Elena-Simona Apostol has scholarly and scientific contributions in fields related to Distributed Systems and Machine Learning and is a senior member of the Distributed Systems Research team and the MobyLab laboratory.
Dr. Apostol received her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Information Technology at the Computer Science and Engineering Department, Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, University Politehnica of Bucharest in November 2014. For her Ph.D. thesis, she researched different methods to optimize the way virtual resources and tasks are scheduled and managed in Clouds. She also designed a dynamic and flexible service composition engine for services in multi-cloud environments, and she provided an efficient implementation of an efficient searching and indexing model for very large sets of data.
Besides a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Information Technology, she also holds an M.Sc. Degree in Computer Science from the University Politehnica of Bucharest in 2010, and a B.Eng. in Computer Science from the University Politehnica of Bucharest in 2008. During her senior bachelor year and her master’s program, she was an intern and junior research engineer at the Fraunhofer FOKUS Institute, Berlin, Germany, where she worked on Computer Networking and Telecommunications, with a focus on mobile and service-orientated architectures. Dr. Apostol was an invited researcher at Inria Rennes-Bretagne Altlantique Research Centre, France, in 2011 and 2012.
From 2013 to 2014, she has also been a Postdoctoral Research at Microsoft Research Inria Joint Centre, France. During her postdoc, she worked on Big Data Analytics and Scientific Workflows for Multi-Site Clouds, with a use case in Bioinformatics. She was involved in the “Z-CloudFlow- Data WorkFlows in the Cloud” project that dealt with data-intensive geographically distributed workflows on Azure clouds. For this project, she has undertaken research on how to efficiently handle metadata across data centers and how to manage data and tasks so that they can be efficiently placed and accessed during execution.
In 2021, she served as a visiting researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (Fraunhofer FOKUS), where her research focused on the detection of misinformation and hate speech. Subsequently, in 2022, she held a temporary teaching and research position at the Division of Computing Science, Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University, Sweden.
In 2024, she obtained her habilitation in computer science with a thesis entitled ‘Intelligent Big Data Techniques for Textual Data Management and Analysis’.
Her research topics include Distributed Systems, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Big Data Analytics, Text Mining, Data Mining, Time Series Analysis, and Cloud Computing. Her work in these domains was published in prestigious conferences (rang A*/A: e.g., PODC- ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, ICCS-International Conference on Computational Science, EDBT-International Conference on Extending Database Technology), COLING-International Conference on Computational Linguistics) and top-level journals (e.g., Big Data Research, Neural Computing and Applications, IEEE Access, Information Systems Frontiers, Semantic Web Journal, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research). Her publication record includes more than 80 peer-reviewed papers: 27+ journal articles, 55+ conference articles, 2 books, and 5 book chapters. Her works have been cited 783+ times according to Google Scholar. Furthermore, her current Hirsch factor is 16 and her i10-index is 28, according to Google Scholar.
She has received several awards for research results in prestigious top Journals as part of the PRECISI UEFSCDI program. She is a member of the organizing or scientific committees of several international conferences and workshops, and she is a scientific referee for several high-impact journals and conferences.
Dr. Apostol has an extensive collaboration network with researchers and experts from all around Europe. As part of this network, she co-written several project proposals, organized workshops, gave talks, and co-authored many joint publications. She has been invited as a researcher at many prestigious universities and research institutes (for example, Aarhus University, Fraunhofer FOKUS, INRIA, and IHE Delft Institute for Water Education), and she worked in several renowned academic research organizations (for example, Uppsala University, Fraunhofer FOKUS, and Microsoft Research).
Dr. Apostol has more than nine years of management experience obtained from national and international projects. She is/was Principal Investigator in three national projects (SCAN-NEWS, StopXocial, ANDESITE), Principal Investigator in a DAAD project on hate speech and misinformation detection, Work Package co-leader in an H2020 project (Data4Water), and an active Management Committee member and Responsible partner for the Romanian team in an EU COST project (RECODIS).
As part of several European research groups, she has been a member of more than 18 national and international research projects.