CV

Marko Horvat is an Assistant professor at the Department of Applied Computing, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER), University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia, and Senior Member of IEEE.

He holds the Diploma (1999), MSc (2007) and Ph.D. (2013) degrees in computer science from the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Zagreb, Croatia. He was a Doctoral Student and subsequently a Postgraduate Researcher at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Zagreb, Croatia (2008 – 2014). Elected to the research rank Research Associate in computer science (2014), and Senior Research Associate in computer science (2021).

Marko Horvat is the President of the Scientific Council of the Croatian Mine Action Center – Testing Center for Development and Training d.o.o. (2022 -) and a member of the Scientific Council (2017 – ). He is the current Co-Chair of Technology Management chapter (TEMS) in IEEE Croatia Section (2019 – ) and chair of the chapter (2016 – 2019). Past member of Thematic Innovation Council for Health and Quality of Life of the Republic of Croatia (2018 – 2020).

Before fully joining academia he was employed with domestic and foreign ICT sector companies as a software engineer, project manager and finally department manager (1999 – 2008). In the ICT industry, he gained progressive experience in leadership and management, as well as the organization and development of many complex enterprise-level core business, Enterprise Resource Planning and Business Intelligence systems.

Participated in a number of national and EU-funded scientific projects as a researcher. He also participated in a number of national projects with industry and government in the role of a professional expert.

Among some of the projects he was involved in; project manager for the “RANMI” project aimed at the development of an innovative platform for representation and analysis of humanitarian demining data using artificial intelligence methods (2024 – ). Project manager for EU Digital Learning Network “Digitalna.hr” project funded by the European Social Fund (2020 – 2004). A researcher in the EU e-research framework COST actions IC1302 “Keystone” and IC1307 “iV&L Net” (2013 – 2017). A researcher on a science project “MULTISAB: A software system for parallel analysis of multiple heterogeneous time series with application in biomedicine” with the Croatian science foundation (2015 – 2018). He was an expert on a project “Politehnika 2025” with the Ministry of science, education and sports of the Republic of Croatia (2015 – 2016). He was a researcher on a scientific project “Adaptive Control of Scenarios in VR Therapy of PTSD” supported by the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports, Republic of Croatia (2008 – 2014). He also participated in a number of national projects with industry and government. As a project leader, he successfully implemented a new information system for academic student polls for the Zagreb University of Applied Sciences, Zagreb, Croatia, in the academic year 2015/16. He also participated in the FERSAT project aiming to launch a CubeSat artificial satellite designed and built at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing by students and professors (2020 – ).

He taught many university courses at Undergraduate and Master levels. At the University of Zagreb participated in teaching activities in undergraduate and graduate courses “Introduction to Programming”, “Algorithms and Data Structures”, “Object-Oriented Programming”, “Software Engineering,” “Advanced Web Development”, “Advanced Algorithms and Data Structures”, “Real-time systems”, “Interactive Simulation Systems”, “Defensive Systems and Technologies”, and “Autocad.” Also, developed and started a new course “Cloud Data Engineering Technologies” at FER.

At Zagreb University of Applied Sciences (TVZ) he taught several undergraduate and graduate college courses including “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence”, “Object-oriented Software Development”, “Algorithms and Data Structures”, “Advanced Java Development”, “Innovations in Informatics and Computer Sciences”, and “Seminar”.

Supervised 97 B.Sc. and M.Eng. dissertations in areas of informatics, computer science, and artificial intelligence.

Published 103 manuscripts in books, journals, conferences, and workshops, including 21 manuscripts in scientific journals indexed in the scientific database Web of Science Current Contents (CC), 23 manuscripts in other scientific peer-reviewed journals, and presented more than 60 papers at international conferences. Reviewer for many respected journals and international conferences, as well as study programs and project proposals for foreign science foundations. He has given several invited lectures and is actively engaged in the popularization of science.

His research interests include ontologies, knowledge representation, automated reasoning, machine learning, information retrieval, decision support systems, recommender systems, augmented cognition, affective computing, and the semantic web.

Current member of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society, IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society, and the IEEE Big Data Community.

Senior Member of IEEE (2019 – ), member of IEEE (2007 – ), and member of the Croatian Astronomical Society (2009 – ).

Currently, he is working on affective multimedia and stimuli databases, which includes, among other research directions, improving databases’ architectures, introducing data integration methods and formal knowledge representation schemes aligned with the semantic web paradigm, and discovering relevant knowledge hidden in semantic and emotion multimedia annotations. Together with his students, he is developing new tools for multifaceted affective multimedia retrieval within keyword- and ontology-based contexts, prediction of emotions, fatigue, and stress from physiology using Common-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware, and innovative software applications for stimuli delivery and emotion elicitation.

Besides computer science, Marko Horvat is also very interested in the theoretical aspects of Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Developing analytical models and stochastic simulations of parameters contributing to Fermi’s paradox. Reconciling a gap between anthropocentrism and Copernicansm maintaining a plausible (and the most probable) perspective.