Prominent Bulgarian scientists and researchers attended the first public lecture by the prize-winner of the "John Atanasov Award" which took place on 9 October this year.

The Computational Linguistics specialist Dr. Slav Petrov is the twelfth winner of the Presidential Award "John Atanasov" which is awarded for achievements in the field of information and communication technologies.

The prestigious prize is awarded since 2003 to promote the talented Bulgarian scientists to develop projects with high applied potential.

Slav Petrov is the head of a research group in the Google company since 2009. A promising Bulgarian scientist, he has a number of achievements, including the development of an improved algorithm for grammatical analysis; he is the author of a grammatical complement to the Google Translate, which leads to more accurate translations in more than 60 languages, including Bulgarian.

During his lecture in the Great Hall of the Academy of Sciences, Slav Petrov talked about his team’s work and the challenges facing his team at Google.