Signature programme

AI and Romanian culture.
15 January.

Romania's National Culture Day (Ziua Culturii Naționale) falls right in the middle of the festival. We treat it as a working theme, not as an excuse for a gala evening.

01
The starting point

A small language in a world of large models.

Large language models are trained overwhelmingly on English. Romanian is a low-resource language compared with what the models consume: less clean data, fewer evaluation sets, fewer tools. The consequences show in the quality of the answers, in the cost of processing and in who can afford to build.

This is not a heritage problem, it is an infrastructure problem. And 15 January is the right day to put it on the table in front of the people who can do something about it.

02
The themes

What is discussed on the main stage, in the morning.

/ 01

The Romanian language in the age of large models

How well current models handle Romanian, where they get it systematically wrong, what is missing from the training data and who should produce the missing datasets.

/ 02

Romanian datasets and evaluation

Without Romanian evaluation sets we cannot tell whether a system works here. What exists, what is open, and what universities and companies should build together.

/ 03

Archives, libraries, museums

Digitising collections and what can be done next: searching old texts, handwriting recognition, linking collections across institutions, public access.

/ 04

Digital humanities and research

What university researchers already do with automated tools: corpus analysis, critical editions, history, linguistics. What they lack to go further.

/ 05

Assisted creation and copyright

What it means for a Romanian author, illustrator or composer to have their work in the training data. What European law says and what comes next.

/ 06

Heritage, without kitsch

What can be done intelligently with the heritage of Iași: the Palace of Culture (Palatul Culturii), the university collections, the city archives. What we will not do: generated poetry presented as a party trick.

03
The format

Open, not only to conference ticket holders.

The morning of 15 January, on the main stage. It is the only part of the festival designed to speak to people outside the industry as well: teachers, librarians, museum curators, researchers, cultural journalists, students of literature and history.

  • When15 January 2027, morningNational Culture Day
  • WhereMain stage, Palas Congress HallThe Chopin and Vivaldi halls combined
  • AccessAccess conditions will be announced in October 2026We want it to be open
  • LanguageRomanianInternational contributions in English

Working on one of these themes at a university, a cultural institution or a company? Write to us at [email protected], with the subject line “AI and Romanian culture”. The programme is being put together until December 2026.

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