dr. Erik Novak

Researcher in Artificial Intelligence

Hi!

I am a researcher in Artificial Intelligence. My research interests are in NLP, more specifically, text documents and text stream analysis, (semi-)automatic data exploration, and text data visualization.

I am employed as a Data Scientist at Event Registry, where I work on applying NLP to news data.

I am also employed as a Senior Researcher at the Department for Artificial Intelligence, Jozef Stefan Institute, where I am managing a number of European Research Projects and mentoring junior researchers and students.

Furthermore, I am a Teaching Assistant at the Jozef Stefan International Postgraduate School, where I assist at the AI for Data Analysis course.

Google Scholar ResearchGate

Latest Publications (see more)

Evaluating Open-Source Large Language Models for Synthetic Non-English Medical Data Generation Using Prompt-Based Techniques. L. Dolinar, E. Calcina, E. Novak. Informatica, 2025.

Semantic Prompting for Large Language Models in Biomedical Named Entity Recognition. E. Calcina, E. Novak, D. Mladenić. Proceedings of the Slovenian KDD conference, Ljubljana, 2025.

TARNet for the Classification of Time Series with Missing Values: A Strong Baseline. K. Buza, E. Novak. Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Informatica, 2024.

Active Projects (see more)

PREPARE

June 2023 - Present | Horizon Europe

PREPARE aims at advancing rehabilitation care for patients with chronic non-communicable diseases. As rehabilitation is a complex, multifaceted, and highly personal process, we currently lack reliable patient stratification and outcome prediction tools. While big data approaches provide a path forward, existing data sets pose numerous challenges. These challenges can be overcome by combining advances in clinical research, socio-behavioral and public health research, data science, and advanced statistical and AI learning methods.

Programming Skills