The day opened with a closed research workshop from the Startup.score project. Invited experts from startup support organisations, such as incubators, accelerators and technology parks, gave their input on how support programmes relate to startup success. In the afternoon, the Centre for Pre-Incubation in Smart Industry presented its latest work and its plans. The fAIth project team also met to discuss fairness, explainability and privacy in AI applications for banking.

The first workshop, "Using Learning Analytics to Explore Learning Patterns and Paths", was organised by the Laboratory for Learning Analytics (LA Lab) together with the TRUELA and SAILeR project teams. It brought researchers and doctoral students together to discuss how to find learning patterns, how to model learning paths, and how to apply data-driven and AI-supported methods to educational data.

In the late afternoon, the interactive workshop "Agility in Action: Decision-Making for Today's Higher Education" introduced participants to agile decision-making. They worked through hands-on activities, discussed common decision traps such as the status quo, sunk-cost and anchoring traps, and identified their own dominant decision-making style. They also analysed real-world cases, including strategic decisions about using AI in higher education.

When the workshops ended, the day continued with Warm-up Talks at Pub Medina Škrinja. Old colleagues caught up and new ones met, which set a relaxed tone for the conference days ahead.

See more moments from the pre-conference day in the gallery below.