Best Romanian AI Thesis AWARDS

We are pleased to announce the second edition of the Best Romanian AI Thesis Awards (BRAIT). This competition recognizes outstanding Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD theses in Artificial Intelligence, fostering innovation and excellence in AI research. 

🏆 Competition Tracks 

• Best Bachelor’s Thesis

• Best Master's Thesis

• Best PhD Thesis

📢 Top papers will be invited to present their work either as posters or oral presentations during Romanian AI Days 2025 

🏅 Win prizes 

✈️ Travel Grants: If your paper is selected for presentation at Romanian AI Days, you may apply for financial support. 

Email contact at airomania dot eu with your request (including justification & amount). 

📥 Submit via OpenReview https://openreview.net/group?id=AIRomania.eu/BRAIT/2025/Awards

(check submission guidelines section)

🔎 Call for Reviewers

We invite professionals from academia and industry to support the review process. Interested? 

Register here:  Reviewer registration form

WINNERS

Best Bachelor's Thesis

• Eduard Ștefan Dinuță, Semi-Supervised Learning For Large Language Models Safety And Content Moderation

National University of Science and Technology Politehnica Bucharest

Advisor: Traian Rebedea, Iustin Sîrbu

Short Paper | Poster 

• Carla Crivoi, Single-Epoch Machine Unlearning with Activation Masking and Elastic Weight Consolidation

University of Bucharest

Advisor: Radu Tudor Ionescu

Short Paper | Poster

Best Bachelor's Thesis - Honorable Mentions

• Cristian George Crăciun, Romanian Legal Question Answering

National University of Science and Technology Politehnica Bucharest

Advisor: Clementin Cercel

Short Paper | Poster

• Ioan Paul Ciobanu, XMAD-Bench: Cross-Domain Multilingual Audio Deepfake Benchmark

University of Bucharest

Advisor: Radu Tudor Ionescu

Short Paper | Poster

• Dragoș-Sebastian-Mihaly Efrem, Depth-Aware Mask Transformer for Robust Instance Segmentation in Images and Videos

Politehnica University of Timișoara

Advisor: Călin Adrian Popa

Short Paper | Poster

Best Master's Thesis 

• Isac-Daniel Ciobotă, SHARPE: State-space HumAn Pose Estimation

Politehnica University of Timișoara

Advisor: Călin-Adrian Popa

Short Paper | Poster

• Cristian Daniel Păduraru, Probing a Classifier's Weights to Identify Learned Spurious Correlations

University of Bucharest

Advisor: Bogdan Alexe

Short Paper | Poster

Best Master's Thesis - Honorable Mentions

• Daniel Airinei, Inside Knowledge: Graph-based Path Generation with Explainable Data Augmentation and Curriculum Learning for Visual Indoor Navigation

National University of Science and Technology Politehnica Bucharest

Advisor: Marius Leordeanu

Short Paper | Poster

• Maria Ceapă, Optimization of Unknown Lipschitz Functions with Applications to Multirobot Search

Technical University of Cluj-Napoca

Advisor: Lucian Bușoniu

Short Paper | Poster

• Radu Bolborici, Conditioning generative models for text-to-speech synthesis

National University of Science and Technology Politehnica Bucharest

Advisor: Ana Antonia Neacșu

Short Paper | Poster

Best PhD Thesis 

• Antonio Bărbălău, Novel Approaches for Weakly Supervised and Self-Supervised Learning

University of Bucharest

Advisor: Radu Tudor Ionescu

Short Paper | Poster

Best PHD Thesis - Honorable Mention

• Eugen-Richard Ardelean, Computational Methods for Brain Signal Analysis during Perception and Behaviour

Technical University of Cluj-Napoca

Advisor: Mihaela Dînșoreanu

Short Paper | Poster

EVALUATION COMMITTEE

Reviewers

Accepted Papers INStructions

🎨 Poster Instructions

📏 Format: A0 size, portrait orientation

📝 What is a poster?
A poster blends text + visuals (figures, tables, graphics) to showcase your scientific contributions in a clear, concise, and eye-catching way.

📚 Helpful Guide: How to Create a Research Poster

🔍 Need Inspiration?
Check out these examples: poster1 | poster2 | poster3 | poster4 | poster5

Who can PARTICIPATE?

✅ Graduates with a Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD thesis in Artificial Intelligence

📅 Thesis defended between 1 January 2024 – 30 June 2025*

🏛️ Studies completed at a Romanian higher education institution (full-time or visiting student, e.g., Erasmus) 

*for Bachelor's and Master's levels, we also welcome submissions from students scheduled to defend their theses in July 2025 

📅 COMPETITION CALENDAR

Warning: Registration is through OpenReview. If you register using a non-institutional email, it may take up to 2 weeks for your OpenReview account to be activated. Make sure you meet the competition deadline. 

📢 Competition Submission Guidelines 

📌 For full submission rules, formatting templates, and anonymization details, see Submission Guidelines page.

📄 What to Submit?
✅ Short Paper (4 pages) summarizing your thesis contributions
✅ Bachelor’s / Master’s / PhD Thesis

📥 Submit via OpenReview https://openreview.net/group?id=AIRomania.eu/BRAIT/2025/Awards

⚠️ Important Notes:

• Documents and reviews will not be made public without author consent.

• OpenReview registration: Non-institutional emails may take up to 2 weeks for activation—plan ahead!

🎭 Double-Blind Review

• Submissions must be fully anonymized to ensure fairness.

• The short paper is the primary evaluation document, but reviewers may consult the thesis.

🕵️ Anonymization Guidelines (Key Points)
✅ Short Paper: Remove names, affiliations, acknowledgments, and self-referencing.
✅ Thesis: Remove names, affiliations, and institution logos. Minor deviations are acceptable.

🤖 Policy on the Use of Large Language Models (LLMs)

The inclusion of content generated by large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, is not permitted in submitted papers, unless the generated content is explicitly presented as part of the paper’s experimental analysis.

The use of LLMs for editing or refining text originally written by the authors is allowed.

Any submission containing content that appears suspicious or potentially LLM-generated will be subject to thorough investigation and may result in rejection. 

EVALUATION CRITERIA

For details regarding the evaluation criteria, please see Evaluation Criteria.

ORGANISERS

SPONSORS 

BRAIT is organised as part of Romanian AI Days. If you are interested in sponsoring the awards please get in touch at contact ai romania dot eu to learn about the benefits for sponsors.

CONTACT

For any questions please get in touch at contact at airomania dot eu

FAQ

1. Am I eligible to participate If I carried out my studies outside Romania but participated in an exchange program (e.g., Erasmus) in Romania?

Yes, If the thesis was developed during the exchange program.

2. Am I eligible to participate If I carried out my studies in Romania but did an exchange program abroad at some point?

Yes, regardless if the thesis was developed during the exchange or not.