site.btaSofia University Freshman Becomes Lead Author of AI Global Forum

Maria Drencheva, a 19-year-old freshman from the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics (FMI) of Sofia University and the INSAIT Institute, recorded her name among the leading authors of one of the most prestigious forums in the world in the field of artificial intelligence: ICLR (International Conference on Learning Representations), the Ministry of Education and Science said Tuesday.

Drencheva is a co-author on a paper accepted for the forum, for which researchers from around the world applied. The student is part of INSAIT's four-year Explorer Programme, created in collaboration with FMI and Bulgarian business.

Maria Drencheva graduated from the Sofia Mathematical High School with full honours. She has a national diploma of the Ministry of Education and is a long-time participant in the national mathematics teams of Bulgaria. She is studying Informatics at FMI and in parallel participates in various INSAIT projects. The acceptance of the ICLR paper is the first major success in her research career.

Explorer's goal is to keep young people like her in Bulgaria and give them a chance to pursue world-class careers in AI and information technology by staying to live and work here, the Ministry added. INSAIT provides a monthly scholarship of BGN 2,000 for a four-year study period at Sofia University, and the funds are provided by donations from leading technology companies.

The paper is co-authored and mentored by Ivo Petrov, who has a Master's degree from Cambridge and is now a PhD student at INSAIT, Dimitar Dimitrov - a PhD student at ETH Zurich, now a researcher at INSAIT. Dr. Maximilian Baader - researcher at ETH Zurich and Prof. Martin Vechev - founder and scientific director of INSAIT. 

Their development is titled GRAIN: Exact Graph Reconstruction from Gradients and explores a problem in federated learning, an approach allowing multiple organizations, such as chemistry labs, to train AI models on their pooled data without sharing confidential information with each other.

The ICLR is a leading event dedicated to the development of the field of AI. The forum ranks among the top 10 scientific conferences in the world across all scientific fields and is globally recognized for presenting and publishing the latest research on AI, statistics and data science, as well as in important applied areas such as computer vision, computational biology, speech recognition, text understanding, games and robotics.