Papers at the main conference:

• Špela Arhar Holdt, Tomaž Erjavec, Iztok Kosem and Elena Volodina. Towards an Ideal Tool for Learner Error Annotation.
• Špela Arhar Holdt, Jaka Čibej, Kaja Dobrovoljc, Tomaž Erjavec, Polona Gantar, Simon Krek, Tina Munda, Nejc Robida, Luka Terčon and Slavko Žitnik. SUK 1.0: A New Training Corpus for Linguistic Annotation of Modern Standard Slovene.
• Jaya Caporusso, Damar Hoogland, Mojca Brglez, Boshko Koloski, Matthew Purver and Senja Pollak. A Computational Analysis of the Dehumanisation of Migrants from Syria and Ukraine in Slovene News Media.
• Filip Dobranić, Bojan Evkoski and Nikola Ljubešić. A Lightweight Approach to a Giga-Corpus of Historical Periodicals: The Story of a Slovenian Historical Newspaper Collection.
• Nikola Ljubešić and Taja Kuzman. CLASSLA-web: Comparable Web Corpora of South Slavic Languages Enriched with Linguistic and Genre Annotation.
• Michal Mochtak, Peter Rupnik and Nikola Ljubešić. The ParlaSent Multilingual Training Dataset for Sentiment Identification in Parliamentary Proceedings.
• Rik van Noord, Taja Kuzman, Peter Rupnik, Nikola Ljubešić, Miquel Esplà-Gomis, Gema Ramírez-Sánchez and Antonio Toral. Do Language Models Care About Text Quality? Evaluating Web-Crawled Corpora Across 11 Languages.
• Andraž Pelicon, Mladen Karan, Ravi Shekhar, Matthew Purver and Senja Pollak. Denoising Labeled Data for Comment Moderation Using Active Learning.
• Marko Pranjić, Marko Robnik-Šikonja and Senja Pollak. LLMSegm: Surface-level Morphological Segmentation Using Large Language Model.
• Darinka Verdonik, Kaja Dobrovoljc, Tomaž Erjavec and Nikola Ljubešić. Gos 2: A New Reference Corpus of Spoken Slovenian.

Papers at the LREC-COLING workshops:

• Çağrı Çöltekin, Matyáš Kopp, Meden Katja, Vaidas Morkevicius, Nikola Ljubešić and Tomaž Erjavec: Multilingual Power and Ideology identification in the Parliament: a reference dataset and simple baselines. At ParlaCLARIN IV Workshop on Creating, Analysing, and Increasing Accessibility of Parliamentary Corpora (LREC-COLING).
• Nikola Ivačič, Matthew Purver, Fabienne Lind, Senja Pollak, Hajo Boomgaarden and Veronika Bajt.  Comparing News Framing of Migration Crises using Zero-Shot Classification. At Reference, Framing, and Perspective 2024 Workshop (LREC-COLING)
• Asher de Jong, Taja Kuzman, Maik Larooij and Maarten Marx. ParlaMint Ngram viewer: Multilingual Comparative Diachronic Search Across 26 Parliaments. At ParlaCLARIN IV Workshop on Creating, Analysing, and Increasing Accessibility of Parliamentary Corpora (LREC-COLING).
• Nikola Ljubešić, Vít Suchomel, Peter Rupnik, Taja Kuzman and Rik van Noord. Language Models on a Diet: Cost-Efficient Development of Encoders for Closely-Related Languages via Additional Pretraining. At the 3rd Annual Meeting of the ELRA/ISCA Special Interest Group on Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL 2024) (LREC-COLING).

 The workshop ML4MS 2024 will include:

• 18 invited lectures, given by world-renowned experts from Slovenia and abroad,
• 10 oral contributions and
• 74 poster presentations.

The event will consist of two parts. The first part will comprise introductory lectures and hands-on tutorials (first two days), while the second part (last two days) will showcase the newest advances in machine learning for materials science.

Participation in the workshop is free of charge. Registration for online attendance is still possible. For more information, please visit https://ml4ms.ijs.si/.

The ML4MS 2024 workshop connects two very important fields: the field of artificial intelligence, which includes machine learning, and the field of materials science. Both fields are among the strongest scientific fields in Slovenia. According to the latest report, among the top 2% influential (most cited) scientists worldwide, there are 172 scientists from Slovenia: Among these, the field of materials science is most represented with 20 scientists, followed by the field of artificial intelligence with 16 scientists (https://elsevier.digitalcommonsdata.com/datasets/btchxktzyw/6).

Materials science is immensely important for addressing a range of problems in modern society, from clean energy to environmental protection. Slovenian scientists investigate materials used as catalysts for generating hydrogen, materials that can be used to build nuclear fusion reactors, as well as materials used in anti-corrosive protection.

The ML4MS 2024 workshop will offer unique and deep insigths into most recent cutting-edge developments at the intersection of machine learning and materials science. The event will be introduced at two opening sessions, one for each part of the event. These will take place at 2pm on Monday, 13.5 and 2pm on Wednesday, 15.5.

You are cordially invited!

More information:

• Report from the final conference
• Milestone achievements of the project

1. developing and testing decarbonization solutions,
2. supervising real-life demonstrations of building renovation and smartification, and
3. deploying energy flexibility services.

The project is funded within the EU Horizon Europe programme and brings together 26 partners from 8 different countries.

At JSI, our focus within SEEDS is on creating a methodology for offering energy flexibility services to various market players. These services play a crucial role in enhancing grid stability but come with challenges such as dynamic resource allocation, aggregation, adherence to controllers, and collaboration among numerous stakeholders including electricity markets, aggregators, distribution and transmission system operators, and consumers. To address these complexities, we will employ advanced techniques like machine learning for predicting the state of flexibility resources and multi-criteria decision modeling to identify and aggregate their essential properties based on stakeholders’ expertise. These aggregated criteria will be utilized in effective optimization algorithms that prepare flexible resources for market offering, ensuring a transparent and efficient energy trading process. The solution will undergo testing at the Slovenian pilot site alongside Petrol d.d. and Elektro Celje d.d., paving the way for large-scale implementation of these services.

“It’s evident that we need to change our travel habits, as the commuting to work as we experience on daily basis benefits neither employers nor employees,” said Miro Smrekar from the Employers’ Association of Slovenia (ZDS), who organized the event as part of the SmartMOVE project. He agreed with Msc. Lilijana Madjar, the director of the Regional Development Agency of the Ljubljana Urban Region (RRA LUR), who emphasized the need for systemic solutions for effective daily mobility. Madjar urged employers and employees to take various measures within their organizations to encourage sustainable commuting, applauding the innovative practices already implemented by many organizations.

Dechatlon took up managing of employee mobility as part of their global group’s strategic goal to reduce carbon footprint. As Tina Špenko, lead of sustainable development puts it, employees decide to start commuting sustainably due to rewards, but stay because of the satisfaction it brings. The company offers a reward of 21 cents for every kilometer traveled to work by public transport, walking, cycling, scooters, or carpooling. This supplement, limited to 50 EUR per month, is added to the payment for the monthly transportation ticket. They provide secure bike parking and showers and also offer internal discounts on the purchase of bikes and equipment. Additionally, they foster positive activities such as competitions between branches for accumulating kilometers and reward achievements.

IKEA Slovenia, aligning with their philosophy that the planet and people are not separate entities, embarked on addressing employee mobility as part of the SmartMOVE project. They received a mobility plan, and as a first result, Klara Lubej, a new member of the marketing team, took on the role of the mobility coordinator. IKEA in Ljubljana offers a variety of transportation options, including bike-sharing (BicikeLJ), e-bike sharing (Nomago) and car sharing (Avant To Go). They provided a secure bike storage facility with space for electric scooters and bikes, along with showers and changing rooms. Their future efforts will focus on encouraging more employees to commute to work without a car, including initiatives like bringing a bike service technician on-site and promoting carpooling within the team.

SIBO Group engaged a mobility coordinator through the SmartMOVE-related Trata 2.0 project. Miha Štucin was the logical choice, since he commutes from Kranj to Škofja Loka by bike every single day. By organizing activities such as monthly draws for practical rewards for cyclists, friendly competitions for accumulating kilometers with fancy awards, “winter cycling day” with breakfast at the firm, and participating in the national cycling initiative “Polni Zagona”, they managed to active additional 11% of employees to arrive to work sustainably. As part of the project, they received a modern bike storage facility, five company e-bikes and charging stations. The project leader from the Sora Development Agency, Katarina Sladoljev, highlighted that habit changes are possible only through continuous action, emphasizing the importance of industrial zones having managers who promote sustainability and address challenges of environmentally friendly mobility.

An innovative solution of carshearing piloted in the SmartMOVE project, aimed at reducing emissions in transportation, drew a lot attention. It involved transporting employees from home to work with vans (with a proffesional driver) at times tailored to the users’ needs. The daily transfers of 131 people from municipalities between Ljubljana and Kranj to their workplaces in BTC and UKC and back home ware managed by the project partner GoOpti. According to Marko Guček, CEO, the most pleasant aspect for users was the carefree journey, and the emissions were reduced by up to 70%. Guček suggests that with streamlining transportation, achieving critical mass, and (company or state) co-funding, they could bring the cost down to around 60 euros per month, making the service marketable. This is the way companies can contribute to emission reduction, provide greater transportation freedom for employees, and raise the attractiveness of workplaces, emphasises Guček.

In order to promote sustainable mobility, <b>Jožef Stefan Institute</b>
(JSI) is developing a certificate for organizations that take good care of sustainable mobility of their employees. The idea is that a company that monitors, actively supports, evaluates and, in the long term, improves the mobility of their employees towards sustainability is encouraged and awarded by an officially and publicly recognized certificate, which may, in perspective, bring advantages to such companies. Prof. Dr. <b>Marko Bohanec</b> from JSI announced a detailed presentation of the certificate in April 2024.

Regarding potential systemic measures, all speakers agreed that it might be time to redefine the classic transportation fee for it to support sustainability instead of rewarding longer commutes. However, this should not pose an additional burden for employers or reduce the net income for employees. Guček also suggested the introduction of a higher property tax on parking spaces. Polona Demšar Mitrovič from the Ministry of the Environment and Spatial Planning participated in the debate, warmly welcoming the efforts of companies in the field of mobility management. She urged companies and institutions to systematically address initiatives and proposals to the relevant authorities, providing valuable insights for sensible planning of financial initiatives etc. Our socity, she added, is distinctly car-dependent, with only 4.9% of the population embracing sustainable mobility, and despite efforts, various guidelines, and co-financing of numerous sustainable mobility measures, the trend is not turning.

Although changing habits is exceptionally challenging, the effort to shift towards sustainable mobility is crucial, bringing numerous benefits for both companies and the community: cost reduction, increased competitiveness, reduced emissions and traffic congestion, opening the space for a better living environment.

Projekt SmartMOVE sofinancirajo Islandija, Lihtenštajn in Norveška s sredstvi Finančnega mehanizma EGP v višini 1.609.166,79 EUR. Namen projekta je blaženje podnebnih sprememb in prilagajanje nanje.