As a product manager at we.CONECT Global Leaders GmbH I am in charge of my own automotive event portfolio. Our conferences bring more than 200 industry experts and decision-makers together and help them exchange experiences and ideas with their peers from the automotive community.

Dr. Bjelica is the Associate Professor at the FTN Uni Novi Sad, a Functional Safety Instructor at the University of California San Diego, and the CEO of NIT Institute. He actively participates in research and innovation activities for various computer-engineering sectors, focusing on consultancy and training in the fields of system safety, functional safety, automotive engineering, and consumer electronics. During his career, he consulted companies in the automotive industry (ZF Germany, TTTech Austria, Qualcomm Automotive USA, Daimler Germany) and also other companies in consumer electronics, industrial machinery, and computing domains. He is a frequent participant and a speaker at major industry events worldwide. Dr. Bjelica holds a Ph.D. degree in computer engineering from the University of Novi Sad, Serbia, as well as an Academic Safety Engineer degree from the FH CampusWien - Vienna Institute for Safety and Systems Engineering (Austria). His professional and research focus is on complex system and software architectures with specific interactions and virtualization. He authored over 100 publications across major journals and scientific conferences and holds 30 patents.

The Pop in Your Job:
My personal passion and also the one of the institutions I collaborate with is the ability to craft useful, safe and secure next-gen technologies based on software. Software started to dominate automotive architectures. However, the software engineering approaches which are widely used are based on an open-source, community-driven, deploy-debug-update mindset that poses great risks to automotive products. We are striving to crack these development principles and to give birth to modern, structured and safe development approaches while still retaining versatility of software development paradigms.

Discover a unique hybrid event experience we.CONECT Global Leaders is a leading business information company, developing and providing virtual business conferences, senior level B2B live events, digital business communities & supporting event technology at the interface between real live business, digital transformation & future technologies & challenges. Leveraging our expertise and strong relationships with key experts across the globe, we create virtual & live events, content and communities that deliver mindblowing ideas, innovations & opportunities to make your business growth. With over 5.000 companies and 1.5 million business users in our network, we look forward to innovating and bringing together the technology communities and businesses we serve in new and creative ways.

NIT Institute continues a 20+ year long journey of excellence in automotive engineering and functional safety consultancy, research and education. Since 2020. we are established as a consultancy and training company (under the brand NIT Academy) with the goal to catalyze the transformation and growth of smart industries dominated by software, with automotive and autonomous driving with AI being among our key traits. Working with our Tier 1 and Tier 2 partners from the automotive ecosystem, we organize, manage, conceptualize and monitor projects as well as train teams on topics such as software-defined vehicles, automotive software frameworks (with AUTOSAR and beyond), functional safety and security with ISO 26262, ISO 21448 SOTIF, ASPICE, ISO/PAS 8800, ISO/SAE 21434, all relevant safety analysis methods (including STPA), as well as practical design guidance with modern hardware and SoCs. Our trainings are in-depth, hands-on and outcome-oriented, and we conduct two certificate tracks (with micro degrees) in functional safety for automotive as a partner of University of California San Diego Extended Studies.