News in Pictures
Spacetime Vision Project - A Bridge between Romania and Norway
November 23, 2022: Together with my PhD students and Dr. Xuan Zhang who visited us from NORCE (Norway Research Center), as part of our collaboration on the Spacetime Vision project: we did research, flew drones, visited castles and spent wonderful evenings together! What a wonderful week!
Visiting NORCE - The Norwegian Research Center
August 2022: Spending a fantastic week visiting our partners from NORCE (one of Norway's largest research institutes), with whom we started a few years ago Spacetime Vision (an extraordinary research project in robotics, computational vision and automatic learning) and with whom we will collaborate for many years to come! And that is how the story of a wonderful journey of discovery, knowledge and construction continues!
Students of the world studying Machine Learning at EEML 2019, in Romania
July 5th, 2019: This is one of the most beautiful pictures I have taken in many years! Seeing all our wonderful students and guests from the Eastern European Machine Learning Summer School 2019, here in our beautiful park Herastrau (Bucharest, Romania), is absolutely fantastic!
Our Smile Project at Link TV!
We are honored to be part of a new project, the TV show ArtPill created by Teo Doroftei, from the Faculty of Journalism of the University of Bucharest in collaboration with Marian Teodorescu and Dan Cojocaru.
Please watch the Pilot episode of the ArtPill TV Show (in Romanian), at Link TV, in which our Human-AI Interaction System Smile-Project was featured on December 1, 2020, our Romanian National Day!
Our research on unsupervised learning and drones at Romanian AI Days
Romanian AI Days is an annual event dedicated to the AI community in Romania. Its aim is to strengthen the Romanian AI community and increase its impact in the international AI ecosystem, by bringing together researchers, entrepreneurs and policy makers from Romania and abroad.
I was invited as a keynote speaker at this wonderful event and I presented our latest research results on unsupervised learning for multi-task scene understanding in the context of intelligent drones, with focus on our recent AAAI 2021 and ACCV 2020 papers.
My talk can also be seen on YouTube (video on the right), in a slightly different version, given immediately after Romanian AI Days, at an online event organized by Under Construction, one of the top Robotics clubs at the National level, formed by high-school students from Carabela, Targoviste - one of the best High-schools in Romania.
Visit of the Minister for European Funds of my group at IMAR
Today, May 25, 2020, I had the great honor and pleasure to have as guest, together with distinguished professors from the management of the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy, the Minister of European Funds, Mr. Marcel Bolos, to whom I presented the my group's research in computer vision and machine learning. It was a day of celebration and an important step in the development of artificial intelligence in Romania!
The official government press release of the visit can be accessed here.
The official press release of the Romanian Academy of the event can be accessed here.
Visit of Minister Marcel Bolos
From left to right: Prof. Lucian Beznea - Director of IMAR, Mr. Marcel Bolos - Romanian Minister of European Funds and myself, after I presented to the distinguished audience the work of my group.
On the slide behind: pictures of my students and group members.
Demonstrating our SmileProject Art-AI intelligent system
Minsiter of European Funds Marcel Bolos tested in real-time our intelligent Smile Project - Deep Immersive Art with Real-time Human-AI Interaction.
The intelligent system consists of five original paintings with fiber optics: the AI-system detects the human facial expression, body pose and movements and responds back by lighting up the optical fibers with different colors.
Visit at the Ministry of European Funds
December 19, 2020: I had the opportunity to participate in discussions with Romanian Minister of European Funds, Mr. Marcel Bolos on the use of European Funds in technology and artificial intelligence.
As shown in the official press release of the event, during the discussions I pointed out that:
"We are on the edge of a new era in technology, triggered by the emergence of artificial intelligence, which will fundamentally change the world, as we know it. Just as the invention of the steam engine, electricity, airplanes, television or the Internet has decisively marked human society, so artificial intelligence has the potential to transform the possibilities in our lives. Artificial intelligence is not just a simple tool. It is about automatically making technology of any kind, in any field, act in the most intelligent way, based both on learning from real data and from experience, but also on efficient and correct computation and mathematics. Intelligence is the best possible way to use as few resources as possible for optimal effect. If we now know how to take advantage of this extraordinary opportunity in history and give Romania the right impetus in this direction, through a wise and courageous investment in the human value factor, but also in the necessary equipment and data, then we have all the chances to emerge victorious."
"Izvoare de Filozofie" Radio Show (October 2020)
October 2020: we had another great time at the "Izvoare de Philosophie" (Sources of Philosophy) Radio Show at Radio Romania Cultural, together with Cornel Moraru, the host and producer of the program.
We talked about recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning and drew parallels between human and computer intelligence. I also had the opportunity to introduce to the audience my recent book on Unsupervised Learning in Space and Time. Some of the questions we addressed during the radio program were: How is it possible for humans and machines to learn in an unsupervised fashion? What is context and how does it relate to the meaning of a specific object or class of objects? What is the relation between the philosophical, cognitive and computational views on intelligence and consciousness?
Our discussion and the program can be heard in full on the website of this edition, here (in Romanian). The introduction of our radio meeting can be translated as follows:
"Since antiquity, philosophers have tried to understand the way man thinks and learns, by appealing to the usual tools of the human intellect and reflective analysis. That is why, traditionally, we have become accustomed to attributing these complex processes only to human intelligence or, in a broader sense, to some of the creatures with which we share this planet. In recent years, however, with the development of artificial intelligence, more and more such processes are being made better and faster by computer algorithms running in the background of our computers, thus causing a paradigm shift in the way we we relate to humanity. Are artificial intelligence algorithms just an imitation of human intelligence or a completely different type of intelligence? How is it possible for an algorithm to see and learn? Is the unsupervised learning process a conscious one?"
Introducing BeAI at Digital Job
September 2020: together with Ioana Irimia, my colleague from Bucharest.AI, we present live at the Digital Job Program of Gold FM and "Scoala Informala IT" (Informal IT School) our Be AI Pre-accelerator, in which I will take part as mentor for three months (October - December 2020).
The talk we had live together with Bogdan Sarpe, the host of Digital Job, can be seen in full here.
#BeAI: the first Pre-accelerator in Romania dedicated exclusively to artificial intelligence (AI) is the topic of the day at 𝐃𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐉𝐨𝐛. The 𝐁𝐮𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐭.𝐀𝐈 team brings, live, all the good news about #free registration, the chance to access a #pre-seed funding of up to 50,000 Euro and other super opportunities for the development of start-ups.
Meeting distinguished people at Bruxelles
Meeting Mrs. Laura Codruta Kovesi
22 October 2019: I am truly honored to be, together with my colleagues and friends, next to the European Chief Prosecutor Laura Codruta Kovesi, an absolutely wonderful person who has done an incredible job, as the youngest Prosecutor General in Romania's history, to bring the Justice System in Romania at the highest professional and moral standards. Her amazing fight against corruption, as chief prosecutor of Romania's National Anticorruption Directorate brought her well-deserved widespread international admiration and acclaim. In 2019 she has become the first European Public Prosecutor.
Meeting Mr. Dacian Ciolos
We discussed together Mr. Dacian Ciolos, former Prime Minister of Romania and other distinguished members of the Renew Europe Group, about the future of technology and how AI will change our world.
Meeting on Artificial Intelligence at the European Parliament
Romanian AI specialists at the European Parliament
22 October 2019: Together with colleagues, researchers, professors and entrepreneurs from Romania working in artificial intelligence, we were invited at the European Parliament, by Mr. Dragos Tudorache, Chair of the Special Committee on Artificial Intelligence in a Digital Age, and by the Renew Europe group.
In this picture, from left to right: Prof. Traian Rebedea (University Politehnica of Bucharest), Elena Burceanu (my PhD student and scientific coordinator of the AI team at Bitdefender), myself and Alexandra Petrus (Product Manager Fintech and co-founder of Bucharest.AI).
Discussing AI at the European Parliament
22 October 2020: Meeting at the European Parliament, Chaired by Mr. Dragos Tudorache, on different aspects regarding the future of artificial intelligence and its impact on society. We had a full day of very interesting and productive discussions together many AI specialists, lawmakers, entrepreneurs, researchers and engineers about the next steps that we need to take in Europe in order to have efficient, powerful and safe AI.
Our paper at NeurIPS 2019
December 18, 2019: My dream team: Iulia Duta and Andrei Liviu Nicolicioiu presenting our paper, which introduces the Recurrent Space-time Graph Neural Networks model, at Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference, last week in Vancouver, Canada.
Congratulations, I am so proud of both of you!!
Best Poster Award - EEML 2019
Juy 5th, 2019: together with my wonderful PhD students Ioana Croitoru and Vlad Bogolin who got the Best Poster Award at the Eastern European Machine Learning Summer School 2019, presenting our paper on Unsupervised Foreground Object Segmentation, published in the International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV).
A wonderful guest
July 3rd, 2019: What a fantastic day! Together wity my dear mentor and friend Dr. Rahul Sukthankar, Director of Google AI Perception Research, who came to see Romania and teach at our Eastern European Machine Learning (EEML) Summer School 2019.
We had a wonderful time visiting together the beautiful Peles (top) and Bran (bottom) Castles!
4th of July, 2019: Visiting the Romanian Palace of the Parliament, on of the largest and most impressive buildings in the world, together with our students at Eastern European Machine Learning Summer School 2019, coming from all over the world!
My lecture at EEML 2019
July 1st, 2019: During my talk on Unsupervised Learning for Computer Vision at the Eastern European Machine Learning Summer School, 2019 - University Politehnica of Bucharest.
Photo taken by Dr. Rahul Sukthankar, Director of Google AI Perception Research.
Teaching at SSIMA 2019
Together with my friend and colleague professor Elena Ovreiu from University Politehnica Bucharest, a true Romanian pioneer who made SSIMA possible for the 5th consecutive year, with immense passion and dedication Today SSIMA is the best summer school in Eastern Europe on Medical Imaging and AI, bringing together some of the most reknowned professors and researchers in the world.
Thank you Elena, you are inspiring our next generation of medical specialists, engineers and AI experts! Thank you also, for inviting me to give a lecture on the research of our research group!
My students teaching at SSIMA 2019
My wonderful PhD students Alina Marcu and Dragos Costea teaching a hands-on tutorial tutorial on Image Segmentation with Deep Learning at the Summer School on Imaging with Medical Applications - SSIMA 2019.
Ema's presentation at RAAI 2019
My PhD student Emanuela Haller presenting our work on Unsupervised Graph Optimization for Object Segmentation in Video at the Recent Advances in Artificial Intelligemce Conference (RAAI), 2019, University of Bucharest.
What a strong presentation, Ema! Congratulations!
My student, Iulia Duta, presenting our work, together with Andrei Nicolicioiu on Recurrent Space-time Neural Networks at RAAI 2019.
My student, Alina Marcu, presenting our work on Semi-supervised annotation for semantic segmentation in drone videos at RAAI 2019.
Together with Cristina Soloc and Professor Mihai Dancus (1942-2020), one of the greatest historians and etnographs in the Maramures County, Romania. He has been the Director of the Maramures Museum of Ethnography, Sighetu Marmatiei, for over 35 years.
Together with Cristina Soloc at the lauch of "Romania Veritabila" TV Show.
Saying a few words at the "Romania Veritabila" launch event.
Together with Cristina Soloc and Professor of Medicine Leon Zagrean, who also took part of "Romania Veritabila"
December 6, 2018: launching of the TV show "Romania Veritabila" (Authentic at TVR1, next to an absolutely wonderful person and very talented Romanian TV producer Cristina Elena Șoloc who continues to surprise me with her talent, energy and dedication!
November 24 and 30, 2018: These two radio shows (in Romanian and available online: link to the first show and link to second one) were a wonderful surprise for me as I had some of the most interesting discussions about artificial intelligence, consciousness, science and beliefs together with a remarkable person, Cornel Moraru, who, besides hosting "Izvoarele filosofiei" (Sources of philosophy") radio show at Radio Romania Cultural, also teaches philosophy of art and esthetics at the Bucharest University of Arts. In addition, he has published books on DJ-ing and is also doing a second PhD in neuro-esthetics, together with Professor Constantin Aslam (top image on the left) and myself.
A new collaboration
Together with Cornel Moraru, professor of philosophy of art, starting a project for Radio Romania Cultural - making bridges across the unknown and looking for roads connecting science, art and philosophy.
At Dagstuhl Seminar, in January 2019, where I presented our work on learning to describe videos in natural language using multiple networks consensus.
More details can be found in our paper:
I. Duta, A. Nicolicioiu, V. Bogolin and M. Leordeanu, Mining for Meaning: from Vision to Language through Multiple Networks Consensus, BMVC 2018
My Computer Vision Class of 2018 !
At the European Conference on Computer Vision in Munchen, September 2018, my PhD student Elena Burceanu presented our work on object tracking by learning a robust society of object parts.
In the news!
My work with Emanuela Haller on unsupervised learning in video, was featured in the Daily News, at the International Conference on Computer Vision, Venice, 2017.
Our Drone Team !
Teaching Drones How to Fly with Computer Vision
Video of us flying the drone can be found here.
At our computer vision reading group !
My research group, at the International Conference on Computer Vision in Venice, October 2017, presenting our papers:
Emanuela Haller and Marius Leordeanu, Unsupervised Object Segmentation in Video by Efficient Selection of Highly Probable Positive Features
Ioana Croitoru, Vlad Bogolin and Marius Leordeanu, Unsupervised Learning From Video to Detect Foreground Objects in Single Images
Dragos Costea, Alina Marcu, Emil Slusanschi and Marius Leordeanu, Creating Roadmaps in Aerial Images With Generative Adversarial Networks and Smoothing-Based Optimization
At the International Conference on Computer Vision, in Venice, 2017, my team working on computer vision for drones received the best presentation award at the UAVision Workshop.
"Grigore Moisil" Prize awarded by the Romanian Academy
In 2014 I received the "Grigore Moisil" Prize in Mathematics, the most prestigious award given by the Romanian Academy, for my work on unsupervised learning for graph matching.
I received the award from the great mathematician Solomon Marcus (1925-2016) with whom I share my deepest love for science and art.
In 2013, in the beautiful city of Roman, Pr. Cornel Paiu and Papirus Media organized the launch of my first book of poetry, The story of a word ("Povestea unui cuvant" in Romanian). It was a wonderful event, combining art and music with an interesting discussion about recent discoveries in neuroscience and artificial intelligence. My presentation was about "The Miracle of Seeing: between Artificial Intelligence and Spirituality", in which I presented my view on how vision could be seen as a story in context and could help explain the mystery of consciousness. Our eternal fascination with the human spirit crossed boundaries, built bridges, connected people and created unforgettable memories.
A new world begins !
My life has changed forever in 2016 when I bought my Yamaha Motifx 8 !
A playlist with my songs I made available on YouTube.
Together with my PhD students Emanuela Haller and Dragos Costea, in the city of York, UK, presenting our work at the British Machine Vision Conference, 2016.
Dragos Costea and Marius Leordeanu, Aerial image geolocalization from recognition and matching of roads and intersections, BMVC, 2016.
Our paper could be found here.
Launching my book "My name is blue" in Sighetu Marmatiei, with many of my friends, former classmates and teachers being present.
On the left there is a short video of the event.
Many many thanks to my dear Mr. Ion Maris and Green Valley publishing house for making this happen !
In Brussels at the interview for the ERC Starting Grant, where I presented my concept of a "Visual Story Network", detailed in the following book chapter:
Marius Leordeanu and Rahul Sukthankar, Towards a Visual Story Network Using Multiple Views for Object Recognition at Different Levels of Spatiotemporal Context, 38 pages, in the book: Physics of the Mind and Brain Disorders: Integrated Neural Circuits Supporting the Emergence of Mind, Springer, 2017.
You can download the book here.
Together with friends at the British Machine Vision Conference, 2015, in the beautiful city of Swansea.
I presented our work together with Otilia Stretcu (now a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University) on Multiple-Frames Matching for Object Discovery in Video.
A video of my oral presentation and the paper could be found here.