For more than 25 years Branislav Anwarzai has been building bridges between fundamental research and the working systems his clients deploy in the field. He moves between three worlds — applied physics, electronic engineering and software architecture — and brings them together into products: sensors that measure what was previously unmeasurable, platforms that turn raw data into decisions, and digital twins that let cities and industrial sites see themselves clearly for the first time.
Short bio
Branislav Anwarzai is the founder and director of the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) and managing director of the technology consultancy INNO, s.r.o. He also serves as chief technology executive at NEVIA SE. Before founding IAS he spent over eight years as a researcher at the Institute of Physics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, eleven years as a university teacher at Slovak and Czech technical universities, and held research and engineering roles at PSL a.s. and at GE Inspection Technologies in Germany.
His scientific work — concentrated on multilayer magnetic thin-film structures and their use as sensors of mechanical strain — has been published in international Current Contents journals and cited by groups working on flexible spintronics, including a citation in Nature Electronics. He is the inventor on two patents for magnetostrictive sensors (WIPO PCT publication WO2009088378 and Slovak national patent SK 50001/2008).
Today he focuses IAS on the convergence of artificial intelligence, sensor systems, IoT and cyber-secure infrastructure. The flagship platform IntelliTwin, developed under the IAS roof, is a modular digital-twin solution for integrating Smart-City installations, IoT sensor networks and security systems with hardware-accelerated AI inference of up to 200 TOPS and a library of 462+ ready-to-use models.
By the numbers
| 25+ | years across research, engineering and innovation |
| 48 | citations in indexed scientific literature (Scopus) |
| 2 | granted patents in magnetostrictive sensing |
| 200 TOPS | peak inference throughput in the IntelliTwin platform |
What he does today
Branislav leads complex product engagements end-to-end — from problem framing and architecture design, through hardware and software prototyping, to deployment and ongoing operation. The most frequent shape of these engagements:
- Digital-twin platforms that integrate existing Smart-City, IoT and security infrastructure rather than forcing customers into greenfield rollouts.
- AI model development and AI hardware infrastructure — building the compute fabric (edge MCUs, FPGAs, GPU/TPU servers) and the MLOps to feed it.
- Parallel-computing & AI architectures for IoT — distributing inference across mesh networks of off-grid edge nodes.
- Hardware design — mixed-signal, FPGA, RF and PCB design with EMC pre-compliance.
- Sensor design — GMR / spin-valve / TMR magnetic sensors, magnetostrictive sensors, strain and ultrasonic sensors, smart sensor systems.
- Embedded systems & DSP — RTOS firmware, real-time signal-processing chains, secure OTA updates.
- Enterprise software architecture — cloud-native services, e-commerce platforms, data analytics, UI/UX.
- Innovation management & technology foresight — UNIDO-certified methodology and contributions to the European state-aid framework for innovative companies, approved across 11+ EU countries.
Selected scientific publications
- Anwarzai, B.; Áč, V.; Lúby, Š.; Majková, E.; Senderák, R. Pseudo spin-valve on plastic substrate as sensing elements of mechanical strain. Vacuum, vol. 84, no. 1, 2009, pp. 108–110. (cited in Nature Electronics, 2018)
- Lúby, Š.; Anwarzai, B.; Áč, V.; Majková, E.; Senderák, R. Pseudo spin-valves with different spacer thickness as sensing elements of mechanical strain. Vacuum, vol. 86, no. 6, 2012, pp. 718–720.
- Lúby, Š.; Majková, E.; Debnárová, A.; Senderák, R.; Áč, V.; Anwarzai, B. Effect of magnetic flux distribution on GMR in Ag/Co multilayers. Thin Solid Films, vol. 433, 2003, pp. 243–246.
- Áč, V.; Anwarzai, B.; Lúby, Š.; Majková, E. Influence of mechanical strain on magnetic characteristics of spin valves. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, vol. 100, 2008.
Author profile: Scopus (Author ID 6505731682) · IEEE Xplore. Over 40 international scientific articles & conference contributions; 60+ Current Contents articles & citations.
Patents
- Magnetostrictive Indicator — WIPO PCT publication WO2009088378, published 16 July 2009.
- Magnetostrictive Sensor — Slovak Republic patent SK 50001/2008, issued 11 January 2008.
Speaking & public engagement
In 2025 Branislav appeared in JazzTalk 2025 — Cyber-security through the eyes of Roman Václav, DPO of the Year 2024, part of the Trenčín 2026 European Capital of Culture programme — bringing the conversation about cyber-security out of conference rooms and into a public, cross-disciplinary format. He has been continuously involved in popularising research in the Trenčín region, including the campaign covered by Slovak regional media to attract students to science and applied research.
Memberships, certificates & recognitions
- IEEE Professional Member (2007 – 2011, international).
- Slovak Physical Society (2006 – present).
- UNIDO certificate — Technology Foresight for Corporations (2006).
- RIS INSTIT management unit, work-package coordinator (2005 – 2008).
- TOGAF (2022) and ITIL (2022) — international certifications in enterprise architecture and service management.
- External reader on engineering theses, including a 2015 bachelor’s-thesis defence at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University in Brno.
Areas of expertise
Vision for IAS
The Institute of Advanced Studies exists to do the work that neither pure academia nor product engineering alone manages to do well — moving promising ideas across the gap between published research and deployed systems. IAS pairs scientific rigour with end-to-end execution: research methods, data, models, hardware, software, deployment, operation. The goal is that customers and partners get not just an answer but a working capability they can run, extend and trust.