Tuesday, 26 May 2026 The Faculty Hosted Numerous International Researchers and Professors in May
Every year, our faculty hosts numerous distinguished professors and researchers from universities around the world, with whom our faculty members have maintained successful long-term research collaborations . Such visits play an important role in strengthening the faculty’s international connections, fostering the exchange of knowledge, and developing joint research projects, scientific publications, and doctoral collaborations. This May, we once again welcomed several renowned experts who visited our faculty as part of research stays and collaborations with our research groups.
Among the guests was Prof. Dr. Daniel le Roux, who visited the HICUP laboratory hosted by Assoc. Prof. Klen Čopič Pucihar and Prof. Dr. Matjaž Kljun from the Department of Information Sciences and Technologies. During his visit, he highlighted the long-standing and successful cooperation between the researchers: “This is my second time here. I first visited in 2023, and shortly afterwards, Matjaž and Klen from the HICUP lab visited me in South Africa. At the moment, we are once again hosting researchers from your faculty at Stellenbosch University, where I work. We have already published one joint research paper together, and we are currently working on a second one, which will be very exciting. We are also delighted that one of my students from South Africa has applied for a PhD position in Matjaž and Klen’s lab, which would make him the first PhD student from South Africa at your faculty.”
Researcher Dr. Jordan Aiko Deja from De La Salle University was hosted by Prof. Dr. Matjaž Kljun and Assoc. Prof. Klen Čopič Pucihar from the Department of Information Sciences and Technologies. Professor Marko Tkalčič was visited by Assoc. Prof. Petar Knees from TU Wien and Assoc. Prod. Bruce Ferwerda from Jönköping University.
The faculty also welcomed Professor Vladimir Gurvich, a renowned expert in operations research and a long-time researcher at the RUTCOR center at Rutgers University. During his visit, he stated: “I am happy to be in Koper again and to continue our long-standing collaboration with Professor Milanič and Matjaž. I am also pleased to present my work here.” His research focuses primarily on combinatorial game theory and graph theory, particularly classes of perfect graphs. He is well known for his key contributions to positional game theory and the analysis of Boolean functions, where his results closely connect structural graph properties with theoretical computer science.
The faculty also hosted Professor Daniel Kráľ, a Czech mathematician and Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Discrete Mathematics at Leipzig University. His research combines mathematics and theoretical computer science, and he is regarded as one of the leading experts in structural and extremal graph theory as well as graph limits. He has received numerous prestigious scientific awards, including two ERC grants and the European Prize in Combinatorics. He is also widely known for solving several decades-old open mathematical problems, including the Lovász–Plummer conjecture. Professor Vladimir Gurvich and Professor Daniel Kráľ were hosted by Assoc. Prof. Matjaž Krnc from the Department of Information Sciences and Technologies.
Among the May visitors was also Prof. Dr. Francesco Ricci from the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, whose research focuses on recommender systems. During his visit, he emphasized his collaboration with Prof. Dr. Marko Tkalčič: “I work in the field of recommender systems, and I am particularly interested in methods for evaluating these systems. Professor Tkalčič is also an expert in this area, especially in research concerning the influence of users’ emotions and moods during interaction with recommender systems. Current technologies are still not sufficiently developed to effectively incorporate these aspects. I believe that in the future, together with Marko, we will be able to develop new approaches and technologies that will better help us understand human emotions, personality, and their influence on the use of recommender systems.”
