavlinek (both from Databox company) and Blaž Škrlj (from Outbrain company). The event was organized by Start:up Maribor and took place in the Technology Park Ptuj. The speakers debated about the newly released chatbot ChatGPT and its impact on the productivity of our everyday work. The debate was also recorded and is published on SoundCloud (https://soundcloud.com/startupmaribor/startup-musli-chatgpt).

In November 2022, Mladen Borovič, member of Institute of Computer Science, appeared as a guest on the AIDEA podcast, where he had a thorough conversation about artificial intelligence, its development, its meaning for humanity and its many applications in the world today. The episode aired on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvMKYWJAsEs) on January 19th 2023 as well as on many other popular platforms (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts; links available on https://kite.link/90-aidea).

At Rector's Day 2023, the following four members of the Institute of Computer Science received the awards:

• Dragana Ostojić, Rector's award for the best academic achievements of students of the University of Maribor in their generation;
• Assoc. prof. Iztok Fister, Award of the University of Maribor for scientific research, artistic and educational work;
• Prof. Marjan Mernik, Award of the University of Maribor for scientific research, artistic and educational work;
• Assoc. prof. Domen Mongus, Award of the University of Maribor for cooperation with the industry and transfer of knowledge.

You can read more about the event and the award winners at https://www.um.si/objava/rektorjev-dan-2023/

Congratulations!

The article entitled "Automatic Compiler/Interpreter Generation from Programs for Domain-Specific Languages: Code Bloat Problem and Performance Improvement" (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590118422000132?via%3Dihub) by Željko Kovačević, Miha Ravber, Shih-Hsi Liu, and Matej Črepinšek was selected as the best paper in the Journal of Computer Languages ​​(https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-computer-languages) for 2021.
The award committee evaluated the received contributions mainly according to the quality of the contribution, novelty and significance of the research work. The award was presented at the SPLASH 2022 (https://2022.splashcon.org/), Auckland, New Zealand. More about the award-winning articles are published on the journal's official website https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-computer-languages/about/news.

Congratulations!

Dear!

We invite you to attend the 17th professional conference entitled ‘Computer image processing and its application in Slovenia 2023 (ROSUS 2023).’ This one-day conference will take place on Thursday, March 23, 2023 at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Maribor. This year's demonstration section is entitled ‘Practical advices from experts.’

Detailed information and application form are available at http://rosus.feri.um.si/.

For students, an entrance to the conference is free of charge (registration is mandatory at e-mail rosus.feri@um.si).

Organizing Committee of the ROSUS 2023 Conference

An international group of researchers published a paper in the ScienceAdvances journal, in which they presented a new methodology for monitoring the activity of motor neurons that innervate human skeletal muscles. The methodology is based on the acquisition and analysis of multichannel intramuscular electromyograms (EMG). In the study, the researchers proved that these innovative systems for capturing multichannel intramuscular EMG signals combined with computer algorithms developed at the Institute of Computer Science UM FERI, support monitoring of simultaneous activity of a relatively large number of motor neurons in the individual skeletal muscle. Up to 67 simultaneously active motor neurons were tracked with identification accuracy of 99% or above. These results significantly exceed the efficiency of the procedures known to date. The presented methodology enables the discovery of new mechanisms in the functioning of motor neurons, which could not be observed with the previously established measurement procedures. Among them, the study discusses the functional coupling of motor neurons at significantly higher frequencies than known until now (even at frequencies around 75 Hz) and measuring of the impact of the Renshaw cells inhibition on the motor neurons. The presented methodology and findings demonstrate the applicability of a new paradigm of human motor system analysis by means of large populations of concurrently active motor neurons. The contribution is available on the website https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.abo5040?af=R

On November 10th 2022, lecture titled "Programming Unmanned Aerial Vehicles" was held at the Department of Computer Science. The lecture was organized as part of external expert lectures in the Evolutionary Computing course at the Second Cycle Bologna Study Programme Computer Science and Information Technologies and was given by Prof. Dr Yu David Liu of the State University of New York at Binghamton. Glimpses from the lectures can be found in the attached pictures.

Organized by the Computer Science department, the 10th International Conference BIOMA 2022 will be held at the University of Maribor, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 17-18 November 2022 (https://bioma2022.um.si/). The researchers come from Belgium, China, Croatia, the Czech Republic, France, India, Italy, Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, Slovenia, Serbia, South Africa, South Korea and the USA. They will present current findings in the field of evolutionary computing. The invited lecturers are dr. Carola Doerr from Sorbonne Université, France, and Dr. Shih-Hsi Liu from CSU Fresno, USA.

You are welcome!

Stanford University has released a list of the top 2% of scientists in the world. The survey covered 10,020,500 scientists who were classified into 22 scientific fields and 176 subfields. The list also includes prof. dr. Janez Brest, prof. dr. Iztok Fister, Prof. dr. Marjan Mernik, prof. dr. Aleš Holobar, prof. dr. Borut Žalik and assoc. prof. dr. Aleš Zamuda from the Institute of Computer Science, UM FERI. Detailed results are published on the official website. Congratulations!

At the Institute of Computer Science, we organize a guest lecture, "Programming Unmanned Aerial Vehicles", by Prof. Yu David Liu from State University New York at Binghamton (http://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~davidl/). The guest lecture is going to be held on Thursday, November 10, 2022, at 10.00 am, in lecture room G2-P06, at the course Evolutionary Computation, 2nd-year R-IT MAG.

Welcome to joint the lecture!

Last weekend, the Slovenian part of the 24-hour virtual world programming competition IEEEXtreme took place at UM FERI for the second time. At the same time, Slovenian teams competed with teams from all over the world in a single 24 hour long world competition, while the overall ranking was also updated live.

On the October 1st, 2022, we started educating the 15th generation of undergraduate students of the Computer Science and Information Technologies study programs. So far, 971 students have graduated from these study programs. Congratulations, and plenty of academic success to the 15th generation!

Prof. dr. Yu David Liu (http://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~davidl/) from State University New York Binghamton (https://www.binghamton.edu/)
received a Fulbright scholarship (https://fulbrightscholars.org/) for four months of research at the University of Maribor in the field of "green computing". At the Institute of Computer Science, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, he will participate in the design and implementation of an energy-aware programming language with self-optimization capability powered by evolutionary computation.

Prof. dr. Marjan Mernik gave an invited lecture on September 20, 2022, at the Università Ca' Foscari, Venice, entitled "Formal and Practical Aspects of Domain-Specific Languages: An Overview of my work on DSLs" (https://www.unive.it/ data/agenda/9/64209), where he presented his research work in the field of domain-specific languages. He has been working in this field for more than 20 years and is among the most cited researchers (https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=search_authors&hl=en&mauthors=label:domain_specific_languages).

The head of the Institute of Computer Science, Prof. dr. Aleš Holobar, gave a lecture entitled "What can we learn from surface EMG and neural codes" at TwinBrain Workshop 2.0. Workshop can be seen at the link below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOGByrQkOzw

The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO 2022 (The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference), will take place between July 9 and 13, 2022, which for the first time this year will be in a digital and physical hybrid format. The organization of the conference is international: responsible for the digital experience (virtualization) is assoc. prof. dr. Aleš Zamuda from Institute of Computer Science at UM FERI, and for local (physical) prof. dr. Erik Hemberg from MIT in the USA (AnyScale Learning For All (ALFA) research group at the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL)).

In addition to the usual 10-member core team of organizers, another twenty members and dozens of volunteers participate in the preparation of the conference, namely members of the ACM, many of whom have already participated in the past as prominent members of the European Cooperation in the Field of Science and Technology (COST) in action CA15130 (ImAppNIO), which was also included among projects at Institute of Computer Science UM FERI.

More than 880 participants from more than 500 organizations worldwide are already expected at the conference, and more than half of the participants will be in remote mode (virtual). To the efforts of dr. Zamuda, registration for the conference is especially simplified this year (ACM interface for Whova), and registration for participants with a digital experience for SIGEVO members is also free. This year's conference experience via digital platforms includes a specially dedicated application in Whova, meetings will take place via Zoom and Gather.Town, and the scientific papers are published at SIGEVO website and will be accessible in the ACM digital library. As part of the digital experience, a schedule of contributions and meetings is available, which arranges several hundred scientific presentations and one hundred topics in more than ten parallel timelines.

Various competitions are also held at the conference, which are mainly attended by doctoral students and many other researchers:

• AbstractSwarm Multi-Agent Logistics Competition
• Competition on Real Parameter Single Objective Bound Constrained Optimization
• Dynamic Stacking Optimization in Uncertain Environments
• Evolutionary Computation in the Energy Domain: Risk-based Energy Scheduling
• Evolutionary Submodular Optimisation
• Interpretable Symbolic Regression for Data Science
• Minecraft Open-Endedness Challenge
• Open Optimization Competition 2022: Better Benchmarking of Sampling-Based Optimization Algorithms
• Optimization of a simulation model for a capacity and resource planning task for hospitals under special consideration of the COVID-19 pandemic
• SpOC: Space Optimisation Competition

The organizer and sponsor of the conference is ACM SIGEVO (Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation), otherwise TII, Google, Autogenetics and Beacon are also sponsors. More about the conference is available on the conference website and social networks:

• https://gecco-2022.sigevo.org/
• https://twitter.com/GeccoConf
• https://www.facebook.com/GECCO2022/

At the annual meeting of the Slovenian section of the IEEE, which took place on 6 June 2022 in Vransko, a ceremony was held to hand out awards for leadership, cooperation, and consulting in the past period. At the ceremony, a member of the Institute of Computer Science, assoc. prof. dr. Ales Zamuda received an award, "for many years of self-sacrificing cooperation as vice-president of the Slovenian section of the IEEE and chairman of the Computational Intelligence Chapter".

More about the event is available at the following links:

• https://feri.um.si/novice/priznanja-ieee-slovenija/
• https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/316033
• https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/316979

Between 9-12 January 2022, the Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR 2022, http://cidrdb.org/cidr2022/program.html) was held in Chaminade, California (USA). At this conference, some results of the DAPHNE project, in which Institute of Computer Science UM FERI also participates, were presented to the public for the first time. The presentation is also available on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKbJCkPjJDQ), and more about the project is available on the project website https://daphne-eu.eu.

The DAPHNE project was reported on the use of the state and EU infrastructure of HPC Vega a few days ago by the Science Directorate of the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport on the GOV.SI portal (https://www.gov.si/novice/2022-01-05-hpc-vega-kot-temelj-za-inovacijsko-raziskovalni-projekt-daphne/). The head of the UM consortium share in the DAPHNE project, assoc. prof. dr. Aleš Zamuda, a member of the Institute of Computer Science, also shared a few words on behalf of the entire UM FERI team for this project and the use of the HPC infrastructure.

Sources of graphic material and news:
https://twitter.com/daphne_eu
https://twitter.com/daphne_eu/status/1483061647107411972?s=20
https://twitter.com/aleszamuda/status/1481187888901541891?s=20
https://twitter.com/aleszamuda/status/1478736982083837957?s=20
https://www.facebook.com/COBISS.SI/posts/hpc-vega-kot-temelj-za-inovacijsko-raziskovalni-projekt-daphne-httpswwwgovsinovi/4925486307473029/