First-year student from Sofia University became a leading author at a global forum on artificial intelligence

19-year-old Maria Drencheva is one of the leading authors at one of the most prestigious forums in the world for artificial intelligence. She is a first-year student at Sofia University (SU) and a scholarship holder at the Bulgarian Institute for Artificial Intelligence, INSAIT.

Maria began working on the project in the summer of 2023, when she first joined INSAIT as part of their summer internship programme. After the internship, she continued working on the project with her mentors, and by the beginning of October of the same year, the project was completed. A few days ago, it was approved for participation in the forum.

"The concept is simpler than it sounds in terms. Let's say we have several chemical laboratories and a molecule, and these data are confidential for some reason. In fact, if all the chemical laboratories want to train a common model, say to create new medicines, the more data the model is trained on, the more accurate it will be. Accordingly, they have an interest in having the model trained on all the data, but on the other hand, they cannot collect it in one place. This is done on one server, where data is not submitted, only partial derivatives of the data. The main idea, what we are researching, is to what extent data is truly preserved under such a protocol," explained Maria.

"The idea is that the function cannot be reversed. Our algorithm provides a way for people who want to train in this way to check through it to what extent the data will be preserved," she added.

According to Maria Drencheva, artificial intelligence can be used for both good and bad, but people should not be afraid of it.

"Artificial intelligence has many applications and can be used for many things. It is a tool that can be used for a lot of good for humanity and for a lot of bad. It is up to us to use it for good things... Changes scare people, but they are for the better" Maria Drencheva, who is a student at the Faculty of Mathematics at SU and the INSAIT Institute, told BNT's 'The Day Begins' programme on January 29.

Maria is adamant that science and mathematics are not boring activities.

"Mathematics has been something I have loved since a very young age. In high school, I actively participated in competitions, and the natural continuation for me was to engage in scientific work. Sometimes I would stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning because if I worked on something all day, it would stay in my head," shared the first-year student.