Upcoming AI Conference: Save the date
Jelena Pavlovic, PhD, PCC
Professor of Organizational Development | AI in L&D Innovator | Founder of Koučing Centar | Bridging Human Expertise with AI Advancements
AI is raging for almost two years and it seems it is everything, everywhere and all at once, causing a spectrum of expectations, excitements and emotions from accelerationists who are dreaming of AGI (artificial general intelligence) that will lead to divine future, to doomers who are frightened about the end of the world as we know it. But there is a more grounded and interesting majority between those two extremes, that is asking more relatable questions: What does it mean for my work; What does this mean for my education and education of my children; How will the collaboration with AI look like; What are the skills for the future that we need; How will organizations of the future look like. We belong to this majority and eager to have a glimpse to possible answers to these questions. That is why we decided to assemble a formidable crew and we are calling you to join us with attempt to address the questions in an event Vision25: AI Everything Everywhere All at Once, that we are organizing on November 29th in Crowne Plaza Hotel. This is one of the most important events for us so I decided to devote this whole newsletter edition to give you an overview of what participants can get out of it and we are calling you to join us.
What is it all about?
Vision25 is Koučing centar 's initiative to provide a collaborative space to share, learn and collaborate on how we can improve the field of work and education with AI. It's unique flavor is a blend of technology and psychology, with a vision of creating transformative and human-centric AI applications. In a collaborative, friendly and informal atmosphere, we are gathering leading voices on AI in the fields of tech, research, learning & development and coaching. Vision25 connects business leaders, HR professionals and innovators to get inspired about applying AI in their lives and organizations, as well as network in a cross-disciplinary environment.
You can read this on the conference web page, so I’ll spare you the formal text. Instead, here’s an inside look at how the event came together.
Conference Highlights
Keynote speakers
Panels and Fireside Chats
Workshops and Interactive Sessions
AI Innovation and Research Showcase
Three keynotes
We were very happy to early onboard Milan Gospic . Milan invited me to his panel "How do we use AI" as part of the eCommerce Association of Serbia this year event. By the way, great panel, many interesting people on it. Milan said it was kind of unusual for him to moderate because he is more used to being a guest panelist. So my counter invite came very soon. I am very happy that Milan will be our business keynote, with his substantial experience in one of the leading companies involved with AI.
Then came the State. We were determined to have a state representative at the conference for our public sector keynote. Wasn't easy to be honest. But we had luck again. We got probably the best person to open the conference with a public sector keynote: Bogdan Stesevic , Head of the Group for Development of Artificial Intelligence at Office for Information Technologies and eGovernment, Government of the Republic of Serbia. Bogdan is also the manager of the National AI Platform at the State Data Center in Kragujevac and a board member of EuroHPC JU, an organization dedicated to supercomputing across Europe. Can't wait to hear what he will be sharing about our country's plan with AI, infrastructural capacities and future applications.
Finally, we were more than excited to welcome Joel DiGirolamo , VP of Research and Data Science International Coaching Federation . Joel is one of the people who created ICF Standards for AI Coaching. With his visionary approach, Joel is a leading voice in aligning AI with professional standards and human values.
Then the Business panel
Jugoslav will be leading this panel (or officially: Fireside chat AI for Business & Innovation) alongside with Predrag Spasojevic , CEO at HOOLOOVOO and Miloš Božović , Full Professor at Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Belgrade . Miloš holds two PhDs (in economics and physics) and also held managerial positions in business. So this will be a delight - mathematician, engineer and physics guy turned into economics chatting about AI. May sound nerdy, but these three gentlemen rock in being fun too. Can be blamed for some gender balance, though, but DEI for the sake of DEI was never our thing.
All good conferences are best during coffee breaks, so we will provide some time for open space networking. Crowne Plaza Belgrade will provide all we need for comfortable chit chats.
We want to engage the participants in some interactive surveys, that will provide some space for reflection about our own mindsets and attitudes towards AI. Mentimeter will be a great tool to enable it and feed back results in real time.
AI Innovation and Research Showcase
We will have a rare line up of diverse people and ideas. We have a great honor to welcome Dragan Gasevic , Distinguished Professor of Learning Analytics at Monash University , Faculty of Information Technology. Just a couple of days ago, Dragan published a paper titled "Promises and challenges of generative artificial intelligence for human learning" in Nature Magazine . Chatting with Dragan the other day in zoom, I just commented how there aren't really many Serbs who have published in Nature on AI and learning. Natalia Fedorova will be joining us live with stories about her research on AI simulating Big Five personality and her general views on AI in learning and development. Holding a PhD in Social Psychology, Natalia balances nicely the "engineering" vibe of the conference so far. In the showcase part, we will have Ivan Ilin demoing his iki.ai , AI knowledge interface. We were impressed with this product and see it as a pioneering one in the field of managing the way we store and process information, not only in terms of tools, but also the effect of tools on how we think. Finally, we will showcase Koučing centar 's award winning AI system for human skills development. ALready Coachia v2 with great support of our tech partners Levi9 Technology Services (thank you Viktor Kovac & Mirjana Trobok ) and Itekako (thank you Ognjen Sami & Jelena Sami ). Huge thank you to the Fond za inovacionu delatnost for their support in building Coachia!
Workshop: Your own AI
Another opportunity to network, chit chat and explore how you can advance your own organization with AI. You'll share your ideas, engage in open discussion, and vote on the most impactful use cases.
Forgot to mention, during the quizzes, we will be sharing valuable tickets for our International Coaching Federation accredited programs which are augmented with Coachia.
Fireside chat: AI for L&D
I am very lucky to have Ivana Mihajlovic , Jelena Sribar and Sanja Persic next to me, chatting on how they see applications of AI in their own organizations and beyond.
And it's a wrap!
This is our first AI related in person event (we had an online international demo of Coachia this summer) and we hope this is just a start.
We want to connect a wide group of leaders in business, public sector, learning and development, academia - to make a vibrant community devoted to AI developments.
What we hope for? An event that is:
Wish us luck and hope to see you there!
Jelena Pavlovic, PhD, PCC happy to join event & looking forward seeing you there!