Another Award for Asst. Prof. Marko Đukanović

Assistant professor at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics of the University of Banja Luka Marko Đukanović, PhD, is a member of the team whose paper was declared the best at the Evostar conference at the University of Aberystwyth in Wales.

Đukanović and another three authors won this award for the paper "A Neural Network Based Guidance for a BRKGA: An Application to the Longest Common Square Subsequence Problem", and the conference was held from 3 - 5 April.

He stated that the award is the result of the international cooperation of the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics of the University of Banja Luka with the Vienna University of Technology, and the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute located with the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Previously, after the peer review process, the committee nominated this paper as the best.

„The conference was attended by PhD student Žaume Rešak, who presented the results of our research. Based on the presentation and content, the commission awarded our paper with the award for the best paperˮ Đukanović said.

He stated that in this paper they demonstrated that information from a well-trained neural network can be incorporated into an evolutionary optimization algorithm as support for making better decisions in the search for better solutions.

„Hybridization of pure optimization algorithms with machine learning models is currently one of the most popular and fastest growing areas in the field of combinatorial optimization, operational research and machine learning in generalˮ Đukanović pointed out to Srna.

Đukanović and his colleague Aleksandar Kartelj won the third place last year at the international symbolic regression competition „Interpretable Symbolic Regression for Data Scienceˮ. Last year, Asst. Prof. Đukanović received the award for the best scientific paper at the international conference on applied artificial intelligence, held in Kragujevac, for the paper "Integrating Top-level Constraints into a Symbolic Regression Search Algorithm". He is also the winner of the Danubius Young Scientist Award 2022.