People
Cristina Lazar
Cristina Lazăr is a young emerging artist who graduated in 2019 from the National University of Art, Bucharest, Romania, class of Professor Petru Lucaci, with a Bachelor's Degree in Painting. Smile Project is based on her Diploma work, which is a multidisciplinary effort standing at the intersection of Art and Artificial Intelligence. One of her drawings, "Her eyes", appeared in a scientific article published in Springer [Leordeanu and Sukthankar, 2017], titled Towards a Visual Story Network Using Multiple Views for Object Recognition at Different Levels of Spatiotemporal Context. Cristina graduated the first in her generation from Ion Heliade Radulescu highschool in Targoviste and also completed "Octav Enigarescu" Art School, Târgoviste, Romania, class of Professor Mihai Serbanescu. At the age of 16 she recieved the „Junior” National Award, given by the Romanian Writers' Association for her debut volume "Fortress of Words" and a Diploma of Excellence from the Romanian Ministry of Culture for her artistic and literary activity. She also won prizes at the national level of the Latin Language Olympiad, showing strong talents in several arts and sciences from an early age.
Nicolae Rosia
Nicolae Rosia graduated with Master's (2015) and Bachelor's Degrees (2013) in Computer Science and Engineering, from the Military Technical Academy of Bucharest, with the top grade point average (GPA) in his generation. He also won top prizes at the European and Worldwide levels in Electronics Design contests, for several years in a row. On the topic of high performance computing and design he already published two papers at the international level (International Conference on Security for Information Technology and Communications, 2014 and 2015). In the last couple of years he became involved in research and development projects, in both industry and academia, on computer vision and machine learning topics that include object recognition, vision for drones and stock prediction. Since 2018 he started to collaborate with Marius Leordeanu and Cristina Lazar on the Smile Project, at the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy and National University of Arts in Bucharest.
Petru Lucaci
Professor Dr. Petru Lucaci graduated in 1982 with Certificate of Honor from the Institute of Arts 'Nicolae Grigorescu', Painting Department, Bucharest, Romania and in 2006 he obtained his PhD in Visual Arts. Dr. Lucaci is Professor at National University of Arts in Bucharest with over 40 individual art exhibitions at the national and international levels. He is currently the Director of «Arta» Magazine and the president of «The Artists Union» of Romania.
Website: http://www.lucaci.ro/
Marius Leordeanu
Marius Leordeanu is Professor at University Politehnica of Bucharest (UPB) and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy (IMAR). At UPB, Marius introduced in 2014 the courses of Computer Vision and Robotics and at IMAR he started the Computer Vision Reading Group, with weekly meetings since 2016. Marius did his PhD at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University (2009) and for his work on unsupervised learning for graph matching he received, in 2014, the “Grigore Moisil” Prize - the most prestigious award in Mathematics given by the Romanian Academy. Currently, Marius leads research projects on various computer vision and deep learning problems, e.g. unsupervised learning in the spatio-temporal domain, video to language translation, object tracking, semantic segmentation, vision for drones and self-driving cars, vision for the wood industry. Together with his students, Marius aims to understand vision at its deepest levels, from learning about concepts in an unsupervised fashion to understanding its relationship to natural language. He created the concept of the Smile Project, in an attempt to cross boundaries between Art and Artifficial Intelligence, in order to explore further and better understand the role and meaning of intelligence, through artistic expression, communication and recognition.