During "Greencajt festival", our LARES member Vinko Lešić was a speaker at the scientific-popular panel session about the upcoming trends in tech jobs, entitled "Professions of the future - 2030 is not that far". He presented the statistics about most wanted jobs of today where, according to IEEE Spectrum magazine article , 7 of 10 most required professions were from electrical engineering and computing already for 2020, and during last two years these professions are digitally revolutionized towards the most paid jobs of 2021 .  "Science inherently takes us beyond the current state of the art, prepares the technology for industry where it finds it commercial purpose, and shapes the educational programmes from higher education to high schools. We may observe that todays transformation of the industry and overall society is green and sustainable, technological and smart." The full article can be found here .

LARES head Prof. Mario Vasak has presented the work of LARES in smart control of legacy heating systems which suffer from high inefficiency and comfort issues when classical control schemes are applied to them. The work Optimal day-ahead operation scheduling of a one-pipe heating system is published on the 8th International Conference on Control, Decision and Information Technology held in Istanbul 17-20 May 2022. The work falls within the efforts of enabling smartness and demand response in buildings and households pursued in the project Development of a System for Control of Electrical Energy Consumption in Households (SUPEER, contract no. KK.01.2.1.02.0063), supported by the European Union from the European Union Regional Development Fund via Operational Programme Competitiveness and Cohesion 2014-2020 for Croatia. The presentation can be found here .

On Friday, April 22, 2022, FER was visited by a group of 3rd-year undergraduate students of Applied / Business Computing at the University of Dubrovnik. The guests from Dubrovnik first visited the Laboratory for Renewable Energy Systems (LARES), which was presented by doc. dr. sc. Vinko Lešić . Researcher Marko Ratković showed them how plant growing chambers work and how they will be applied in the AgroSparc project. They then went to other faculty laboratories and got to know their projects.

As part of the study trip on March 18, 2022, a group of undergraduate students of Industrial Management and Logistics from the Université Paris-Saclay , accompanied by their professors, visited FER. During the one-week visit to Croatia and Slovenia, the students' goal was to get to know the local business culture and companies associated with French companies or investors. Consequently, they visited TPV Group, Renault, Zagrebačka pivovara, Holcim Croatia, DPD, INETEC and Končar. They concluded their trip at FER, where we introduced them to the research we are conducting as part of the Advanced Laboratory of Power Systems (SG Lab), the Laboratory for Renewable Energy Systems (LARES) and the Laboratory for Underwater Systems and Technologies (LABUST). At the end of the gathering, the guests were greeted by members of the student association EESTEC LC Zagreb, who presented the work of the association in French and thus pleasantly surprised our guests from Paris.

Organized together with IEEE Croatia Section and its Control Systems Society Chapter and Power and Energy Society Chapter, LARES member Husam Shaheen held a lecture entitled  „Metaheuristic Optimization Algorithms and Application in Power System“  on March 8, 2022. Husam Shaheen, PhD, is a Profesor at Tishreen University, Latakia, Syria, with several years of experience at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan, Hubei, China and Xiamen University of Technology (XMUT), Xiamen, Fujian, China, and currently a visiting researcher at LARES under SmartCityLight project .

LARES joined LARICS team to participate at IFAM 2022 Expo  held in Ljubljana. IFAM is a Trade Fair for automation, mechatronics, sensor technology, measurement technologies. The event brings all key technologies together in one place and is focused on fulfilling the needs of the professional visitors.  Within the scope of  FER projects in the area of agrorobotics  presented as breaking sessions, Asst. Prof. Vinko Lesic presented the project AgroSPARC - Smart and Predictive Agriculture for Resilience to Climate Change. We thank LARICS for their invitation and hosting us at their booth. Few photographs are available in detailed news content.

The Minister of Regional Development of the Republic of Kosovo, Fikrim Damka, visited FER on March 7, 2022, where he was hosted by the Vice Dean for Science, Prof. dr. sc. Nikola Mišković and the head of the Laboratory for Renewable Energy Systems (LARES) prof. dr. sc. Mario Vašak. They discussed the position and importance of FER in the academic and scientific research community and potential cooperation with Kosovo's scientific institutions and economic entities. The Kosovo delegation then visited the Laboratory for Renewable Energy Systems, where Professor Vašak presented the system of advanced building and infrastructure management, which was implemented on the FER skyscraper (building C). Namely, within the 3Smart project, a system of advanced climate control of a skyscraper building based on the smart building principle has been developed, which enables the integration of a high share of renewable energy into the energy system and efficient energy consumption.

We are proud to announce that we have held another  AI Bootcamp - an intensive, one-week course covering a typical AI project flow, from getting and understanding the data, tuning the models, all the way to their implementation, initial results, and fine-tuning, all accompanied with real datasets and practical examples.  Our AI Bootcamp differs from others in personalized materials tailored to clients, and after completing the course, our lecturers are still at your disposal for any questions and concerns!   If you see benefits from this course to your company, send an email to  ivana.basljan@fer.hr  and find out all the details. We can't wait to pass on the knowledge, join us! 😊