Davor Orlic

I am responsible for the UNESCO’s AI Center daily operations, overseeing several teams: Research, Outreach, Events, Grants, Contracts and Business Design. In this role, I provide guidance and lead strategic planning to ensure impact, operational efficiency and effectiveness in support of the Center’s mission. I oversee all activities across industry, governments, and a network of 60 research groups and 300 companies. Responsibilities • Strategy: Define the Centre’s long-term strategy and vision within the AI landscape • Planning: Develop the Centres product function’s mission, core principles and culture • Talent: Responsible for acquisition, working to attract, retain, and develop top talent • Organisation: Ensure optimisation between Legal, Strategy, Finance and People • Operations: Support CEO and other ELT members and Advisory Board • Communications: Support the CEO in creating the right messages for the Centres objectives • Business Expansion: Ensure partnerships across industry, governments and UN • Workflow: Create structures that allow personnel to be most effective Main Achievements • Leading teams of contractors and sub-contractors, employees and board members across 5 regions • Leading successful transition of project delivery across all teams during covid-19 pandemic • Increasing operational efficiency by 60% from 2021 to 2024 • Implementing new processes (as well as hybrid work) that increased productivity by 40% • Developing a rolling admissions system that increased international partnerships by 80% • Setting the complete governance, comms and business outreach structures • Managing the full suite of IRCAI in year activity as an Agile Portfolio (from startup to scaleup) • Providing Scientific Programme Directors with agile, operational and technical support

I design, convene, and coordinate the AI Working Group’s agenda at the Digital for Development (D4D) Hub Secretariat in line with EU digital policy priorities, partner country needs, and the D4D Hub’s regional branches (Africa, Latin America & Caribbean, Asia-Pacific, Neighborhood)

Working with talents at the UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence in London.

I designed and implemented the Compute for Climate Fellowship which is a funding R&D program from AWS and IRCAI. We support Climate Tech startups using a great deal of AI and cloud computing to address the climate crisis. Our aim is to accelerate the fight against the climate crisis by providing startups with AI and advanced cloud computing, funding, PR, and expert technical and scientific advisors.

I ensured that the non-profit's AI community building, and (non-profit) entrepreneurship streams in AI projects are well-managed, efficient, and aligned with the organization's mission with partners such as Hewlett Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, development agencies like IDRC, SIDA, GIZ, Lacuna Fund and historically marginalised AI groups across Sub-Saharan Africa like Deep Learning Indaba. Responsibilities • Strategy: Co-owned long-term strategy and roadmap, involved in acquisition of international projects • Business: Developed business plans/models for research and commercial exploitation • Operations: Managed on-time delivery of projects, financial planning, forecasting of individual projects • Portfolio: Developed and managed an active portfolio of current and prospective donors • Communications: Mobilised communities that are inclusive, ethical, gender and rights-based Achievements in Enabling Teams & Communicating research impact • Directed synchronised research-to-market for AI funded projects exceeding 8 mill EUR • Enabled managers and research leads towards excellence and industry focused implementation • Supported teams to deliver on-time applications for funding from EU, VC, Int. development agencies • Mentored and initiated opportunities for researchers to take part in hackathons and launch start-ups • Organized and delivered 40+ community events - conferences, workshops and hackathons Achievements in Planning & Leading Projects • Managed portfolio of European research projects on AI 40+ partners, 150+ researchers across Europe • Managed portfolio of African research projects on AI across 42 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa • Developed international programme for AI for Development with total investment 80 mill GBP • Managed and funded creation of micro-projects and datasets for low resource African languages

Co-founded Credentify to address the following market problems: • Provide a robust solution for secure blockchain academic micro-credentials transfer • Assist Universities to unlock information hidden behind ECTS credentials • Equip Universities which have no technical means to exchange information about credentials • Facilitate third parties access to a breakdown of skills, competencies behind diploma degrees Certify is the first European issuer of blockchain-secured stackable micro-credentials for ECTS credentials that are university and student-owned, and verifiable anywhere, anytime. It is the first in the world to use the Ethereum standard ERC-721 that translates one-of-a-kind digital or real-world assets into non-fungible tokens (NFTs). • Launched MVP via an RRI model • Secured kick-off and integration with several universities • Part of the European Commission Erasmus+ research funding programme • Managed the building of robust API and online application • Scaled to offer business use cases

Co-founded Translexy to address the following market problems: • Provide missing solutions for Machine Translation specifically tailored for educational text • Break barriers for MT adoption due to low consumer trust, poor infrastructure, low-quality outputs • Despite the availability of tools, implementation into large CMS, LMS systems is problematic • Research-based solutions are rarely driven from the lab to the market Translexy is a state-of-the-art neural machine translation platform for edutech startups, growing education providers and publishers that facilitates the high-quality translation of educational content. • Launched MVP via an RRI model • Secured kick-off and integration with several large-scale MOOC providers • Part of the European Commission H2020 research funding programme • Built a robust API infrastructure and platform with 12 language-pair engines • Scaled to offer business use cases

Collaborate with a team of machine learning researchers and cross-disciplinary academics to explore opportunities for Artificial Intelligence applications such as: • Cross-modal: technologies for multimodal content understanding • Cross-site: technologies to transparently accompany and analyse users across sites • Cross-domain: technologies for cross-domain content analytics • Cross-language: technologies for cross-lingual content recommendation, translation • Cross-cultural: technologies for cross-cultural learning personalization JSI is the leading Slovenian research organization. It is responsible for a broad spectrum of basic and applied research in the fields of natural sciences and technology with around 960 employees. • Working portfolio of European Commission funded projects FP7, Erasmus+, Horizon 2020 • Carrying out top-level project management services from the kick-off stage until project's closure • Developed and launched "Opening up Slovenia" nation-size research initiative • Developed and launched “Opening up Balkans" unique regional pilot for Openness

Collaborated with Vice Provost for Education, Digital Education Team and cross-disciplinary academics to explore learning technology, e-learning and distance learning opportunities across the whole of UCL resulting: • Open Education roadmap for wider strategic, policy, tech, community and educational components • Build a business case to ensure the initiative has institutional-wide impact and sustainability • Projection on project-to-service to implement roadmap appropriate to UCL business identity

Co-founded VideoLectures.Net to address the following market problems: • Provide open access to high-quality video academic talks in all branches of science • Expose young research talents via video on the Web • Build up the largest collection of video talks on Computer Science topics • Position academic video as first-class citizen of the Web VideoLectures.Net is a multiple awarded website with 25,000 peer-reviewed scientific video talks. • Directed the editorial framework, grammar and direction for presenting long form, uncut, unmediated academic video on the Web • Lead operations and team with all managerial aspects attached • Designed all editorial, operational, technical and global distribution features • Published more than 9000 lectures, at a rate of 1500 per year • Liaise with more than 200 conference organizers, labs, centers, Uni dept. and schools.

Digital humanities research takes place at the intersection of digital technologies and humanities. It aims to produce applications and models that make possible new kinds of research, both in the humanities disciplines and in computer science and its allied technologies. It also studies the impact of these techniques on cultural heritage, memory institutions, libraries, archives and digital culture.