site.btaINSAIT Institute Scientists at Sofia University to Participate in NeurIPS

Seven scientific achievements with the participation of scientists from the Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Technology - INSAIT, at Sofia University were accepted at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems - NeurIPS, the Education Ministry said Monday.

The conference is ranked first in the field of Artificial Intelligence and ranks in the top 10 scientific conferences in the world among all fields with a Hirsch-5 index of 309. The model on which ChatGPT is built was released during NeurIPS in 2017, five years before ChatGPT conquered the world, the Ministry said.

Publications in top scientific conferences, such as NeurIPS, are of strategic importance to the US, China and other leading countries in AI development and deployment. There has been no participation of a Bulgarian institution since the conference's establishment in 1987.

Dr. Nikola Konstantinov from INSAIT is the lead author of two of the seven accepted papers. They present new data sharing algorithms to create better and more reliable AI models. One of these papers also involves prof. Martin Vechev - an architect of INSAIT, and Georgi Pashaliyev - a 12th grade student from the Sofia Mathematics High School.

INSAIT PhD student Anton Alexandrov has an approved paper, which presents a new method for creating multilingual databases used for training AI. The other four publications involve prof. Luc Van Gool, one of the world's leading scientists and a pioneer in artificial intelligence, who joined INSAIT in 2022. The publications are in the fields of 3D diffusion models, computer vision, deep neural networks and more.

The INSAIT institute at Sofia University has the strategic goal to turn Bulgaria into a leading centre for research and innovation in the field of informatics and artificial intelligence. Just a month ago the institute became part of ELLIS - the leading European initiative for artificial intelligence. Thus, Bulgaria became the first country in Eastern Europe to join the network, which includes Oxford, Cambridge, Max-Planck and others.