Strong presence in the community
Beyond teaching, we stay close to the research and industry ecosystem:
- BRAIT: Romanian awards program for AI theses and innovation.
- Romanian AI Days: national AI conference and community; we take part in the programme and networking.
- National AI Olympiad (ONIA): official Romanian high-school AI olympiad (UPIR); we support the initiative.
- Eastern European Machine Learning Summer School (EEML): summer school we engage with (e.g. sponsorship, lectures, participants).
- European and national research projects: active in EU- and Romania-funded research.
- International collaborations: Max Planck Institute (IMPRS-IS), ETH Zurich, Mila (Montreal), Idiap (Switzerland), and others.
Conference service
We contribute to the research community through peer review and conference organization. Recent involvement includes:
- ICML'26: Andrei Manolache (gold reviewer), Antonio Bărbălau (gold reviewer), Elena Burceanu (gold reviewer)
- CVPR'26: Dan Oneață (outstanding reviewer)
- CoLLAs'26: Elena Burceanu (local chair, Bucharest)
- NeurIPS'25: Elena Burceanu (Associate Program Chair)
Technology transfer projects (PTE)
We run two Proiecte de Transfer la Operator Economic (PTE):
- Veridiq: multimodal deepfake detection.
- VeriDark: authorship verification and identification benchmarks.
Meetups
We run regular research meetups. See the meetups page for the schedule (Google Calendar).
Deepfake Detection Reading Group
We host a biweekly Deepfake Detection Reading Group to discuss the latest work in the field of deepfake detection. Sessions are informal (Fridays, online). See the reading group page for the schedule, past sessions, and how to join the mailing list.
Courses
Here at Bitdefender we design and teach deep learning courses with top universities in Bucharest and in-house programs. We bring students and engineers closer to research with up-to-date, hands-on content.
