On friday, 9 october 2026, the University of Ljubljana (UL) presented the Dr. Uroš Seljak Awards and commendations for the fifth time, recognizing the best scientific publications by undergraduate and master's students in Slovenia. Among this year's award recipients was Valter Hudovernik from the Faculty of Computer and Information Science (UL FRI), who received an award for a scientific paper in the field of artificial intelligence. Nikolay Kormushev, a graduate of the EMAI programme at UL FRI, was also among the recipients of commendations.

Valter Hudovernik received the award for his scientific paper Relational Transformer: Toward Zero-Shot Foundation Models for Relational Data. His research was supervised by Prof. Jure Leskovec and Prof. Erik Štrumbelj.

Image 1: Award recipient Valter Hudovernik and his supervisor prof. Erik Štrumbelj.

Nikolay Kormushev received a commendation for his paper Mitigating Objectness Bias and Region-to-Text Misalignment for Open-Vocabulary Panoptic Segmentation. His research was supervised by Prof. Matej Kristan and Assist. Prof. Josip Šarić.

Image 2: Nikolay Kormushev and his supervisor prof. Matej Kristan.

“At a time when trust in reason and science is often being put to the test, young researchers have a particularly important role to play. As the eminent physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman emphasized, a scientific theory can be disproved, but we can never conclusively prove that it is correct. Science advances precisely through critical examination and the continuous refinement of existing knowledge,” said prof. Simon Horvat, chair of the expert committee, in his address.