Computer Vision, Image Processing and FotoNation, from Bucharest, Romania
Notes from the Bucharest.AI Meetup 6.0
Category: Machine Learning
Author: Alexandra Petrus

Computer Vision, Image Processing and FotoNation from Bucharest, Romania
Notes from the Bucharest.AI Meetup 6.0
🙌 Amazingly talented speakers, audience and venue location surely make for an amazing Bucharest AI meetup 6.0. Kudos to everyone that took part and exciting to see such great minds and people all in one place, Bucharest AI — the cluster for AI practitioners and enthusiasts.
Powerful things happen when like-minded people connect.
Andrei Țăranu (left), Product Owner and Value Researcher; Liviu Dutu (middle), Research Engineer specialised in Machine Learning technologies from FotoNation; and Marius Leordeanu (right), Lecturer @Facultatea de Automatică și Calculatoare, UPB teaching Computer Vision and Robotics for the MSc in #AI.
This edition we focused:
Challenges, as part of our Community Open Space. We welcomed Andrei Taranu with “Building an ICO-worthy team to support a marketplace for AI services based on distributed TensorFlow”. Want to present your challenge in future Bucharest AI events, kindly register by filling this short form.
Keynote “Vision in Words: in Search for the Link Between Vision and Language” — by Marius Leordeanu, Research Scientist & Associate Professor Computer Vision and Robotics. Marius presented his recent research on bridging the gap between vision and language. This research problem is only in its infancy in AI and is gathering a lot of interest in the field. Topics discussed: potential use cases with impact in everyday life & approach to this task and current results.
Keynote and demo “Revolutionizing Imaging with AI @ FotoNation” — by Liviu Dutu, Research Engineer specialized in Machine Learning technologies. Relying on its world-class imaging and computer-vision expertise, FotoNation is now developing advanced machine learning algorithms for a wide range of mobile and automotive applications. Follow them to explore some of their most captivating technologies, ranging from face analytics to photography enhancement.
Challenges — Building an ICO-worthy team to support a marketplace for AI services based on distributed TensorFlow
Andrei Taranu, Product Owner & Value Researcher @Kondiment in front of the curious Bucharest AI audience.
Andrei codes Java and Python and his challenge presented consists of:
Implementing the Markov-Chain MC (Tangle) security mechanism
Joining a Fin-tech Accelerator and organising an ICO.
He is looking to welcome, in his team, roles of Core Developer — Architect and Engineers.👆Click for slides deck.
Keynote: Vision in Words: in search for the link between vision and language
Marius Leordeanu, Research Scientist & Associate Professor Computer Vision & Robotics in front of Bucharest AI’s captivated audience.
Marius has a Robotics PhD from Hunter College, City University of New York. His contributions on “graph matching” started a distinct scientific branch in computer vision, dedicated to graph matching efficient algos development. Marius started a research group in computational imaging and automatic learning, gathering very talented and passionate students and PhDs from the Politehnica University of Bucharest and Romanian Academy. Marius and his teams are returning real scientific results that are considered internationally.
Under Marius’s guidance, we explored what would we like for a computer vision system to do with an image, as we better understood the differences between human and machine perception over what surrounds us or get to see. We found out about the ‘Discrete Continuum’ relation and were shown some of the results follwoing Marius & his team’s research.


It was grand to have Marius passionately walk us through his findings and results. We hope to enjoy his presence more and more and get exposed to his research often.
👆Click for slides deck.
Keynote & demo: Revolutionizing Imaging with AI @ FotoNation

Liviu Dutu, Research Engineer specialised in Machine Learning technologies demo-ing FotoNation’s face analytics tech that is working with a wide range of head orientations.
Throughout his career, Liviu contributed to the development of technologies such as object detection and tracking, classification, semantic segmentation and single image super-resolution. His work is estimated to be employed in 25% of the smartphones shipped worldwide. He holds a PhD in electrical engineering and has published in major international journals.:)
It’s amazing to see FotoNation’s progress with computational imaging algorithms and the sectors they serve. With over 18 years of breakthroughs they are picturing our world and can’t wait to welcome them at future events. We’ll keep them close and update you on their continuous progress.
👆Click for slides deck.
Working on a computer vision project / idea? We’d love to hear from you!
If computer vision, image recognition or detection is your main focus of a project or idea, we’d love to hear more from you. If you had specific challenges that you could share the learnings from, or are currently in need of a second thought, ping us. If it’s over our league, we’ll connect or pair you with someone that could help. Our local community is growing but so is our global City.ai community. Let’s benefit of all the knowledge around and help each other deliver successful AI products.
Who attended Bucharest AI 6.0?
This was a first! 200 of you AI practitioners and enthusiasts joined us to connect and be part of the local AI scene. All of this despite terrible weather conditions that could have easily kept you at home, chilling and sipping from some hot cocoa.:) Thank you.
This helped us acknowledge even more the massive interest and potential of the local AI scene, and we understand we need to aim for larger venues to properly accommodate you all. Challenge accepted! You keep showing up to our events and we will make sure you have a great time and leave with significant takeaways and connections.
Fun fact: 44% of you joined us for the first time. Thank you and see you soon again! :)

For the other 56% of you who have joined us previously as well, we hope you’re enjoying the meetups more and more, and also noticing the efforts made to implement every good feedback received, while becoming bigger and stronger as a community. Got some more good ideas about event setup, topics or speakers? Jot them here.

Looking to rewatch the streamed meetup content presented? Tune in.
When’s the next meetup? 21st of March!:)
You asked, we answered. Can’t wait to see you there. Get your tickets (they sell very, very fast & we have a tighter seat limitation).:)
What to expect? As EU is looking to build the ‘European AI Alliance’ (broad, diverse community of stakeholders) to set ethical guidelines for AI (fairness, safety, transparency, the future of work, democracy, impact on Charter of Fundamental Rights), we couldn’t see more fit that we allocate a full meetup event towards understanding more on the topic. AI Policy, Trends, Markets and AI-based products investors-worthy will be the topics discussed on the 21st of March. Agenda covers:
What is an investor looking for when it comes to AI ideas/products/services, by Eamonn Carey, Managing Director, Techstars London.
Citizen AI — Raising AI to benefit business and society, by Florin Soare, Accenture Technology Romania Lead. As Artificial Intelligence expands further into society, the business accountability around raising a responsible and explainable AI will rapidly grow. By raising AI for responsibility, fairness, and transparency, businesses can create a collaborative, powerful new member of the workforce. This session will cover the top 5 IT trends of the moment, discovered in Accenture’s 2018 Tech Vision.
Introducing the AI Policy Series by Yolanda Lannquist, AI Policy Researcher at The AI-Initiative, Harvard Kennedy School.
We kindly ask you to reserve a seat only if the topics above are right up your street or if you’re really into them. Given the venue space limitation, we are forced to receive up to 100 seats. Until we find larger venues, we’d appreciate your understanding. We welcome all of you to tune in to our streamed live event via our Facebook page.:)
Got your AI groove on? Get involved, join us, find the right AI tech for you and let’s enable more of us in understanding and practicing AI.