Meet Marián Šimko

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.

In today’s episode of the series, you’ll meet Marián Šimko, who was there at the very beginning of KInIT and now serves as the deputy director. Marián also leads the natural language processing team and focuses his research on information extraction and language modelling. His main interest lies in how artificial intelligence can support the fight against disinformation and contribute to more trustworthy language technologies – and he guides young NLP talents at the Kempelen Institute toward these same values.

I remember the very first conversations with industry representatives who later became our founders. We had to demonstrate the viability of our team, which at the time had lost its institutional backing. It was necessary to clearly show that there was a group of people with real potential. Our founders had the right value alignment, compatible with ours, and they wanted to support a good cause. They didn’t want Slovakia to lose part of its talent – because that was also at stake. A group of skilled people could have scattered across the world. I’m very glad that in the end we managed to gain their support.

I also remember the conversations with fellow researchers who were hesitant about whether to get involved at all. Some were disheartened and were thinking about changing their careers from academic or scientific paths to something else. In many cases, it wasn’t easy, but in the end, many of them stayed and are still with us, which is just great.

Then came the discussions with Majka, when we talked about how the teams could be structured at the very beginning – who would be where and how it might look so that it made sense and, from the start, created something that would also be sustainable in the long run.

And I still recall the memories of how the name came about. We were sitting on an online call back then, since those were still Covid-marked times, and we were brainstorming what the institute could be called and what abbreviation it should have. We wanted it to sound good, not resemble anything else, and have the potential to become a strong brand later. We discussed many options, but in the end, Kempelen Institute, or KInIT, won. Alternatives included IIIT, EICIT, or even KICIT.

Today, I think many of us are focused on sustainability – making sure that what is thriving now can keep working in the long term. That means proving what we’ve been striving for since the very beginning: that an independent research institute can be built in Slovakia, one that connects academia with industry and becomes a strong ecosystem player supporting innovation.

In the long run, we want to be as little dependent on donors as possible. We need to be able to earn our own way, identify and seize the opportunities available on the market, and connect them all so that the scientific and innovation worlds function together. And so that KInIT can be here for as long as possible.

That moment came when we managed to secure our third or fourth grant project. That’s when I realised it wasn’t just luck or a coincidence – there was really something behind it: we had the necessary know-how and truly knew how to write grants. I began to believe that “yes, this was the right path”.

I see it very optimistically. Over the past five years, we’ve managed to significantly expand our network. We have many contacts, we’re involved in numerous consortia, and my colleagues are doing fantastic work. We’ve become responsible and reliable partners for our collaborators. As a result, we’re now receiving invitations to new projects and consortia – we no longer have to seek them out proactively or convince anyone of our quality. The momentum has started, and we no longer face the uncertainties we did in the beginning. It’s much easier now, and we can benefit from it in many ways. Even if some things don’t work out, we’re already established and internationally recognised, at least to some degree.

We may not yet have the excellent scientific individuals we ideally need, but we’re on the best path to achieve that. That’s natural – five years is a very short time for something like this. We need to wait a bit for our experts to publish more in top forums and for stable recognition of their work to emerge. In the scientific world, this isn’t unusual, but it requires patience. After that, KInIT will be even stronger, and I believe we are moving in that direction.