RoNLP Members

Ștefan TRĂUȘAN-MATU is a full professor at the Computer Science Department of the National University of Science and Technology POLITEHNICA Bucharest (UPB) and a scientific researcher at the Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence of the Romanian Academy. He started research over 40 years ago as a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence in Romania. Since 1994 he has been teaching and doing research in Natural Language Processing at the UPB Computer Science Department, when he also received also a PhD degree. He was a Fulbright post-doc at Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA and visiting professor at Universities of Nantes, Lyon, Toulouse, and Grenoble in France. He is doing research in discourse analysis, human-AI interaction, AI in education, Collaborative Knowledge Construction, with also interdisciplinary AI studies including Philosophy, Ethics, Sociology, and Music. He authored or edited 24 books, 59 book chapters, and more than 500 peer-reviewed papers at prestigious conferences and journals. He chaired international conferences (including rated A) and participated to the program or organizing committee of many others. He was the director or participant in many research projects, including EU and US, and was awarded the Romanian Academy Award.

Mihai DASCĂLU is a full professor in Computer Science at the National University of Science and Technology POLITEHNICA Bucharest and is responsible for the courses in object-oriented programming, algorithm design, and semantic web. Mihai was head of his class (i.e., GPA 10/10; ranked 1st across specialization and university) at POLITEHNICA Bucharest and holds a double Ph.D. with the highest distinctions in Computer Science (Excellent, POLITEHNICA Bucharest) and Educational Sciences (Très Honorable avec Felicitations, University Grenoble Alpes, France). Mihai has extensive experience in national and international research projects (POC Optimize, POC InsureAI, PTE ATES, PCE INTELLIT, PCE Lib2Life, PCE ROBIN, POC D HUB-TECH, POC G NETIO, H2020 RAGE, ERASMUS+ ENeA-SEA) with more than 300 published papers, including 40 articles at top-tier conferences (AAAI, ACL, CogSci, AIED, COLING), 100+ papers indexed ISI at renowned international conferences (ICALT, ITS, EC-TEL, ICWL, ISPDC, AIMSA), and 10+ Q1 journal papers (Computers & Education, Computers in Human Behavior, Behavior Research Methods, ijCSCL). Mihai received the award “Mihai Drăgănescu” from the Romanian Academy in 2023, the distinction “IN TEMPORE OPPORTUNO” in 2013 as the most promising young researcher in POLITEHNICA Bucharest, obtained a Senior Fulbright scholarship in 2015, and holds a US patent. Mihai is also a corresponding member of the Academy of Romanian Scientists.

Traian REBEDEA holds a PhD from National University of Science and Technology POLITEHNICA Bucharest with a thesis focusing on discourse analysis for Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) multi-party dialogues. After completing his thesis, Traian has continued his work as a teacher and researcher, but has also engaged into several industrial research projects on opinion mining, social media analytics, people search, and conversational agents. He has vast experience in working in large R&I projects, including leading 3 research grants with a total budget of $1.5M+, and coordinating a 10+ research group in applied Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. He has also published 100+ papers, including top-tier conferences (NeurIPS, ACL, EMNLP, COLING, EACL, ECAI, CSCL, AIED, ITS), and journals (Computers in Human Behavior, ijCSCL, Natural Language Engineering, Creativity Research Journal). Currently, Traian is an Associate Professor teaching Algorithm Design, Information Retrieval, and Machine Learning, and a Principal Applied Data Scientist at NVIDIA working in Dialogue research. Previously, he has been co-founder and Chief Data Scientist at RoboSelf, working to advance Conversational AI by improving NLU using deep learning models and building Colang, the language for modelling conversational flows. He is co-organizer of Romanian AI Days, Bucharest Deep Learning meet-up, and co-lead of the Open Romanian LLM initiative.

Stefan Ruseti is an Associate Professor at the National University of Science and Technology Politehnica Bucharest and holds a PhD in Computer Science. His research activity covers many areas in Natural Language Processing (NLP), most studies being dedicated to applying NLP techniques to build tools for educational scenarios. He has experience in national and international projects and has more than 75 published papers, including 13 articles at top conferences (EMNLP, COLING, ECIR, AIED) and 6 articles published in Q1 journals (Computers & Education, Computers in Human Behavior).

Gabriel GUȚU-ROBU earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University Politehnica of Bucharest (UPB), Romania, in 2017, specialising in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Currently, he serves as an Assistant Professor at the Computer Science and Engineering Department, Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, within the National University of Science and Technology Politehnica Bucharest. From December 2021 to March 2022, Gabriel had the prestigious opportunity to be a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Georgia State University’s Department of Applied Linguistics/ESL (Atlanta, United States), where he actively contributed to a cutting-edge project on Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platforms. Since 2015, Gabriel has been involved in NLP research, participating in numerous national and international projects at UPB. His scientific work includes over 30 peer-reviewed articles, solidifying his reputation as a contributor in Natural Language Processing, Technology in Education, and Machine Learning. His current research is primarily focused on NLP, Computational Linguistics, Educational Platforms, and MOOC platforms.

Alexandru PETRESCU received the BSc degree in computers science engineering from the University Politehnica of Bucharest in 2019, and the MSc Degree in computer science engineering and information technology from the University Politehnica of Bucharest in 2021. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in Computational Lingustics, Natural Language Processing, and Distributed Machine and Deep Learning at the National University of Science and Technology Politehnica Bucharest. He holds a Teaching Assistant of Computer Science position at the Computer Science and Engineering Department, Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, National University of Science and Technology Politehnica Bucharest. During his MSc studies, he was an invited researcher at the Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Denmark, where he worked on Social Media Analysis and Network Immunization.