Maribor, Slovenia – September 2025 – The EU.FFICIENT project played an active role at the 28th OTS National Conference on Information Technology, held from 3 to 4 September 2025 at the University of Maribor, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (UM FERI). As one of Slovenia’s leading IT conferences, OTS 2025 gathered experts from academia, industry and the public sector to discuss the latest trends in information technologies and digital transformation.
EU.FFICIENT contributed to the conference programme with both a lecture and an interactive workshop, demonstrating its mission to establish Communities of Expert Facilitators across Europe.
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Lecture/Presentation: Establishing a Community of AI Facilitators in the EU (Milan Zorman, Bojan Žlahtič, Tanja Botić, Aleš Holobar)
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Workshop: Demystification, Bias, and Explainability of Artificial Intelligence (Milan Zorman, Aleš Holobar, Tanja Botić, Bojan Žlahtič)
The lecture explored the interdisciplinary nature of artificial intelligence (AI), highlighting the importance of expertise across mathematics, statistics, computer science and domain-specific knowledge. It also addressed ethical challenges, the mitigation of bias, and transparency in decision-making, underscoring the critical role of AI facilitators in navigating technological, regulatory and societal complexity.
The workshop provided a hands-on exploration of pressing questions surrounding generative AI, bias and explainability. Participants were invited to “look behind the curtain” of AI systems, gaining insights into how such technologies function and how they can be applied critically and responsibly.
Both sessions introduced the AI/Digital Community of Expert Facilitators and dedicated platform developed within EU.FFICIENT, which supports the exchange of knowledge, technologies and tools between academia, industry, policymakers and civil society.
Through our lecture and workshop at OTS 2025, we showed that demystifying AI is not just a technical challenge, but a societal one. As facilitators, we help transform complexity into understanding and understanding into critical thinking and responsible action.
– presenters M. Zorman, A. Holobar, B. Žlahtić and T. Botić
Participation at OTS 2025 reinforced EU.FFICIENT’s visibility in Slovenia’s IT community, while promoting the importance of skilled AI facilitators and fostering dialogue on the ethical and responsible adoption of AI across Europe.