Bulgarian student Maria Drencheva was selected from a pool of 2,500 young talents for a prestigious Swiss research program. The Student Summer Research Fellowship (SSRF) is organized annually by ETH Zurich, with just 20 places available to students from around the world.
Over the course of two months, Maria Drencheva worked on a key question in AI safety: what happens when an AI agent is given a task but faces clear boundaries on the actions it is allowed to take? Her research examines whether, in pursuing an assigned goal, an AI system might attempt to circumvent these restrictions and take actions it is not authorized to perform.
Her work was carried out as part of ETH Zurich’s Secure and Private AI (SPY) Lab, which researches the security, privacy, and reliability of AI systems, with a particular focus on identifying vulnerabilities and developing ways to address them. Maria worked under the mentorship of Dr. Avital Shafran and Prof. Florian Tramèr, head of the lab and a leading researcher in machine learning security.
Maria Drencheva is an INSAIT fellow in the prestigious EXPLORER program and a student at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski.” In Bulgaria, she has been dubbed the “golden girl” of mathematics, a reference to her numerous medals at student Olympiads and international competitions.
Despite her young age, Maria Drencheva has already built an impressive track record. A paper she co-authored with mentors from INSAIT was accepted to ICLR in Singapore, one of the world’s leading conferences in artificial intelligence, where she presented the work as first author. Last year, Drencheva was also selected for an internship at Man Group, an industry partner of EXPLORER and one of the world’s leading investment management firms, with more than $250 billion in assets under management.