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INSAIT announces a unique doctoral program for Eastern Europe: 36,000 euro annual scholarship in Bulgaria with professors from Carnegie-Mellon, EPFL, ETH Zurich, MIT, Yale

Category: News
May 31, 2022

Bulgaria’s talents no longer face the dilemma of accepting a high-paying job in the IT industry or leaving the country to acquire in-depth knowledge and skills at a world-class level. INSAIT’s PhD program ( https://insait.ai/phd/ ) in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence is unique in Eastern Europe, offering for the first time conditions competitive with leading international universities – scholarships of 36,000 euros per year and training under the guidance of world-renowned professors from top American and Swiss universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie Mellon (CMU), ETH Zurich, Yale and EPFL. The program offers Bulgarian students the opportunity to reach a world-class level without having to leave Bulgaria, and a chance for development for those who complete their education abroad and want to return. Global technology companies DeepMind (Google’s research division) and Amazon Web Services also provide scholarships for talented young scientists. Their leading experts in the field of artificial intelligence and computer science will participate in the doctoral program and serve as student supervisors.

INSAIT’s program is structured similarly to elite American and Swiss universities and lasts up to five years. Students will participate in exchange programs, spending up to three months per year at their mentors’ universities, while also collaborating with local research groups.

INSAIT welcomes applicants who aim to develop as top researchers, scientists or entrepreneurs aiming to create high-tech companies. To apply, students must have excellent English and hold (or be in the process of obtaining) a bachelor’s or master’s degree in one of the following fields: computer science, informatics, physics, mathematics or electronic engineering. The first doctoral students are expected to start in autumn 2022.

The initial list of research areas includes: machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, programming languages, verification, computer systems, computer architecture, information security, theory and algorithms.

The leaders of the young scientists will be some of the leading professors in the field of computer science and artificial intelligence, winners of numerous world awards, who have won a total of 11 grants from the European Research Council (ERC)*, and have created 9 high-tech start-ups:

  • Srdjan Capkun , professor at ETH Zurich, and ACM fellow, ERC Consolidator grantee. His research in the field of information security – both hardware and software – is fundamental to the development of this field worldwide.
  • Ottmar Hilligs , professor at ETH Zurich, formerly at Microsoft Research, whose research interests are in the field of computer vision. Recipient of ERC Starting and Consolidator grants.
  • Martin Jagi , EPFL professor of machine learning, previously a researcher at ETH Zurich.
  • Andreas Krause , Professor of Machine Learning at ETH Zurich, previously Professor at Caltech, USA. Recipient of ERC Starting and Consolidator grants.
  • Peter Müller , professor at ETH Zurich. His research has laid the foundations for software verification and is currently working on SCION, a new generation of secure and reliable internet.
  • Onur Mutlu , professor of computer architecture at ETH Zurich, ACM and IEEE fellow, whose research has been implemented in numerous chips, including those from Apple, Intel, IBM, Samsung and Sun Microsystems.
  • Martin Oderski , professor of programming languages at EPFL and ACM fellow, inventor of the Scala programming language. Winner of an ERC Advanced grant.
  • Matthias Payer , professor at EPFL, whose research in information security has diverse applications in industry. ERC Starting grant recipient.
  • Dragomir Radev , professor of natural language processing at Yale, whose work has been recognized with numerous awards, including ACM, ACL, AAAS, and AAAI fellow.
  • Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Professor of Machine Learning at Carnegie-Mellon University, former director of the artificial intelligence research team at Apple, and former doctoral student of Prof. Jeffrey Hinton, co-discoverer of deep learning.
  • Laurent Vanbeuver , professor at ETH Zurich, whose research on increasing the security and reliability of computer networks has played an important role in shaping a new scientific field with direct applications in industry. Winner of an ERC Starting grant.
  • Virginia Wasilewska-Williams , professor of theory and algorithms at MIT and Sloan fellow, inventor of the world’s fastest matrix multiplication algorithm.
  • Martin Vechev , professor at ETH Zurich, previously at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, whose work pioneered the field of machine learning on code. Prof. Vechev’s research helps create more reliable and secure artificial intelligence and offers new ways to program quantum computers. The only Bulgarian to have won two ERC grants: Starting and Consolidator.
  • Zi Zhang , Professor of Computer Systems and Data Science at ETH Zurich, previously a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford. Professor Zhang’s research focuses on machine learning systems. ERC Starting grant recipient.

*The European Research Council (ERC) is the European Commission’s research funding organisation. The ERC is a symbol of scientific excellence, with a budget of around €2 billion in 2022, and a single grant worth between €1.5 and €2.5 million over 5 years.
More information about the program can be found here .