Curriculum Vitae

Mario Brcic, PhD

Strategy Engines · Cognitive Sovereignty · Value Alignment. Associate Professor at FER (University of Zagreb). Managing Partner at It From Bit.

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Positioning

Originator of Strategy Engines — computational systems for principled, well-grounded, and auditable strategic moves on wicked, high-stakes problems. Author of the Cognitive Sovereignty trilogy on value alignment, strategy, and systems of power.

Current positions

  • Associate Professor, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER), University of Zagreb. Research on AI safety, decision intelligence, operations research, and the formal limits of strategic AI.
  • Managing Partner, It From Bit — strategic advisory practice deploying Strategy Engines methods with executive teams and public-sector decision-makers.

Research program

  • VALOR — Value-aligned and Interpretable Optimization and Reasoning. FER institutional research project, 2025–2029. Mechanistic interpretability and value alignment of large language models. Themed under Civilian Security for Society. Principal Investigator.
  • EquiFlow (completed) — Proof of Innovative Concept (NPOO / NextGenerationEU, FER). Large-scale urban-traffic coordination on specialised accelerator hardware. Principal Investigator.
  • AnomalyStudio (completed) — Proof of Innovative Concept (NPOO / NextGenerationEU, via It From Bit). Automated, interpretable root-cause analysis of operational anomalies. Principal Investigator.
  • Earlier EU-scale work: European Processor Initiative (EPI), National Competence Centres in EuroHPC (EuroCC), ESIF distributed-process monitoring research.

Selected publications

3000+ citations. Full record on ORCID and Google Scholar.

  • Brcic, M. (2025). The Memory Wars: AI Memory, Network Effects, and the Geopolitics of Cognitive Sovereignty. arXiv preprint, 2508.05867. arXiv: 2508.05867.
  • Doncevic, J., Fertalj, K., Brcic, M., Kovac, M. (2024). Mask–Mediator–Wrapper Architecture as a Data Mesh Driver. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 50 (04), 900–910. DOI: 10.1109/TSE.2024.3367126.
  • Longo, L., Brcic, M., Cabitza, F., Choi, J., Confalonieri, R., Del Ser, J., Guidotti, R., Hayashi, Y., Herrera, F., Holzinger, A., Jiang, R., Khosravi, H., Lecue, F., Malgieri, G., Páez, A., Samek, W., Schneider, J., Speith, T., Stumpf, S. (2024). Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) 2.0: A manifesto of open challenges and interdisciplinary research directions. Information Fusion, vol. 106. DOI: 10.1016/j.inffus.2024.102301.
  • Brcic, M., V. Yampolskiy, R. (2023). Impossibility Results in AI: A Survey. ACM Computing Surveys, Volume 56, Issue 1, 1–24. DOI: 10.1145/3603371.
  • Krleža, D., Vrdoljak, B., Brcic, M. (2021). Statistical hierarchical clustering algorithm for outlier detection in evolving data streams. Machine Learning, Volume 110, pp. 139–184. DOI: 10.1007/s10994-020-05905-4.
  • Brcic, M., Katić, M., Hlupić, N. (2019). Planning horizons based proactive rescheduling for stochastic resource-constrained project scheduling problems. European Journal of Operational Research, 273 (1), 58–66. DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2018.07.037.
  • Krleža, D., Vrdoljak, B., Brcic, M. (2019). Latent Process Discovery Using Evolving Tokenized Transducer. IEEE Access, 7, 169657–169676. DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2955245.
  • Karlo Došilović, F., Brcic, M., Hlupić, N. (2018). Explainable Artificial Intelligence: A Survey. Proceedings of MIPRO 2018 — 41st International Convention on ICT, Electronics and Microelectronics, Rijeka, Croatia, pp. 210–215. DOI: 10.23919/MIPRO.2018.8400040.

Full bibliography: https://mariobrcic.com/publications/

Selected essays

  • The Memory Wars: Why AI's Sticky Feature Is a Sovereignty Issue (2025) — companion to arXiv:2508.05867.
  • The Power Gambit (Part 1) — Shadow Sovereignty (2024).
  • The Power Gambit (Part 2) — Alignment Frameworks: SEAL, REAIM, TUNE (2024).
  • AI Policy: You Can Have Your Cake and Eat It Too — FER's Policy on Appropriate Use of AI, adopted March 2025.

Full archive: https://mariobrcic.com/writing/

Education

  • PhD, Computer Science. Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, 2015. Thesis: Proactive-reactive project scheduling with flexibility and quality requirements.
  • MSc, Computer Science. Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, 2008. Thesis: Source code generator based on UML specifications.

Affiliations

  • IEEE
  • ACM
  • AAAI
  • INFORMS
  • Croatian Operational Research Society (CRORS)
  • AGI Society

Verifiable identity

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