Professor Mária Bieliková works on artificial intelligence and machine learning at the Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies. She founded the institute in 2020 and considers it her biggest success. Her scientific field is young and still changing, and her field of research keeps changing as well. Over the long term, she has been tackling the problem of information overload.

Unlike other scientists, Mária Bieliková's workplace may not look different to an ordinary meeting room. „We don't work directly with matter, but rather with the soul of what surrounds us – with data, ideas, thoughts and concepts. We're trying to put these things into interesting applications or find new relationships between them. When we work in artificial intelligence, specifically machine learning, we are basically creating and processing data, cleaning it, designing models, training it and evaluating it,“, the internationally renowned scientist explains.

Mária Bieliková works in one of the youngest fields of science – artificial intelligence, which was established as a discipline in 1956. Although at first she wanted to work with people and also considered studying psychology, she decided to study technical cybernetics at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava (STU), and later in her studies she switched to the Department of Computer science the same faculty. With the advent of the web, she found a way to collaborate with a wide range of professionals: „The beautiful thing about computer science is that you can create solutions for anyone – psychologists, doctors, teachers – and so you become a bit of an expert in those fields as well.“

She started with her master’s thesis on expert systems for diagnosis of diseases in hens. She became fascinated with the web and very early in the 1990s she started to address the problem of information overload in the online space. This focus has remained with her to this day. In the past she worked on personalizing web systems, primarily recommendation systems. With more data and computing power, the discipline changed rapidly, and today Mária Bieliková works with machine learning and deep neural networks. At present she is designing models for analysing the credibility of text information.

The size of the trained models affects her research, among other things. „When you train a model with millions of parameters and then with billions of parameters, new features emerge that were not directly part of the training. Larger models can solve tasks they have not been explicitly trained for, which means their capabilities are expanding. We still don't understand many of the features of large models. We have a problem globally in the community with replicating results and evaluating models. That’s why we are also developing datasets – we contribute to the standardisation of evaluation.“

Mária Bieliková, along with her team, is also developing machine learning methodologies, particularly for training models with limited or labelled data. This topic is also at the core of her recent paper in ACM Computing Surveys, the world's most prestigious journal discussing the methodologies and challenges in computer science.

One of Mária Bieliková’s most notable achievements was founding the Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies (KInIT), the first independent AI research institute in Slovakia. Its goal is to bring excellent science to businesses and connect them with academia. The Kempelen Institute has the potential to scale up research activities and compete with large international institutions in artificial intelligence. It also helps Mária Bieliková to fulfil her dream of working with people. It is her team at the institute, which she leads, that creates the inspiring environment in which she works best.

At KInIT, she can not only work on excellent science, but also transfer the latest knowledge into innovative solutions, which she considers crucial. Her goal is to create solutions that are not just innovative, but also useful to society.

In her spare time she enjoys photography and long walks. She likes to spend time with her family, especially her young grandson.