Prof.dr. Mihai Surdeanu visits the Computer Science Department

The Computer Science Department at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca and the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (https://airi.utcluj.ro/) warmly welcome Prof. Dr. Mihai Surdeanu for his one-semester Fulbright visit. During his time in Cluj-Napoca, Dr. Surdeanu will collaborate with our colleagues on research into new large language models that can understand and meaningfully participate in complex debates. If successful, these models will augment considerably the decision-making capabilities of human experts in critical domains such as healthcare and public policy. Also, he will teach the Natural Language Processing master course for the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and Vision study tracks at the Computer Science Department.

Dr. Surdeanu (https://surdeanu.cs.arizona.edu/mihai/) works on building computer systems that process and extract meaning from natural language texts. He focuses mostly on interpretable models, i.e., approaches where the computer can explain in human understandable terms why it made a decision, and machine reasoning, i.e., methods that approximate the human capacity to understand bigger things from knowing smaller facts.

He published more than 150 peer-reviewed articles, which have been cited over 22,000 times. Dr. Surdeanu’s work was funded by several United States government organizations (DARPA, NIH, NSF), as well as private foundations (the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation).