Mostly serious work. Not always serious tone.
Hello — I’m Ema. I work on machines that try to read difficult documents: noisy newspapers, OCR and HTR transcripts, handwritten archives, inscriptions, administrative records, financial texts, multilingual media, and visual cultural collections.
I care about what AI extracts from them — people, places, events, relations, narratives, uncertainty — but also about what it misses, invents, flattens, or quietly ruins while looking very confident. I come from both computer science and art, so I tend to treat documents as data, evidence, image, memory, and occasional trouble.
Outside research, I keep returning to photography, handmade things, gardening with variable success, films, series, mostly non-fantasy books, metal festivals, camping, and soup logic. I like clarity, good noise, dry humor, and people who get to the point without murdering the point.
Noisy Documents
I study OCR, HTR, digitization errors, degraded text, and how noise changes downstream meaning.
Research + papers → 02Semantic Extraction
I work on named entities, entity linking, relations, events, and the small structures that make documents searchable.
Research + papers → 03Historical AI
I care about temporal modelling, multilingual archives, and language that refuses to stay stable.
Research + papers → 04Cultural Heritage
I work with digital epigraphy, Armenian and Ukrainian heritage, cultural weaponization, and structured memory.
Research + papers → 05Multimodal Archives
I connect text, image, layout, typography, photographs, and visual traces in document collections.
Research + papers → 06Applied Document Intelligence
I have also worked on document fraud, fake news detection, epidemic monitoring, and large-scale research infrastructures.
Research + papers →Photograph / video projects
Older art portfolio projects and newer photo collections: rooms, objects, bodies, evidence, awkward freedom, and other visual trouble. Click a cover to open the full project.
2017
Fake Freedom
A photo sequence about performance, escape, and awkward freedom.
2017 · photography · 8 images
2014
Cutting into Silence
A quiet sequence of surfaces, cuts, gestures, and withheld movement.
2014 · photography · 7 images
2014
Exhibition
Exhibition views, installation fragments, and documentation.
2014 · exhibition documentation · 28 images
2014
November Queue
Waiting, street fragments, bodies, and public-space choreography.
2014 · photography · 6 images
2014
Yellow Room
An interior, a colour, light, objects, and a room becoming a scene.
2014 · photography · 5 images
2013
Everything but You
Rooms, objects, absence, and traces of someone not directly shown.
2013 · photography · 13 images
2010
Space in Time
Private space, performance, rooms, projection, exhibition.
2010 · performance · video · photography · programming · interactivity
2010
Christmas '10
Small events, familiar surroundings, memory loops.
2010 · photography
2010
Înainte de a adormi
Video project, 2010; “cu 30 de ani înainte.”
2010 · video
2009
Tableau Vivant
Photography and exhibition views, 2009.
2009 · photography
2009
Tătărași
Photography and exhibition views, 2009.
2009 · photography
2009
A reface
Video stills from the 2009 portfolio.
2009 · video
2009
The same
Video project, 2009.
2009 · video
2007
2007 Journal
A book of images, text fragments, truthfulness and staring.
2007 · photography · bookPosts, notes, opinions
A place for short texts about AI, archives, cultural heritage, evidence, noise, and other things that refuse to stay neatly technical.
LLMs in archives: fluent, useful, suspicious
On why good prose is not the same thing as grounded historical understanding.
NoteDocuments are evidence, not just data
A small manifesto for building AI systems that keep traces attached to claims.