about me

I am a Senior Research Scientist at Google Deepmind in Montreal, Canada. I am interested in applying methods and techniques from cognitive science in analysis and characterization of behavior of machine learning models. Specifically, this includes designing evaluation protocols, benchmarks and metrics to comprehensively understand capabilities and limitations of large vision-language models that in recent years have demonstrated strong performance in a variety of tasks. More recently, I have been studying how well image generation models understand numbers and quantities.

I also enjoy being engaged with the wider AI community: I was a program co-chair for the 2024 edition of the Montreal AI Symposium, and the co-lead of the Language & Thought topic area at the 2024 Telluride Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering Workshop.

I completed my PhD in Computer Science in 2020 at the University of Waterloo in Canada, where I was a student in the Computational Neuroscience Research group (CNRG). I received my Master’s degree in Computational Neuroscience from the Bernstein Centre for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, and my undergraduate degree from FER at the University of Zagreb. My (occasionally updated) CV is available here.

my name

I come from Croatia, which is a small beautiful country in the Mediterranean whose contours on a map, some people say, look a bit like those of a bird in flight (imagining Istria as the bird’s head). To pronounce my name as a Croatian would, try saying E-va [sounds like “va” in lava]-na [“na” like in retina] Ka-[sounds like “ca” in cartoon]-yeech. Croatians speak Croatian, which is a Slavic language and contains lovely vowelless words such as trg (town square), vrh (peak) and Krk (name of an island). Instead of getting lost while trying to find a trg on a vrh at Krk, one can also visit Plitvička Jezera, Dubrovnik or Paklenica.

about this website

This page is hosted using Github Pages and uses Jekyll, a static page generator. The website code is available here.