Meet Mária Bieliková

The Gamechangers series presents the stories of the people who stood at the very beginning of the Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies. Through their vision and determination, they transformed a bold idea into reality – creating a new place for excellent science connected with innovation and talent development in Slovakia. In the interviews, you will learn about the challenges they had to overcome, the values that unite them, and what motivates them to keep pushing the boundaries of research and innovation.

The opening episode features Mária Bieliková – founder and director of the Kempelen Institute. Mária is a renowned Slovak computer scientist who has long been dedicated to research in the field of artificial intelligence, talent development, linking science with practice, and supporting innovation. Together with her colleagues, she founded the Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies in 2020, which will celebrate its fifth anniversary on September 9 this year.

Such a moment can’t really be pinpointed exactly. The creation of KInIT can actually be seen from two perspectives. One was that about 20 years ago, I realised that if we want to live well here, we need to have as many honest, engaged, and enterprising experts around us as possible. And gradually I found that this mission suited me very well.

When I was still working at the university, talent development and the connection between academia and the business sector were my passions. I was involved in the founding of the Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies at STU. I built a research team in what was then a new area related to web personalisation, and I became dean. At the university, we strived for strong, top-level computer science. And we succeeded in that.

The essence of what I was striving for back then hasn’t changed at all. But, of course, the world around us has changed, and that influenced the way I pursue my vision. And that’s the second perspective. At that time, I had no idea that we would ever establish a faculty or that the Kempelen Institute would come into being. Then the opportunity came – and as it often goes, fortune favours the prepared.

It turned out that some problems cannot be solved from the inside. In the public academic sector in Slovakia, there were, are, and I believe will continue to be, many talented people. But there are various constraints, some of them rooted in history, which sometimes make change difficult to achieve. Another thing is that if we look at how it works abroad, in countries that are truly considered strong innovators, we see that alongside universities and state or public research institutions, institutes like KInIT are a normal part of the landscape. They serve as connectors between two worlds.

For a long time, I discussed with many people from different sectors how to develop talent and foster excellent science that has the potential to contribute to innovation. The opportunity to bring this vision to life came in the summer of 2020.

Several strong moments contributed to the founding of KInIT. The first was when a successful businesswoman asked me why I didn’t just try to make the dream I was talking about a reality. Another important moment came at the beginning of July 2020, when I was on a late-night call with my friend and former colleague Andrej Danko, who has been living in the US for a long time. At one point, we said: let’s write down how we imagine such an institute – and that’s how the first document (a onepager) about an independent research institute was created. Andrej is still an advisor to KInIT today.

Later, several other key moments followed. The involvement of business partners was crucial, since without their financial support, the project of an independent research institute would have had no chance of seeing the light of day. Another important impulse was the realisation that it was possible to do things differently – and many people helped us with that. Without their support, both financial and otherwise, what we have today would not have been possible.

Looking back on that period, what mattered was probably that it was clear we truly believed in it. I still believe that building an innovative ecosystem by connecting excellent science with practice and talent development makes a lot of sense, and I’m very grateful that we can keep pursuing it – that our previous activities created the trust needed to continue outside the university as well. Our conviction that the vision was a good one kept strengthening until the moment when the Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies was founded.

There were quite a lot of challenges. It wasn’t easy – we were venturing into the unknown. Nothing like KInIT had ever existed in Slovakia, nor more broadly in Eastern Europe.

If I go chronologically, the very first challenge was how my closest colleagues would react. In the end, that turned out to be the easiest one, which made me very happy. Something like this cannot be done by a single person. The Kempelen Institute is the work of many people, and more continue to join it even today.

The second challenge, which may naturally seem like the biggest, was securing funding. In the situation at that time, it was clear that we had no chance of obtaining support from public sources. But we wanted to pilot our idea, which had been modelled after similar institutes abroad, for example, in Austria and Germany, where such institutes are usually public–private partnerships.

In Slovakia, research and innovation have always been divided strictly between the public academic sector and the business sector. But we wanted to connect these two worlds – something possible only if someone understands both. We needed people willing and able to try out both sides: researchers with an entrepreneurial mindset within the institute, and entrepreneurs curious enough to contribute to this project.

It was clear that at the beginning, we could secure funding only from the private sector. That requires trust – but also a bit of luck. Luck in finding people who think with a long-term perspective. I am very glad that Eset, Tatra banka, Innovatrics, Seesame, and Softec were the companies that made it possible for us to start, and that at that time they put their trust in what we ourselves believed in from the very beginning.

Another challenge was somewhat hidden, and not everyone realised it, but for me it was enormous. The question was how the Kempelen Institute would be received by its surroundings. When you start something completely new, it can very easily happen that people naturally feel afraid of it. We didn’t know what entrepreneurs would say, and especially what the academic world would say. But then something amazing happened. The very next day after the announcement of KInIT’s founding in August 2020, the President of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Professor Šajgalík, responded to journalists. Newspapers ran big headlines: “A bold step in the right direction.” That was an enormous encouragement.

So we had some people and some resources, perhaps even that first acceptance, and then came the main question – what to focus on, how to begin. That was truly a big challenge. Every research institution essentially operates on subsidies, grants, and collaboration with industry. We started with grants. 

I don’t think so. I don’t have – and I believe I never will have – doubts about the overall purpose of this endeavour. I have, rather, doubts about whether we’ve chosen the right path and whether we’re following it well. When there are many dead ends, some doubts are bound to arise, especially when you are piloting something new. But I actually enjoy the dead ends and say that we need to make more mistakes than usual when trying new things. The key is to learn from them quickly and keep moving forward.

Then there are not exactly doubts, but more like questions – about everything you can imagine: how we manage the institute, what structure we have, our processes… Yes, abroad, there are plenty of examples, but we find that even though we can learn a lot from them, they have their own problems and are highly dependent on the environment and country they are in. You can take something from them, but certainly not everything.

Another question is whether we can attract enough talent. This is very difficult, and the environment in Slovakia is not particularly favourable to talent. At the same time, we want – and must – do everything in a way that does not weaken the existing academic institutions, which we actually need to strengthen.

The future is another big question. How far can we go? To what extent will we be able to operate successfully? Of course, external factors also come into play. Many acquaintances from abroad, for example, tell me that something like this cannot be built without government support. And yet, you see, it works in Slovakia. But it works because people from the private sector decided to help. Without that, it simply wouldn’t be possible. Today, KInIT can secure nearly two-thirds of its funding from other sources.

There are several levels to this. At KInIT, we chose our topics so that we could fulfil our vision of creating an innovative ecosystem based on excellent science. The first very important thing is that we have to be excellent in research. We need to select topics where we have a chance to be world-class. Our research topics also need to be interesting not only globally, but also locally, for our innovation ecosystem – because the main impact we want, and are already creating, is here at home.

Another aspect in choosing the topics was our competencies. You can build something on a greenfield in entirely new areas, but that would mean immediately looking for people from abroad. Many institutes abroad are founded this way. But projects like that involve tens to hundreds of millions of euros, and we were not in that situation. So we had to focus on topics where we already had competencies. That’s how two strong AI-related topics crystallised for us.

The first topic was machine information processing, primarily focused on text. Image, audio, and text processing are all large, separate fields studied by thousands of people worldwide. Considering our size and experience, we chose text. And once again, we had a bit of luck – two years after KInIT was founded, the field exploded, and now far more researchers are working on text processing than when we started. The second topic was predictive modelling in the environmental domain. We began with energy, but within that area, we have already expanded to other environmental topics.

At the same time, these are arguably two of the most important AI topics in the world today – information processing and quality, and our environment. We try to motivate people to “hop on our train” and work alongside KInIT, even for a while. That’s why it’s important that our topics also have social relevance, contributing as directly as possible to a better life. I believe it’s wonderful to dedicate your life to leaving something better behind than what we started with. And that is possible with topics like these.

Our third important topic is ethics and values in technology, especially in artificial intelligence. I consider this very important. Back when I was at the university, we had endless discussions about how much the humanities should be included in technical education. Not everyone shared the view that the humanities and social sciences are important for technical training. Today, far more people recognise the importance of these subjects, and it is increasingly clear that technologies are not neutral and must be understood in their full scope to serve us humans.

So from the very beginning, I knew that at KInIT we needed to connect technical disciplines with humanities and social sciences. It was great that Juraj Podroužek joined us already in the preparatory phase of KInIT, and today we have an excellent team working on AI ethics and regulation topics. This team recently secured two European projects with a social-humanities focus as the main theme. I think that is an amazing achievement.

What we are building can relate to any research area. We focus on AI topics, where there is enormous potential, because a lot of investment goes into it today, and it increasingly influences our lives. And that greatly supports our mission.

I didn’t have a concrete idea of the kind of institute I wanted to build. In fact, I’m not really building an institute at all, but rather the environment and ecosystem in which KInIT exists. I consider connection and collaboration to be a core value. I want to see interconnected bubbles and people who do things with passion. And we are succeeding in that.

I see it as an endless game, and that’s why I don’t primarily aim to achieve specific metrics, although I consider data important and use it wherever possible. It’s more about motivating people at KInIT, motivating partners and collaborators from other institutions and abroad, to want to contribute to this vision for the sake of our future.

We don’t pilot things for the institute itself, but so that we can move them forward and improve the entire ecosystem. My goal is to make the world better as much as possible. And I think we are succeeding, even if progress is slow. So I’m learning to be patient.

Since we are playing an endless game, I don’t think there’s really a moment of “we did it.” Of course, there have been many moments when something succeeded.

For example, when we were starting out, we needed to hire 24 people within three days. No one really believed it would be possible to find a company, reach agreements, and register employees with the insurance company in just three days… And in the end, we managed it. That was a real “wow” moment, because everyone was prepared for it not to succeed.

Then we started writing European grants. The first one we submitted was on November 5, just over a month after we began operating. And again, “wow” – we got it. In the meantime, we started writing more grants. It must be said that without external help, we would not be anywhere near where we are. And that’s also advice for anyone attempting this. Civitta was a huge help to us, specifically Peter Kolesár, Eva Šimeková, and their Estonian colleagues, who not only helped us navigate the process but also gave us the courage to try, for example, to form a consortium.

Of course, it wasn’t easy. We were also a bit lucky, because we won all those first projects. Today, winning projects is a mix of success and challenges, slightly above the European average success rate. Many grants we didn’t get, even though most were evaluated above the funding threshold. There is and always has been a lot of work involved – and a bit of luck.

But perhaps the strongest realisation is that the original KInIT team now makes up only about one-fifth of the institute. That means more than four-fifths are people who joined KInIT and live our vision together with us. And for me, that is the biggest “wow,” because it’s something you truly want to experience.

I’ve actually already said it. What I associate with KInIT are the people. And at the same time, since we are a research institute, naturally also curiosity and – as I’ve mentioned several times – excellence.

But the strongest and most defining things I associate with KInIT are collaboration and sharing. And that ultimately connects to why KInIT is a bit different. These are values that are essential for playing the endless game. Our approach is that we don’t need to be better than others, but we want to do things as well as possible – the best we can – to fulfil our vision. That isn’t possible without collaboration and sharing.

And there are many memorable experiences, from anecdotal ones to everyday situations. Sometimes I even enjoy misunderstandings, because you always learn something from them. When everything goes perfectly all the time, it starts to get boring.

Only good. Especially because, thanks to the large European lorAI project, the path toward becoming a recognised centre of excellence is becoming more concrete. We received an investment that allows us to create something like this for Slovakia. So our future builds on what we already have, such as excellent scientific results, a strong network, and initial steps in tech transfer…

I believe the future lies in becoming a strong player in the research and innovation ecosystem. On one hand, as an example for other institutions in various fields that could emerge this way and be our partners in the development, application, and research of AI. And certainly also as a place where talent and people who want to do something interesting and meaningful can come together.