The Croatian Government has finally leaked information about the date of the announcement of Croatia's national artificial intelligence development strategy, which should have actually been completed by this summer.

As Poslovni Dnevnik/Bernard Ivezic writes on the 2nd of October, 2019, within sixty days, the Republic of Croatia should receive its first national artificial intelligence (AI) development strategy. Politically, this is a necessary document for the government to open the way forward to more than 2.5 billion euros in subsidies for both private and public companies and state administrations, intended solely to encourage the implementation of AI.

With the development of supercomputers (2.7 billion euros), subsidies for AI are the most abundant new source of "free" funding for high-tech development in the EU up until the year 2027.

Vlado Rendulić, a member of the APIS IT Management Board and a member of the Government Plan Strategy Working Group shed more light on dates on Wednesday at HUP's presentation of the document called ''Artificial Intelligence Potential for Croatia''.

"I can't speak on behalf of the government, and formally I'm not even a representative of the Ministry of the Economy, but as someone who is aware of the progress and development of this document, I can say that the proposal of the national AI strategy will be completed by the end of November," Rendulić stated encouragingly.

The time and place of its publication are not accidental. HUP has decided to publish a document on the potential of AI, because the government invited all segments of society except private entrepreneurs to develop the first Croatian AI strategy.

Furthermore, Economy Minister Darko Horvat announced that the strategy would be completed by the middle of this year, and although the deadline was broken, employers were not given information on how and at what pace it was being worked on. Moreover, the presentation at HUP announced the arrival of the State Secretary of the Ministry of Economy, Mario Antonić, but Vlado Rendulić appeared, who has, among other things, extensive experience in crisis management.

Rendulić added that the Croatian Government is following an EU recommendation to develop a plan for investment and concrete actions on AI. When the initial document is complete, he argues, a discussion will also open with the private sector. HUP are very skeptical, and there are many reasons for that. The government only joined the Union's AI partnership back in July as one of the last three members to show any interest, followed by sharp criticism.

And then, just a week ago, IMD announced that Croatia had fallen by seven places on the global digital competitiveness ranking, and is now in an unimpressive 51st place. In the introduction of HUP's AI document, Boris Drilo, a member of HT's Technology Board and president of the HUP-ICT Association, stated that the digital economy accounted for 5 percent of Croatia's GDP three years ago (with 18 billion kuna), and could grow to 16 percent of GDP (80 billion kuna) by 2025, according to McKinsey. But it depends on productivity growth, ie, the development of artificial intelligence and Croatia actually showing interest and taking it seriously.

"With advanced digital technologies, it will be possible to automate up to 52 percent of all working hours in Croatia," Drilo said.

Employers are convinced that this is one example of why they are stalling with the AI ​​strategy. Milan Račić, co-founder and director of development for the Croatian robotics startup Gideon Brothers, says there are topics in AI that Croatia's typically unpopular politicians don't like.

"We have to be honest and tell citizens that because of AI, some jobs will be gone, they need to be prepared for it, they should be offered a new perspective, and not be silent about it! I think the development of AI is greater than the next generation of communications, because it goes into all operations and all processes,'' Račić concluded.

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ZAGREB, September 25, 2019 - The Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER) of the University of Zagreb on Wednesday presented its project of establishing the first artificial intelligence centre in Croatia as the pivotal institution to coordinate activities in the field of AI development.

The faculty's dean, Gordan Gledec, said that FER wanted to continue playing a pioneering role in promotion and development of advanced and safe artificial intelligence complying with ethical norms and serving for the benefit of citizens of Croatia and the world.

The centre will share knowledge and provide support to all who find AI-related topics to be important, in line with recommendations on the development and application of artificial intelligence adopted earlier this year by the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (HAZU).

Gledec said that companies that are involved in the development of new products based on AI must actively invest in research and development.

One of the missions of the centre is to educate the general public about possibilities of positive application of AI.

The faculty has already developed successful projects such as cyber fraud protection systems, enhanced safety and security in the tram transportation system or increased potato cultivation productivity.

More news about science in Croatia can be found in the Lifestyle section.

As Poslovni Dnevnik/Lucija Spiljak writes on the 18th of August, 2019, HUP has just published a document outlining the opportunities for the use of artificial intelligence in Croatia, so it's easy to assume that this will also become a permanent topic in market and business related discussions.

A conversation on the potential of artificial intelligence for Croatia and whether or not robots will eventually replace humans was held with Ratko Mutavdžić, a member of the Executive Board of the HUP-ICT Association, and the director of the public services sector at Microsoft's cloud.

Is Croatia aware of the potential of artificial intelligence in terms of markets and business?

What's most likely, like most things in our country, the potential has been recognised with a few years of delay.

Applications have become more significant with the adoption of artificial intelligence in products from other industries, such as the automotive, finance or commerce industries, where the rapid effects of application in existing or new products on the available data have been recognised.

Today, this is increasingly taking place, and due to its good results and the low cost of its application, artificial intelligence has slowly begun to take the lead in new applied technologies in many Croatian companies. The role of the state in creating an environment that will foster the development and application of artificial intelligence solutions should not be neglected.

The beginnings were not very promising - let's recall that Croatia was the last member state of the EU to sign the Charter on the Application of Artificial Intelligence, but there have been recent efforts of the Ministry of Economy to indicate through the activities of the Croatian Employers' Association, as well as through participation in the work of the National Council for Digital Economy, that they're thinking about this. The EU is also earmarking some 2.3 billion euros for artificial intelligence projects.

HUP has just published a document outlining the opportunities for the use of artificial intelligence in Croatia, so we can assume that this will also become a permanent topic in discussions related to the market and business based on artificial intelligence.

Specific examples at Microsoft?

The application of artificial intelligence is diverse.

Companies like Microsoft have made it easy to deploy, made it low in its cost of use, and fast-paced, through platforms that are accessible to everyone, such as cloud-based platforms. Today, it is embedded in almost all products, introducing new features or enhancing the user experience to a lesser or greater extent.

You already see such applications in everyday life, especially if you have a smartphone. On the other hand, it helps companies accelerate and automate processes, reduce errors, eliminate manual work. It's not only a matter of improving the performance of companies but also of application in various fields such as healthcare, education or public administration. It's easier to spot specific illnesses, find out far earlier about potential problems, understand how we can help children individually in schools, or how we can speed up court processes.

In which areas is it being used?

Artificial intelligence has gained new life in the last ten years. We came out of the "ice age" of artificial intelligence development because we had several things to do: We developed better algorithms, enabled them to be processed quickly and scalably using large publicly available processing platforms, through cloud computing, and began to collect large amounts of data that we need for artificial intelligence.

Today, companies are making significant investments in deployment, while major platform makers, such as Microsoft, are investing several billion dollars a year in this development. There are currently no restrictions on implementation, although, rightly, questions arise in which areas we should consider applying it.

There is more and more talk about the ethics and law of artificial intelligence and how we should regulate it. While all of our efforts are aimed towards applying it to the well-being of technology for humanity as a whole, there are always attempts to misuse technology in ways that we, as a community, disagree with - and this needs to be understood well and properly regulated.

Do Croatian companies use European Union money to develop artificial intelligence?

A large number of members and partners involved with HUP, but also other communities, and partners of the companies producing artificial intelligence platforms, have a great opportunity to use EU money from the Digital Europe 2021-2027 financial package and program, which envisages around 2.3 billion euros for artificial intelligence-based projects.

However, even without such significant support, the development of such solutions is very intensive in Croatia, and there are a number of companies and individuals involved in artificial intelligence. Most of the first solutions are either based on platform-based cognitive services that allow you to build popular chatbots that you can find on various company and organisation websites today, or at simpler levels of machine learning, again related to cognitive services such as facial recognition, objects, or text.

Part of the problem is either a lack of quality data or limited support for lesser spoken languages ​​such as Croatian. But lately, with the growth of knowledge and the available data, we're seeing more complex solutions, for example, in the automotive industry we now have self-driving cars or the transport industry where we have robots for carrying out warehouse work. The artificial intelligence gathering and sharing community is very active and you can follow its work on the Ai2future community websites.

And how does ICT deal with the problem of a lack of qualified personnel?

This is an area that is growing, and the salaries of such employees are among the largest in the country and continue to grow for specialists by area. The disadvantage is noticeable, but the application of technologies allows us to work and produce solutions anywhere. It's hard to talk about a ''skilled workforce'' and ''imports'' in this context - in the computer industry, the only thing that really matters is that you know what to do, no matter where you are physically or how you get the results. I think that these manufacturing activities today are the best way to show what the workplace looks like and the work of the future - distributed, shared, remote, but also unified. I think many industries should be learning from us.

How do you comment on the views that robots will replace humans?

For many years, artificial intelligence was portrayed in a negative way; as a machine tasked with eliminating humans and human existence. Artificial intelligence would be portrayed as a program that has stripped itself of human control and self-awareness leading the world to destruction. It is because of this understanding that we are very cautious about how we move forward and what we create and, in parallel with development, we understand the ethics, rights, morals, and the reach of such solutions.

We try to understand what values ​​and principles we need to ''instill'' when it comes to such intelligence and establish norms by which it would behave, which is not easy because the human community does not all have the same views on individual things.

Unfortunately, it has already been shown that particular human immorality has a very successful effect on how artificial intelligence behaves, and this is certainly an issue that we will continue to hold to be of importance. In some highly repetitive automation industries, yes, robots will replace humans.

It's difficult to see manual work in factories in Croatia where a worker works on a piece of product or moves it manually; you can't compete with a robot that will do the same job 100 times faster than you. But in a range of industries and fields, there will be no replacement - robots and programs will be an added value for humans to improve their work. We'll probably still have doctors who will be assisted by artificial intelligence, preparing results, providing better insight and the like, but the final decision will be that of a specialist.

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