About me

I am an assistant professor at the University of Ljubljana, Faculty for computer and information science, Laboratory for Data Technologies. I interested into databases, natural language processing, semantic Web, information retrieval and information extraction.

Data is the new oil. — Clive Humby, Kellogg School, 2006.

I am a postdoctorate researcher at the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Computer and Information Science. My research interests are related to broad Information Retrieval and Information Extraction fields, which I also researched in my diploma thesis and PhD thesis.

Information Extraction (IE) refers to automatic extraction of structured information from unstructured sources. As a task it can also be seen as flling slots into a database from text. It must pre-process, recognize and convert information from textual documents (e.g web pages, reports, books), structural (e.g. web page structure, indexes) or usage data (e.g. query logs) into human and machine understandable format. As a family of techniques IE combines segmentation, classification, association and clustering. They can be roughly divided into pattern-based and machine learning-based (ML) approaches. The first use manually defined rules or can also learn them for specific type of documents using seed expansion. The latter consist of probabilistic (e.g. sequence models) and induction (e.g. linguistic, structural models) approaches and are currently the main focus of the research in IE community. In knowledge management and semantic web, a machine can understand the data if it is represented as an ontology. Therefore IE techniques can be used for automatic ontology creation and also population.

"Once you have a truly massive amount of information integrated as knowledge, then the human-software system will be superhuman, in the same sense that mankind with writing is superhuman compared to mankind before writing." Doug Lenat, June 21, 2001

Work

Harvar University, Department of Biomedical Informatics, 2022, Visiting Professor

University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Computer and Information Science, Autumn 2018-now, Assistant Professor

University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Computer and Information Science, Autumn 2014-Autumn 2018, Assistant with a PhD

Laboratory for Data Technologies, reporting to Prof. Dr. Marko Bajec, Vecna pot 113, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Junior Researcher from Industry

Microsoft Development Center Norway, Oslo (Torggata 2-4-6, NO-0181 Oslo), Summer-Autumn 2014, Software Development Engineer in Test Intern

Optilab d.o.o. & Laboratory for Data Technologies, 2011-2014, Junior Researcher from industry

Education

University of Ljubljana, Faculty of computer and information science, 2010-2014, PhD in computer science

University of Ljubljana, Faculty of computer and information science, 2006-2010, Bsc. in computer science and mathematics

Electrotechnical and Computer Technical School and Gymnasium Ljubljana, 2002-2006, Technical Gymnasium, General Graduation

Primary school Sostro, 1998-2002, 5th-8th grade

Primary school Mali Lipoglav, 1994-1998, 1st-4th grade

Kindergarten Kekec, 1993-1994, pre-school education

Contacts

slavko AT zitnik.si

slavko.zitnik AT fri.uni-lj.si

@szitnik

LinkedIn profile

Personal blog

Skype: slavkozitnik

Mobile: +386 31 543 547

Research indexing

Slovenian research agency profile, SICRIS number 34156

Google Scholar