July 18 – 26, 2026
Predeal, Romania
Organized by the Bucharest Business School, at Bucharest University of Economic Studies, in collaboration with the GATE Institute at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” and the projects DataPACT, TwinShip, INTEND and CauseFinder. Event co-sponsored by OMV-Petrom.
Goal:
The goal of the summer school is to familiarize students with relevant state of the art topics in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The program will cover fundamentals of Data Science and AI and focus on the following key topics:
- Statistics and Machine Learning
- Large Language Models (LLMs)
- Agentic, Conversational, Causal AI
- Knowledge Graphs for LLMs, Agents, and Auditable AI
- Time series forecasting, XAI, and databases
- Edge Federated Learning
The program will consist of a combination of lecture-style talks introducing various Data Science and AI paradigms and methods, and hands-on sessions. The summer school aims to have a practical orientation, with Python and Jupyter Notebooks being used to exemplify many of the topics covered at the summer school. Students will work on group (mini-)projects/exercises during the summer school.
At the end of the summer school, the students are expected to understand key paradigms used in Data Science and AI and be able to practically apply them in Data Science and AI projects.
Prerequisites:
Familiarity with computer programming and basic knowledge about Python, interest in working with data, enthusiasm, and willingness to learn new things!
Lecturers and instructors:
- Dan Nicolae (University of Chicago, USA), Professor, PhD
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-nicolae-221991a - Cornelia Caragea (University of Illinois Chicago, USA), Professor, PhD
https://www.linkedin.com/in/cornelia-caragea-94bb513 - Radu Prodan (University of Innsbruck, Austria), Professor, PhD
https://www.linkedin.com/in/radu-prodan-182812b1 - Ioan Toma (Onlim GmbH, Austria), Chief AI Officer, PhD
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ioantoma - Dumitru Roman (SINTEF / UiT, Norway), Senior Research Scientist / Professor, PhD
https://www.linkedin.com/in/titiroman - Jože Rožanec (Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia), Researcher / Machine Learning Engineer, PhD
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmrozanec - Nikolay Nikolov (SINTEF AS, Norway), Research Scientist, PhD
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikolay-nikolov-a9672659
