I'm an Machine Learning Engineer, working on cool projects at the intersection of NLP and CV. I finished my PhD in 2011, worked as a Research Scientist at the Research Institute for AI (Romanian Academy) for 7 years, then switched applied ML as an ML engineer at Sustainalytics (2017-2019) and now at Adobe.

I'm active in open source, especially on Romanian NLP. Throughout the years I've published, teached and coded, all while having fun. I like to build stuff.

Showcase on HuggingFace:

• Named Entity Recognition playground
• Write with transformers, but for Romanian :)

• Romanian Text Corpus (joint project with Mihai Ilie)
• Word Sense Disambiguation Corpus & Models for Romanian (large scale, long running project)
• NLI Corpus for Romanian
• Sentence segmentation for Romanian (because current Romanian tools fail miserably for anything but clean text)

• May Appeared on live TV discussing AI (#1, #2)
• Apr Participated in WE Smart Diaspora conference in Timisoara, Romania, presenting "The Impact of Large Language Models"

• Nov Released the first T5-base and large pretrained checkpoints on Romanian, trained on TPUv4s from TRC. Invaluable help from Mihai Ilie and Per Egil.
• Nov Organized the first edition of the LiRo NLP Hackathon in Politehnica University of Bucharest, with over 80 participants. Thanks to Viorica Patraucean, Traian Rebedea and all the wonderful volunteers.
• Jan Released roner, a pip-installable custom NER based on RONECv2, providing SOTA results on Romanian.

• Aug Trained and released a monolingual GPT-Neo 780M model, trained on a TPUv3-32 with the help of Mihai Ilie
• Nov Lead the development of the first Named Entity Recognition dataset for Romanian. Currently, at version 2.0, holds 12330 sentences with over 0.5M tokens, annotated with 15 classes, to a total of 80.283 distinctly annotated entities. Invaluable help from termene.ro.

• Aug I lead the development of the first ML leaderboard named LiRo Benchmark, together with Viorica Patraucean and other amazing RomaniaAI volunteers.
• Jun Proposed and lead the development of the Romanian Semantic Textual Similarity dataset. It's a 1:1 high-quality human translation of the English STS dataset.
• Apr: Trained an released the first monolingual Romanian BERT model, which became the most used BERT model in Romania, with thousdands of monthly downloads.

• RoWordNet pip package providing quick access to the Romanian WordNet. After all these years it's still the only python plug-and-play package for Romanian - seems to be working well :)
• Developed NLP-Cube with Tiberiu Boros (lead). Started as an entry in the 2018 Conll competition and evolved into a multilingual toolkit providing Tokenization, Sentence Segmentation, Lemmatization, POS and DEP parsing, trained on the Universal Dependencies dataset.

Google Scholar profile , h-index: 9

• Liro: Benchmark and leaderboard for romanian language tasks, SD Dumitrescu et all., 2021
• The birth of Romanian BERT, SD Dumitrescu, AM Avram, S Pyysalo, 2020
• Introducing RONEC - the Romanian Named Entity Corpus, SD Dumitrescu, AM Avram, 2019
• NLP-Cube: End-to-End Raw Text Processing With Neural Networks, T Boroș, SD Dumitrescu, R Burtica, 2018