At the Faculty of Computer and Information Science of the University of Ljubljana (UL FRI) the first four students who completed the international Erasmus Mundus Joint Master in Artificial Intelligence, which UL FRI runs together with three renowned European universities, successfully defended their Masters thesis between 30 June and 2 July 2025.

The University of Ljubljana, together with University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Radboud University in the Netherlands and Sapienza University in Rome, enrolled the first generation of 20 students in the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master in Artificial Intelligence programme. All students spend a semester in Barcelona, and then, depending on their interests, visit the other participating universities for the next three semesters and complete their final thesis at one of them. UL FRI contributes to the consortium mainly in the field of data science.

Very satisfied with the Faculty, the computing infrastructure and Slovenia

Nikolay from Bulgaria, Bernardo from Brazil, Camile from the Dutch island of Curacao and Manfred from Costa Rica decided to do and defend their Master's thesis in Ljubljana. With a lot of hard work over the last year, they all managed to finish with a grade 10. They are very impressed with Slovenia and Ljubljana, which they consider to be the safest and cleanest city they have ever lived in. But they are even more pleased with the Faculty for giving them access to several laboratories where world-class experts in artificial intelligence work - from computer vision and deep learning to data science and large language models.

In addition to the selfless support of their mentors, all of them highlighted the access to the powerful computer infrastructure at UL FRI and the supercomputers, which are not available even to their colleagues at more well-known and renowned universities. Without this, they say, they would never have been able to do such large-scale research and data processing. The results will be used to publish papers in scientific journals in the next two years. They consider the UL FRI study programme to be the most research-oriented among the participating universities, and suitable as a preparation for doctoral studies.

All are drawn to doctoral studies

Their commitment and successful research work has opened the door for all to move forward. Camile will pursue his PhD in the Netherlands and Manfred will do it in Belgium. The other two are also drawn to PhD studies, but are also interested in working in industry. Bernardo is therefore going to Germany for at least a year to gain practical experience in industry, while Nikolay is keeping his eyes open for industry or an artificial intelligence institute in his native Bulgaria.

Although they are going abroad, they say they will remain connected to UL FRI through their research work. They are also in regular contact with other colleagues from the international AI programme who will be doing their Masters in the coming months at the other three universities.