Andrei Coman

Andrei Coman is from Bucharest, Romania and graduated from the “Tudor Vianu” National High School of Computer Science, one of the most prestigious Romanian high schools. He intends to major in Computer Science (with a focus in AI or Theoretical CS) and minor in Mechanical Engineering or Applied Mathematics.

Andrei discovered his passion for STEM fields from a very young age, when he came upon the works of polymaths. He has dedicated most of his time to the study of Computer Science, Mathematics and Physics, and wants to follow a career in Engineering. Throughout middle school and high school, Andrei worked with some of the best Romanian teachers and represented his country in tens of individual international contests and olympiads. Some of his most remarkable achievements are his medals from the Balkan Olympiad of Informatics, the Tuymaada Olympiad, the Zhautykov Olympiad, the Open Programming Olympiad and the International Autumn Tournament in Informatics. However, team projects have also been a core element of his development, as he won the first prize in the NASA Space Settlement Design Contest, the Honorable Mention at the Princeton Unlimited Contest and reached the final stage of the MIT Zero Robotics Tournament.

Throughout his sophomore year, Andrei realised that, in order for his work to be meaningful, he should also apply his competitive experience in other fields. Thus, in 2018, he gained his first experience in Software Engineering by working at Ubisoft Romania, becoming the first high school student to intern for their Romanian center. There, he collaborated in a 13-person team of students to develop a fully-functional and highly-efficient product from scratch and implemented, optimized and integrated the scripts for several functionalities. This experience convinced him to later create his own local media player, for which he was awarded the Professional Computer Proficiency Certificate by the Romanian Ministry of Education.

In the summer of 2019, his passion for theoretical Computer Science ultimately led him to research the field of Natural Language Processing at the Romanian Academy Center for Artificial Intelligence. He conducted his work under the guidance of Acad. Prof. Dr. Dan Tufiș and Dr. Maria Mitrofan, and developed a highly-efficient annotation algorithm for Romanian legal documents. He achieved his highest academic performance yet by publishing his work at the International Conference on Linguistic Resources (ConsILR 2019) and by co-authoring an article for the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020).

Driven by his fascination for interdisciplinarity, Andrei further completed a Training Stage at the National Institute of Materials Physics, in the Magnetism/Superconductivity Department. There, he attended a series of advanced lectures on Quantum and Statistical Mechanics, Microscopy, Spectroscopy and Superconductivity. While completing his internship, he assisted ongoing research which aimed to reduce rare-earth components in permanent magnets and to efficiently produce nanoporous materials, which are used in drug delivery systems.

Right now, Andrei is looking forward to expand his horizons, to conduct more research projects and to bring a meaningful contribution to the world as part of Columbia Engineering.