Sofia University “St Kliment Ohridski” (SU), established in 1888, is the oldest university in Bulgaria. It has become one of the most highly reputable centers of science on the Balkans, a full-fledged university of the European type. Today SU is the biggest and most prestigious scientific hub in the country. It has 16 faculties with more than 120 accredited bachelor’s degree programmes, more than 400 master’s degree programmes and over 190 doctoral programmes.
SU, and in particular its current Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics (FMI), is the country’s pioneer in higher education in the field of Artificial Intelligence. The first university course in AI was launched in 1980 for students majoring in Mathematics at FMI. In the 1990s, several specializations were launched within the then-new Informatics major, including AI. In 2002, the Master’s Programme in AI at FMI was officially launched, and has enjoyed high interest and significant success throughout its more than 20-year history.
The Master’s Programme in AI gives the graduates good theoretical knowledge in the field of intelligent systems and a variety of practical skills related to the application of AI methods and techniques in a wide range of areas of Informatics and IT. The curriculum includes courses in fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence, knowledge modeling and design of knowledge bases, machine learning and deep lerning, information retrieval, data mining and knowledge discovery in big data, natural language processing and large language models, image processing and pattern recognition, embedded and autonomous systems, neural networks and genetic algorithms, robot control, semantic technologies, recommender systems, etc.
