Ard Kelmendi
AI & Digital Co-Creation
A computer scientist with a passion for creating, building, and maintaining software, and an AI specialist captivated by the creative process. With a strong technical background and a bachelor's degree in computer science, Ard has focused primarily on backend development and has made significant contributions to increasing the interpretability of deep-learning models by developing feature importance for black-box models.
Ard views coding as a creative endeavor, though less abstract than in other fields, with more structured design patterns. An experience writing an article for Kosovo2.0 sparked Ard's interest in storytelling, which led to an exploration of sharing stories through multimedia formats, including images and videos. This passion culminated in the direction, recording, and editing of a short documentary titled "Code of Illusion," which explores social media impersonation and cybersecurity through the lens of generative AI. The documentary was screened at several festivals worldwide.
Ard's career has evolved from studying interpretability in models to creating with models, a transition that was seamless yet underpinned by a constant theme: the reliance on hardware and software as the foundation for creation or co-creation in the digital world. This journey has reinforced Ard's belief in the deep interconnection between the digital and physical worlds, viewing them as one.
In the exploration of Diffusion models for image generation, Ard collaborated with Nikita Kartashev and Danil Fokin to develop a real-time image-to-image generation workflow. This workflow encodes the physical world into software, which the hardware then computes and projects back into the physical world. Ard believes that this method of expression, among others, vividly demonstrates the unity of our physical and digital worlds.