Advisory board

Adina Magda Florea is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the Department of Computer Science, University Politehnica of Bucharest. She is the coordinator of the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence and Multi-Agent Systems (AI-MAS). She is Senior member of IEEE and ACM and President of the Romanian Association of Artificial Intelligence (ARIA).

Andrei is an Applied Machine Learning scientist at Amazon, Iasi. Passionate about mathematics from a young age, he majored in theoretical mathematics at UAIC and was quickly drawn to Machine Learning ever since. As a consequence, his master’s degree and PhD at UAIC were focused more and more on this subject. Beyond classic ML, his science interests lie in computer vision and numerical optimization, always taking on one-too-many projects to get them all right. He finds relaxation in driving his motorcycle, playing guitar and growing tiny pet projects that never end up anywhere.

Bogdan Dumitru spent the past 18 years building the core technologies of one of the world’s most advanced security suite. Throughout his career at Bitdefender, he co-authored several patents and built innovative technologies that now form the cornerstone of a product protecting more than 500 million users worldwide. Also, he is an advisor and angel investor in Romanian technology startups.

Călin-Adrian Popa received his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Information Technology in 2009, his Master's degree in Software Engineering in 2011, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Information Technology in 2015, all from Politehnica University Timişoara. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer and Information Technology, Politehnica University Timişoara. He also received a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics in 2013, and a Master's degree in Mathematics in 2015, both from West University of Timişoara. He is interested in neural networks and deep learning.

Csaba Szepesvári, currently on leave from the University of Alberta, is the team-lead for the "Foundations" team at Deepmind, UK. His main focus is the development of principled approaches to AI with the use of machine learning. He has extensive industrial and academic experience and holds various editorial positions at leading journals and conferences. He is the co-inventor of UCT, a widely successful Monte-Carlo tree search algorithm, which ignited much work in AI, and won the 2016 test-of-time award at ECML/PKDD. In his fictional spare time, he likes to engage in various activities, such as climbing, hiking, biking, skiing and alike with his family and friends.

Jan Chorowski is an Associate Professor at Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Wrocław. He received his M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the Wrocław University of Technology, Poland and EE PhD from the University of Louisville, Kentucky in 2012. He has worked with several research teams, including Google Brain, Microsoft Research and Yoshua Bengio’s lab at the University of Montreal. His research interests are applications of neural networks to problems which are intuitive and easy for humans and difficult for machines, such as speech and natural language processing. He has also led a student team to the 3rd place at the University Rover Championship in 2016.

Luigi Malagò is Project Director at the Romanian Institute of Science and Technology (RIST) in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, since October 2016. Previously, he was Assistant Professor at Shinshu University in Nagano, Japan (2014-16); Research Assistant at Collegio Carlo Alberto, Moncalieri, Italy (2014-16), and a Postdoc Researcher at Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy (2012-14). In 2012 he received a PhD in Information Technology at Politecnico di Milano. His work has been awarded with the Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation Award for the best PhD thesis (2012). His research interests focus on information geometry and on the use of geometric methods in Machine Learning, in particular first and second-order optimization methods over statistical manifolds. Luigi Malagò is Principal Investigator of the DeepRiemann project “Riemannian Optimization Methods for Deep Learning”, funded by European structural funds (2016-2020) through the ANCSI Competitiveness Operational Programme (POC 2014-2020). In 2018 he has been one of the organizers of the Transylvanian Machine Learning Summer School (TMLSS) which took place in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

Maria Florina Balcan is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Her main research interests are machine learning, computational aspects in economics and game theory, and algorithms. Her honors include the CMU SCS Distinguished Dissertation Award, an NSF CAREER Award, a Microsoft Faculty Research Fellowship, a Sloan Research Fellowship, and several paper awards. She was a program committee co-chair for the Conference on Learning Theory in 2014 and for the International Conference on Machine Learning in 2016. She is currently board member of the International Machine Learning Society (since 2011), a Tutorial Chair for ICML 2019, and a Workshop Chair for FOCS 2019.

Rada Mihalcea is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of Michigan. Her research interests are in computational linguistics, with a focus on lexical semantics, multilingual natural language processing, and computational social sciences. She serves or has served on the editorial boards of the Journals of Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluations, Natural Language Engineering, Research in Language in Computation, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, and Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. She was a program co-chair for the Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2011) and the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (2009), and a general chair for the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2015). She is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award (2008) and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers awarded by President Obama (2009). In 2013, she was made an honorary citizen of her hometown of Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

Rodica Potolea is a Professor leading the Computer Science Department at Technical University (TU) of Cluj-Napoca. She is also coordinating the Knowledge Engineering research group at TU Cluj-Napoca. She is a member of ACM, IEEE, and ARIA, and a recipient of the IBM Faculty Award.

Silvia Chiappa is staff research scientist in Machine Learning at DeepMind. She received a Diploma di Laurea in Mathematics from University of Bologna and a PhD in Machine Learning from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Prior to DeepMind, Silvia worked in several Machine Learning and Statistics research groups: the Empirical Inference Department at the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, the Machine Intelligence and Perception Group at Microsoft Research Cambridge, and the Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge. Her research interests are based around Bayesian & causal reasoning, graphical models, variational inference, time-series models, ML fairness and bias, and deep learning.

Ulrich is a South African research scientist at DeepMind, who lost his heart somewhere in the bushveld and is always looking for ways to find it. His most recent expedition in this quest is with the Deep Learning Indaba and its community of hard-working, dedicated friends and peers. He holds a PhD in machine learning from the University of Cambridge, lived life on the edge in two high tech startups, managed a team in Apple, and with Noam Koenigstein developed the core of the Microsoft recommender system. He was on the initial Xbox One team, and is still itching to build the next big thing.