Hopero.AI: European Digital Innovation Hub
The Slovak AI European Digital Innovation Hub is a nation-wide ecosystem with a clear focus on artificial intelligence aiming to support the digital transformation of Slovak companies in the European innovation space. Hopero.ai is part of this European Innovation Hub ecosystem with the aim to upgrade companies and their people for the digital era by strengthening and expanding the community of innovators, sharing knowledge, improving access to funds and adopting artificial intelligence.
Slovak companies haven’t been benefiting from digitalization and artificial intelligence (AI). Slovak entrepreneurs are already lagging behind their competitors from abroad. They are not tech ready to cope with the current or future crisis and trends, such as remote work, lack of human capital or the next generation of employees with creative, flexible and inspirational job expectations. Businesses in Slovakia are not aware, equipped or financed to achieve this necessary progress by themselves.
The European Commission and the Slovak government allocated resources to the Hopero.ai project to:
- test, evaluate and upgrade individual companies,
- create an ecosystem of potential suppliers and customers for continuity after the initial 3 years period.
Hopero.ai is dedicated to 3 main goals:
- promotion of digital technologies related to artificial intelligence (AI) in all its aspects,
- supporting the SMEs in access to private and EU funding necessary for adoption of all digital technologies, focusing specifically on SMEs in the regions
- development of the digital innovation ecosystem in Slovakia.
The customers of Hopero.ai can benefit from the application of advanced AI tools, Anomaly Detection, Deep Neural Networks, Ethic in AI assessment & regulation, Low Resource NLP, Machine Learning with Limited Data, etc.
Using the unique testing infrastructure devoted to an accelerated testing environment, companies and public organizations are enabled to increase competitiveness and efficiency through optimization and automation of production processes, cloud services, predictive analytics, anomaly detection, text classification, malfunction prediction, disinformation detection or disease detection from multimodal data.
In terms of digital maturity, Hopero.ai supports both digital adopters and digital natives, systematically trying to mobilize Slovak companies in the regions to become AI adopters, engaging AI adopters to become AI natives and supporting AI natives with delivery and scaling up of transformative technologies.
We are building Hopero.ai on these principles:
- Excellent science to business transfer creates synergy.
- Digitalization is a must for next-generation businesses.
- Hopero.ai should lead by example and therefore we strive to be number one in digitization.
- AI is a crucial upgrade, timesaver and differentiator once digitalization is achieved.
Besides the coordinator role in the project, KInIT will focus on providing R&D excellence and practical experiences with AI adoption. Primarily, we will cover the Test before invest and partially the Training and digital skills improving services for the customers.
KInIT’s mission is to improve Slovakia’s competitiveness, connect the private and public sectors and to encourage responsible innovations. Hopero.ai will dramatically contribute to fulfilling our mission as the project’s goals are perfectly aligned with ours. Together with our partners, we will help Slovak companies to respond to the digital challenges and become more competitive.
Michal Kompan, Chief Research Officer, KInIT
Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies
- SAPIE – Slovenská aliancia pre inovatívnu ekonomiku
Key project team members
Michal Kompan
Lead and Researcher
Maria Bielikova
Lead and Researcher
Matej Maderič
Product Manager
Juraj Podroužek
Lead and Researcher
Viera Rozinajová
Lead and Researcher
Jakub Šimko
Lead and Researcher
Marián Šimko
Lead and Researcher
Ján Dráb
Senior Project Manager
This project is co-funded by the European Union.