Team Members

Prof. Univ. Dr. Marius Leordeanu is a Professor at the University "Politehnica" of Bucharest (UPB) and Senior Research Scientist at the  Institute of Mathematics "Simion Stoilow" of the Romanian Academy (IMAR) and Research Scientist at NORCE, Norway. Prof. Univ.Dr.Marius Leordeanu obtained his Bachelor's in Mathematics and Computer Science at Hunter College of the City University of New York (2003) and PhD in Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University (2009). His research spans different areas in vision and learning, with a main focus on unsupervised learning in the space-time domain, vision for drones and aerial scene understanding, optimization on graphs and neural nets, as well as relating vision to natural language. He coordinates several research groups, both in academia and industry, having strong collaborations on topics that range from general computer vision (e.g. Google, Bitdefender, NORCE) to specific applications for autonomous vehicles (e.g. ARNIA, Google, NORCE), the wood industry (Fordaq) and medical imaging (Siemens) and also Art and AI projects. For his work on graph matching and unsupervised learning he received the "Grigore Moisil Prize" in Mathematics (2014), the top award given by the Romanian Academy. In 2020 Marius published a book, Unsupervised Learning in Space and Time (Springer), which proposes a general unsupervised learning model that brings together the powers of graphs and deep neural networks.

His website Marius Leordeanu (google.com) 

A list of publications could be found on Google Scholar profile and on DBLP profile.

Prof. Univ. Dr. Emil-Ioan Slusanschi is a Professor at University Politehnica of Bucharest. He received his MSc in Computer Science from the UPB in 2001 and his PhD from the Institute for Scientific Computing at the RWTH-Aachen University in Germany in 2008. His fields of interest include high performance scientific computing, compilers, automatic semantic transformations of computer codes, numerical algorithms, multi-core and multi-processor systems. He coordinated the UPB team in the EUWB, TWISNet and LEXNET FP7 projects and the UNICORE H2020 project. He is currently the Head of the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the UPB and also heading the Centre for Research in Computing. His interests are: High Performance Computing, Parallelization of Computer Programs, Profiling and Optimization of Scientific Software Systems, Computer Systems Architecture, Semantic Transformations of Computer Codes, Automatic Differentiation, Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks. Specialities: Parallel Computing (MPI, OpenMP, and Multicore Programming; Porting and Parallelization of Scientific Computing Applications to HPC systems; Profiling and Debugging Parallel Programs), Automatic Differentiation (Development of an AD-tool for Java bytecode; Expertise with AD-tools for the C, Fortran and Matlab languages). 

A list of publications could be found on Google Scholar profile.

Emil Slusanschi's LinkedIn page.

Prof. Dr. Rahul Sukthankar is a VP at Google Research, where he co-leads the Perception org on research in computer vision and machine learning/AI. Dr. Sukthankar received his Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon in 1997 and his B.S.E. in Computer Science from Princeton in 1991.

 He has organized several major conferences in his field (e.g., General Chair, CVPR'21), served as Editor in Chief of the Machine Vision and Applications journal, and is a Fellow of the IEEE.

 A list of publications can be found on Google Scholar profile. 

His website: sukthankar.org - Rahul 

Dr. Nabil Belbachir is the Research Director of Smart Instrumentation and Industrial Testing of NORCE Institute, Norway. He previously woked with Austrian Research Centers GmbH (ARC). Prior to ARC, he was with Vienna University of Technology involved in the Herschel-PACS project of the European Space Agency. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Vienna University of Technology. 

He is a member of the IEEE, IAPR and EURASIP. 

A list of publications can be found on Google Scholar profile. 

Dr. Xuan Zhang obtained B.E. degree on Electronics and Information Engineering from Hunan University, China, in 2005. She obtained M.E. degree on Signal and Information Processing from Shandong University, China, in 2008. From May 2010 to January 2014, she worked as a Ph.D. research fellow in the field of Artificial Intelligence, in University of Agder, Norway. From September 2014 to December 2014, she worked in Teknova Company for the project of condition-based maintenance. Keywords of her research interests include: Machine Learning, Learning Automata, Stochastic Modeling and Optimization, Data Mining, Pattern Recognition and Classification, Condition-based Maintenance and Decision Support. 

A list of publications can be found on Google Scholar profile. 

Prof. Univ. Dr. Adina Magda Florea is a Distinguished Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Vice Rector of the University Politehnica of Bucharest, a Founding Member and President of the Romanian Association for Artificial Intelligence, Senior member of IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, Member of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, Head of IEEE CIS Romanian Chapter, Senior Member of ACM – The Association of Computing Machinery, Member of AAAI – The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Member of Open Agent-Based Modeling Consortium and Member of SRAIT – The Romanian Society for Automation and Technical Informatics, with a Ph.D from University Politehnica of Bucharest, defended in 1997. Her research interests include Multi-Agent Systems, Agent Learning, Machine Learning, Ambient Intelligence, Ambient Assisted Living, Human-Robot Interaction, and Autonomous Driving. 

A list of publications can be found on Google Scholar profile. 

Adina Magda Florea's AI-MAS page.

Prof. Univ. Dr. Traian Rebedea is an Associate Professor at the University Politehnica of Bucharest, with a Ph.D. in natural language processing defended in 2013 (at UPB). The thesis focused on offering detailed feedback to learners engaged in multi-party computer-supported collaborative conversations (using chats, and discussion forums). In the last couple of years, Dr. Traian Rebedea was involved in several applied projects involving NLP, information extraction, and machine learning with applications in opinion mining, information extraction from public data about companies and persons, conversational agents, multi-modal vision and language tasks, and question-answering systems.  He has coordinated two research projects in collaboration with companies (Bitdefender and Autonomous Systems), as well as an innovation grant for startups offered by the European Commission through the Open Data Incubator (Wholi project). 

A list of publications can be found on Google Scholar profile. 

Prof. Univ. Dr. Bogdan Alexe is an Associate Professor at the University of Bucharest, Romania. In 2013, he received his PhD degree from ETH Zurich. Since 2014 he joined the University of Bucharest, where he teaches lectures on computer programming, artificial intelligence, and computer vision. His research interests include machine learning and pattern recognition in computer vision.

A list of publications can be found on Google Scholar profile. 

Prof. Dr. Radu Tudor Ionescu is Professor at the University of Bucharest, Romania. He completed his PhD at the University of Bucharest in 2013. He received the 2014 Award for Outstanding Doctoral Research in the field of Computer Science from the Romanian Ad Astra Association. His research interests include machine learning, computer vision, image processing, medical imaging, computational linguistics and text mining. He published over 90 articles at international peer-reviewed conferences and journals, and a research monograph with Springer. He received the "Caianiello Best Young Paper Award" at ICIAP 2013 for the paper entitled "Kernels for Visual Words Histograms". Radu also received the "Young Researchers in Science and Engineering" Prize organized by prof. Rada Mihalcea for young Romanian researchers in all scientific fields. Together with other co-authors, he obtained good rankings at several international competitions: 4th place in the Facial Expression Recognition Challenge of WREPL 2013, 3rd place in the NLI Shared Task of BEA-8 2013, 2nd place in the ADI Shared Task of VarDial 2016, 1st place in the ADI Shared Task of VarDial 2017, 1st place in the NLI Shared Task of BEA-12 2017, 1st place in the ADI Shared Task of VarDial 2018.

A list of publications can be found on Google Scholar profile. 

Dr. Oana Mitrut (Balan) is Associate Professor at the University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania. She received her Bachelor's Degree at Petroleum-Gas University Ploiești, Faculty of Computer Science, and her Master’s Degree in Advanced Information and Processing Techniques Petroleum-Gas University Ploiești, Faculty of Computer Science, 2012. She completed her PhD at the University of Politehnica of Bucharest, Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, supervisor Prof. Dr. Ing. Florica Moldoveanu in 2015. She's an author of 3 books and 1 book chapter - 20 articles published in journals, of which 7 articles published in Q1/Q2 journals - 48 articles published in international conferences, of which 4 articles at conferences in the Core A category at the time of publication. Her interest research are mainly in the area of virtual and augmented reality.

A list of publications can be found on ‪Oana Mitruț (Bălan)‬ - ‪Google Scholar‬ 

Drd. Ing. Alina Marcu received her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from University Politehnica of Bucharest and has a Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence from the same institution. She is currently a PhD student, in her fifth year, at the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy. In 2017 she was awarded with Best Paper Award at Computer Vision for UAVs Workshop, International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) - Costea, Marcu, Slusanschi and Leordeanu, "Creating roadmaps in aerial images with generative adversarial networks and smoothing-based optimization". Her research interests revolve around subjects such as supervised/semi/self/unsupervised learning methods for scene understanding, with a focus on video scene semantic segmentation for UAVs. 

A list of publications could be found on Google Scholar profile.

Drd. Ing. Dragos Costea received his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from University Politehnica of Bucharest and also a Bachelor Degree -  First Class in Informatics from Coventry University, United Kingdom. He has a Master Degree in Real time systems from University Politehnica of Bucharest and Master's Degree in Automatic control from CentraleSupélec, Gif-Sur-Yvette in France. Currently is a PhD student at the University Politehnica of Bucharest and the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Marius Leordeanu and Prof Dr. Emil Sluşanschi. His research interests revolve around image-based localization, depth estimation, scene/object representation, embedded/real-time algorithms. In 2017 he was awarded with Best Paper Award at Computer Vision for UAVs Workshop, International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) - Costea, Marcu, Slusanschi and Leordeanu, "Creating roadmaps in aerial images with generative adversarial networks and smoothing-based optimization" 

A list of publications could be found on Google Scholar profile.

Drd. Ing. Mihai Masala received his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from University Politehnica of Bucharest in 2017. In 2019 he was awarded his M.Sc. in Computer Science with focus on Artificial Intelligence. His field of research was Natural Language Processing with a strong focus on question answering techniques and chat conversations analysis. He is currently a PhD student at The Institute of  Mathematics of the Romanian Academy working on bridging the gap between computer vision and natural language processing through story graphs.  

A list of publications could be found on Google Scholar profile. 

Drd. Nicolae Cudlenco received his Bachelor’s degree in Artificial Intelligence from University Politehnica of Bucharest (GPA 10/10) and his Bachelor's degree from University Politehnica of Bucharest (GPA 10/10).  He is currently a PHD Student in Artificial Intelligence at Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy  and is also a Professional Software Engineer at BUCHI Laboratory Equipment in Switzerland . His research interests include approaches for investigating the process of human perception, at the intersection of vision and language, using deep learning techniques.

A list of publications could be found on ‪Nicolae Cudlenco‬ - ‪Google Academic‬ 

Ing. Andrei Jelea received his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from University Politehnica of Bucharest and his Bachelor's degree in Mathematics from University of Bucharest. He is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Artificial Intelligence at University Politehnica of Bucharest and is also a research scientist at NORCE Institute, Norway. 

His research interests include approaches for: test-time augmentation and semi/ self/ unsupervised learning.

Ing. Vlad Licaret received his Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from University Politehnica of Bucharest. He is a senior researcher with interests in topics such as, but not limited to: depth estimation from video, pose estimation, raster/point cloud consensus and rendering / 3D software.

A list of publications could be found on ‪‪Vlad Licaret‬ - ‪Google Scholar‬ 

Drd. Ing. Mihai Pirvu received his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from University Politehnica of Bucharest and has a Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence from the same institution. He is currently a PhD student at the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy. His research interests include approaches for: graph/consensus-based scene understanding, graph NN software, depth estimation, UAV navigation software.

A list of publications could be found on Google Scholar profile. 

Drd. Florin Condrea received his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from University of Bucharest and has a Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence from the same institution. He is currently a PhD student at the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy.  His research interests include approaches for: machine learning applied in the medical domain, computer vision, self-supervised learning, weakly supervised learning.

A list of publications could be found on ‪Florin Condrea‬ - ‪Google Scholar‬ 

Drd. Ing. Sebastian Mocanu received his Bachelor's degree in Mechatronics and Robotics Engineering from University Politehnica of Bucharest and at the same institution he finished a Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence. He is currently a PhD student at University Politehnica of Bucharest. His research areas of interest are combining real-time algorithms with computer vision and mobile robotics, especially drones, to create autonomous visual-based controlled systems using depth estimation, semantic segmentation and control algorithms.

His website: Sebastian Mocanu | Portofolio-Personal Page (brittleru.github.io) 

Alexandru Todoran is the youngest member of our research group and he is currently a high school student at “Aurel Vlaicu” High School Orăștie. He is passionate about Computer Science and Mathematics. Being a member of the National Computer Science Olympiad Team for 7 years, he qualified to represent Romania in international competitions where he obtained a total of 22 medals (14 gold, 6 silver, and 2 bronze), including 2 silver medals in the International Olympiad in Informatics and gold and silver medals in the Central European Olympiad in Informatics.

In 2023, Alexandru became interested in seeing his passion come to life by doing research in Machine Learning and Computer Vision, with the guidance of Prof. Univ. Dr. Marius Leordeanu with whom  is currently work on a research project that aims to harness the power of Machine Learning to make predictions in the multi-layer Earth System and study climatic correlations as well as Climate Change.

Dr. Elena Burceanu received her BSc and MSc from the University Politehnica of Bucharest, on Compilers and Distributed Systems. She's having a strong background in Mathematics and Physics, with awards at national and international contests. She defended her PhD at University of Bucharest, with Efficiently Exploiting Space-Time Consensus for Object Segmentation and Tracking in Video thesis, under Prof. Univ. Dr. Marius Leordeanu and Prof. Univ. Dr. Gheorghe Stefanescu supervision. She had outstanding members in the PhD Defense Committee: Tinne Tuytelaars - KU Leuven, João F. Henriques - University of Oxford, Viorica Pătrăucean - Google DeepMind. Her current research interest is in Generalization problems under Distribution Shifts.

Her website: https://ilarele.github.io/ 

A list of publications could be found on  ‪Elena Burceanu‬ - ‪Google Academic‬ 

Dr. Emanuela Haller received  her PhD degree in 2022 from the University Politehnica of Bucharest under the supervision of Prof. Univ. Dr. Marius Leordeanu and Prof. Univ.Dr. Adina Magda Florea. During her PhD, she worked on the challenging problem of unsupervised learning from visual data, with her thesis entitled "Unsupervised Visual Learning by Exploiting the Spatio-Temporal Consistency of Highly Probable Positive Features". She also obtained her MSc in Artificial Intelligence and her BSc in Computer Science and Information Technology from the University Politehnica of Bucharest.

Her research interests concern unsupervised/self-supervised learning, anomaly detection, and generalization under distribution shifts.

Her website: Haller Emanuela (emanuelahaller.github.io) 

A list of publications could be found on ‪Emanuela Haller‬ - ‪Google Academic‬ 

Dr. Ing. Ioana Croitoru received her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from University Politehnica of Bucharest and has a Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence from the same institution. She received her PhD from the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy. Her research interests include approaches for: unsupervised object segmentation and vision-language representation.

A list of publications could be found on Google Scholar profile. 

Dr. Ing. Vlad Bogolin received his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from University Politehnica of Bucharest and has a Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence from the same institution. He received his PhD from the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy. His research interests include approaches for: unsupervised object segmentation and vision-language representation.

A list of publications could be found on Google Scholar profile. 

Website: Vlad Bogolin 

Dr. Otilia Stretcu is a Senior Research Scientist at Google Research in Mountain View, California, working on methods and tools that enable non-AI-practitioners to efficiently train and deploy AI models for specialized applications using only domain knowledge. This work spans across multiple the areas including large language models, active learning, few-shot learning, and knowledge distillation. Previously, she was a PhD student in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University, co-advised by Prof. Tom Mitchell and Prof. Barnabàs Pòczos. Her PhD research focused on developing algorithms for curriculum learning, semi-supervised learning, and graph-based learning, and applying them on problems related to health and neuroscience. Prior to her PhD, Otilia received an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, UK, where she was a Gates Cambridge scholar, and a BEng from Politehnica University of Timisoara, Romania. 

During her master studies she published her first publication with oral presentation at one of the top Conference Computer Vision (British Machine Vision Conference 2015) together with Prof. Univ. Dr. Marius Leordeanu. 

Artist Cristina Lazar received her Bachelor’s degree in Painting from National University of Art, UNArte and currently she is a master student at National University of Arts, Bucharest, Romania. She is also involved in multidisciplinary projects at the intersection of Art and Artificial Intelligence together with Prof.Univ.Dr. Marius Leordeanu and Drd. Alina Marcu and Drd. Dragos Costea. At the age of 18 she received National Award „Junior” of the Union of Writers from Romania for the debut volume "Fortress of Words" and national awards in Latin language. Her research interests include approaches for: Unsupervised Learning, Human AI Interaction, Deep Immersive Art, Experiential Art and Immersive Installations, Avatars and Emotion AI and the impact of emotions and human expressions in innovative projects with ART and AI. SmileProject - Deep Immersive Art with Realtime Human - AI Interaction is her graduate project, created in collaboration with Prof. Marius Leordeanu with his original scientifical idea. 

The site of the project can be found here Smile Project (google.com)