site.bta100-Plus Scientists Enter INSAIT Competition

Three young scientists in the field of Artificial Intelligence will join INSAIT, the Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Technology with the Sofia University, said the Education Ministry. 

Over 100 scientists from 22 countries took part in the first competition for researchers at INSAIT. INSAIT was launched a little over a year ago and already is performing at a top-world level, which makes it desirable for talent from all over the world. 

Among the candidates were researchers from the US, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, Germany, Norway, the UK, India, Brazil, South Korea, Canada and Iran. 
The eight-member jury was made up from top scientists from the US, Israel and Switzerland and the total number of their citations exceed 400,000.  

Candidates underwent a very rigorous selection procedure. 

The three successful candidates are Nikola Konstantinov, Wouter Van Gansbeke from Belgium and Danda Paudel from Nepal.  

Nikola Konstantinov, 29, is among the most promising European AI scientists. At INSAIT Konstantinov will lead a group of researchers in the field of machine learning. This is a strategic field for the European Union in which a lot of investments are made. 

Wouter Van Gansbeke, 27, has over 1,500 citations of his research works. This year he is wrapping his PhD thesis in the field of Artificial Intelligence and computer vision. 

Danda Paudel will move to Sofia from Zurich. He has drawn a lot of attention with his work on computer vision and has been a guest lecturer at Oxford University, the University of Amsterdam and Tokyo University. 

With Van Gansbeke and Paudel INSAIT is growing its team on computer vision, one of the fastest developing subfields of AI, used in medicine, robotics, pilotless driving, traffic management, satellite data processing, etc.