Institute of Information and Communication Technologies

Institute of Information and Communication Technologies of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (IICT-BAS) is a leading research organization in the fields of computer science, communications, scientific computing, natural language processing, signal processing, and critical situations. The achievements of IICT-BAS are recognized by the European Commission, which concluded two major contracts with the institute: FP5 BIS-21 “Centre of Excellence” (2000-2004) and FP6 BIS-21++ “Centre of Competence” (2005-2007). In addition, IICT-BAS was awarded the prize of the Ministry of Education and Science for the most active participant in FP6 (a team of 65 scientists received project funding exceeding €2.5 million in FP6). In the period from 2000 to the present, IICT-BAS has been developing 50 international and 32 national projects. Scientists from IICT-BAS publish over 200 articles annually, including 120 in peer-reviewed and authoritative international publications.

The Artificial Intelligence and Language Technologies Department , which implements the BG-CLARIN project, is among the most active participants in IICT-BAS projects and contributes to raising the prestige of the entire unit through its achievements. Its projects during the 1990s under the Copernicus program were LATESLAV, GLOSSER, BILEDITA, LARFLAST, Elsnet, MulText Goes East, TELRI 1, and TELRI 2. After 2000, it carried out the BulTreeBank project, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (Germany), which established the repository of over 15,000 syntactically annotated trees of Bulgarian sentences. It coordinated Balric-Ling/IST-FP5, a project establishing Balkan regional centers for raising awareness of language technologies, and executed the HOPE-EuroMap/IST-FP5 project to build a national network of industrial users of language technologies.

The department has participated in the following international projects related to the development of language resources and technologies: CLARIN (FP7), LT4eL (ICT-FP6), AsIsKnown (ICT-FP6), LTfLL (ICT-FP7), EuroMatrixPlus (ICT-FP7), and FLaReNet (eContentPlus). New European projects in the area include: EUCases (611760, FP7-ICT-2013-SME-DCA), QTLeap (610516, FP7-ICT-2013-10), and AComIn (316087, FP7-REGPOT-2012-2013-1).

Department of Scientific Computing carries out research activities in the primary areas of: Large-Scale Computer Models; High-Performance Computer Architectures and Algorithms; Computational Linear Algebra; Three-Dimensional Digitization and Microstructural Analysis. Researchers from the department actively participate in international and national research projects, such as the Center of Excellence “Supercomputing Applications” (NSIF 2009) and the “Centre of Excellence for Mathematical Modeling and Advanced Computing” (H2020 2015). The department annually participates in organizing and holding several specialized scientific forums. Notable among them is the series of prestigious international conferences “Large-Scale Scientific Computations” in the field of high-performance scientific computing, which takes place every two years (the 10th edition took place in 2015).

IICT-BAS is the coordinator of the project “AComIn: Advanced Computing for Innovation” (2012-2016), designated by the European Commission as one of the FP7 projects the Commission takes pride in, as it has had a significant, real impact on the European economy and society. Within the framework of the AComIn project, the so-called “Smart Lab” was established, consisting of modules for 3D digitization, visualization, speech processing, and system dynamics. The project results are key to the development of CLaDA-BG.