Mihai Surdeanu

Prof. Mihai Surdeanu Fulbright U.S. Scholar University of Arizona, USA

Research areas: Natural Language Processing, Large Language Models, Machine Reasoning, Interpretable AI

Mihai Surdeanu is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Arizona, where his research focuses on natural language processing, artificial intelligence, machine reasoning and interpretable computational models. His work investigates how computational systems can process, extract and reason over meaning expressed in natural language, including through question answering, information extraction and other forms of automated language understanding.

During his Fulbright semester at UTCN, Prof. Surdeanu will collaborate with researchers from the Computer Science Department and AIRi@UTCN on new large language models designed to understand and participate meaningfully in complex debates. The research explores the potential of such models to augment expert decision-making in domains including healthcare and public policy. He will also teach the Natural Language Processing master's course for the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and Vision study tracks at the Computer Science Department.

Before joining the University of Arizona, he was a research scientist in the Natural Language Processing group at Stanford University and Chief Scientist at Lex Machina. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Southern Methodist University.

Prof. Surdeanu has published more than 150 peer-reviewed articles and has an extensive record of research in natural language processing and artificial intelligence. His work has received support from U.S. government organizations including DARPA, NIH and NSF, as well as private research organizations and foundations.

In 2026, he was selected as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar for Romania, with the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca as his host university for the September–December 2026 grant period.