IN­SAIT – A per­fect ex­am­ple of bor­der­less re­search co­op­er­a­tion in Eu­rope

A suc­cess­ful pro­ject starts with per­son­al­i­ties, their his­tory and their con­nec­tions to other per­son­al­i­ties. In the case of IN­SAIT, it is Pro­fes­sor Mar­tin Vechev. Born and raised in Sofia, he grad­u­ated from the Sofia High School of Math­e­mat­ics (SMG). His ed­u­ca­tion and re­search took him to the UK, the USA and Canada. Today he is a full pro­fes­sor of com­puter sci­ence at ETH Zurich, where he heads the Se­cure, Re­li­able, and In­tel­li­gent Sys­tems Lab. With­out his col­lab­o­ra­tion with world-lead­ing in­sti­tutes in the field of ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence, nei­ther the know-how nor the funds needed to es­tab­lish the in­sti­tute in Sofia would have come to­gether.

A re­sult of in­ter­na­tional re­search co­op­er­a­tion

In ad­di­tion to pro­fes­sors from Switzer­land's two top tech­ni­cal uni­ver­si­ties, IN­SAIT also re­ceives sci­en­tific sup­port and ad­vice from re­searchers at other lead­ing re­search in­sti­tu­tions such as the In­sti­tute of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­ogy Aus­tria (ISTA), the Mass­a­chu­setts In­sti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy (MIT), UC Berke­ley, Yale, Prince­ton and the Tech­nion - Is­rael In­sti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy.

The start-up cap­i­tal for the in­sti­tute is around 100 mil­lion dol­lars for the next ten years. This will be pro­vided pri­mar­ily by the Bul­gar­ian gov­ern­ment through an en­dow­ment fund. But the real econ­omy is also par­tic­i­pat­ing in the pro­ject: Google is in­vest­ing $3 mil­lion over the next three years to pro­vide IN­SAIT with cloud com­put­ing re­sources and ac­cess to its Ten­sor Pro­cess­ing Unit Re­search Cloud, a ded­i­cated in­fra­struc­ture for run­ning high-per­for­mance ma­chine learn­ing mod­els. Tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies such as Site­Ground, Deep­Mind and Ama­zon Web Ser­vices are par­tic­i­pat­ing in the pro­ject as well. A num­ber of Bul­gar­ian en­tre­pre­neurs are sup­port­ing the in­sti­tute with more than seven mil­lion dol­lars.

Cut­ting-edge re­search knows no bor­ders

"IN­SAIT is ac­tu­ally the first in­sti­tute of its kind in East­ern Eu­rope and there­fore has the po­ten­tial to be a very ground­break­ing ini­tia­tive," says Prof. Mar­tin Vechev.

The new in­sti­tute is a per­fect ex­am­ple of the fact that cut­ting-edge re­search is only pos­si­ble with in­ter­na­tional co­op­er­a­tion be­tween all stake­hold­ers, the pub­lic sec­tor and the pri­vate sec­tor, and with­out po­lit­i­cal blink­ers. The es­tab­lish­ment of IN­SAIT in Sofia also stands for suc­cess­ful Swiss-Bul­gar­ian co­op­er­a­tion. This in turn un­der­lines the im­por­tance of transna­tional re­search co­op­er­a­tion in Eu­rope, to which Switzer­land can make an im­por­tant con­tri­bu­tion even as a non-EU mem­ber. At pre­sent, Switzer­land con­tin­ues to be treated as a third coun­try in the Eu­ro­pean re­search pro­gramme. It is in the in­ter­est of both the EU and Switzer­land to end this in­ad­e­quate sta­tus as soon as pos­si­ble and allow Switzer­land to par­tic­i­pate in Hori­zon Eu­rope as a full mem­ber.