Prof. D.Sc. (Econ.) Stoyan Denchev was elected a full member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts – one of the highest honors in the European academic community.
On this occasion, a number of prominent public figures, scientists, clergymen and cultural figures shared their words of respect, gratitude and personal memories for the man who over the decades managed to unite science, spirituality, statehood and culture in a common mission for Bulgaria.
Prof. Denchev is the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the University of Library Science and Information Technology and Director of the Institute for Information and Security at the university.
The occasion for the speeches was the international recognition of his scientific contribution and his acceptance into the elite European academic community, but they also emphasized the public importance of his long-standing activity as a scientist, rector, visionary and defender of Bulgarian spirituality.
With the election of Prof. Denchev, Bulgaria receives another worthy presence among the intellectual elite of Europe, and the recognition of his personality also becomes a recognition of Bulgarian science, culture and spiritual tradition.
In their words, close associates, representatives of academic circles and public figures speak not only about his scientific achievements, but also about the person Stoyan Denchev – for his ability to inspire, to create bridges between institutions and generations, to defend knowledge as a moral value and to uphold the belief that without spirituality and memory there is no future. Their testimonies outline the image of a modern enlightener, whose work has long gone beyond the academic world and has become part of the spiritual image of modern Bulgaria.
We publish some of them:
Prof. Dr. Kiril Boyanov – a leading figure in the development of Bulgarian computer technology, with a key role in the introduction of the Internet and e-mail in Bulgaria in the 1990s. As an academician of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and a leading designer of Bulgarian computers, he contributed significantly to the development of information technologies, scientific networks and computer systems in the country:
Stoyan Denchev – scientist, visionary and organizer of knowledge:
a memory of the development of the Bulgarian school of informatics and cybernetics
I have known Stoyan Denchev since the 1970s - a time when Bulgarian science was looking for new applications and new horizons. He was a student with unconventional thinking, who, while absorbing knowledge, turned it into a movement forward and a perspective for current results. In the seminars on cybernetics and management theory, associated with the circle of Assoc. Prof. Dr. Dimitar Dobrev, he was distinguished by a vision that was ahead of its time - especially in the field of information systems, the management of complex processes and the emerging informatics.
Even as a graduate student (doctoral student in those years), he turned to information systems and the then first models for processing and accessing information arrays - a topic that today we would call the foundation of the digital society. During this period, he simultaneously considered science and its application and how knowledge could become a working tool in industry.
Our joint work and long discussions in those years were related to new directions in information systems and their practical implementation in Bulgarian industry. This was a period in which the country was building its technological capacity through specialized factories and applied science units, and the need for a new type of personnel - programmers, system analysts, computer specialists, was enormous. In this process, Stoyan Denchev stood out as a person who understood new technologies and was able to organize people and ideas around them.
A particularly important place in this story was occupied by his work within the International Federation for Information Processing - IFIP. Bulgaria had a strong presence at that time, and Denchev was an active participant and leader in Technical Committee No. 13, dedicated to the interaction "man-machine". This committee was among the most significant because it focused on the question of how people use computer systems - a topic that is today the basis of the entire digital world.
This international activity, together with the participation of Acad. Blagovest Sendov and the Bulgarian scientific school, enabled Bulgaria to be visible and active in the global scientific space.
Later, in the mature years of his scientific and public activity, Stoyan Denchev remained faithful to the idea of continuity. It was he who played a key role in the creation and establishment of the Sendov Awards – as a living mechanism for supporting young scientists and continuing the spirit of that innovative Bulgarian school.
Thus, in an unbroken line – from student seminars, through broad international contacts to global scientific structures and ideas for a generation of researchers, directly related to the construction of artificial intelligence were the focus of his vocation. Stoyan Denchev remains for me a man of ideas, who transformed knowledge into a system, and the system – as the main foundation for the future development of Bulgaria.
Prof. Dr. Petar Kenderov - a prominent Bulgarian mathematician, whose scientific work in the field of topology, functional analysis and optimization ranks him among the leading figures in the Bulgarian mathematical school. He is a long-time researcher at the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and one of the organizers of the first International Olympiad in Informatics - one of the most prestigious student competitions in the world. His work combines a high scientific level with a key contribution to the development of mathematical and computer science education in Bulgaria.
Prof. Stoyan Denchev as a “communicator“ and a connecting link in society
I am sincerely happy about this well-deserved recognition for Prof. Stoyan Denchev.
In my professional and social life, I have had the opportunity to meet prominent scientists, public figures, statesmen and people of culture who contribute to the development of society in different ways. Less often, people are found who possess several of the mentioned characteristics. We often say about them “they have a little of everything“.
However, in the case of Prof. Denchev, the expression “they have a lot of everything“ is more appropriate.
My work with him, while I was Chairman of the Supreme Attestation Commission to the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Bulgaria, gave me the opportunity to directly see his consistent commitment to Bulgarian science and higher education. For him, issues related to scientific development and academic standards were never formal or administrative. They were always part of a broader responsibility - to preserve the intellectual potential of the country and to strengthen the authority of Bulgarian science.
Especially significant is his contribution to Bulgarian community centers and to the activities of the International Foundation “St. St. Cyril and Methodius“. Prof. Denchev clearly realizes the historical role of the community center as one of the most enduring Bulgarian spiritual institutions – which arose before the modern Bulgarian state and functioned as a center of education, cultural consolidation and social unity. That is why his active work in this area, including the organization of initiatives dedicated to the work of the holy brothers Cyril and Methodius, has both cultural and deep social significance.
In this context, I would like to highlight a particularly characteristic feature of Prof. Denchev – his ability to know, understand and connect people. Here it is appropriate to recall the so-called hypothesis of the “small world”, formulated by the Hungarian writer Fridès Carinthi, and later developed as the idea of “six degrees of separation”. According to her, between every two people there is a short chain of acquaintances through which they can be connected.
In social terms, this leads to an important conclusion - society is not a collection of individuals, but a network of connections in which certain individuals play a key structuring role. These are people with a wide range of contacts who are able to activate them, create trust and turn individual connections into a functioning social fabric.
Prof. Stoyan Denchev belongs to this type of personality. His exceptional ability is expressed in the fact that he actually connects them - often through short chains of intermediaries - and creates working interactions between them. In this sense, he can be considered a typical “communicator“ in the deepest sense of the term - a person who understands the abilities, interests and potential of others and puts them in a productive relationship with each other.
That is why the contribution of Prof. Denchev should be considered on the one hand through his institutional and organizational achievements, and on the other - through his specific role as a connecting link in the social network. This ability of his has real consequences for the development of education, science, cultural institutions and social processes in Bulgaria.
In this sense, his work represents a valuable example of how the individual qualities of a person can have a systemic importance for the functioning of society as a whole.
Prof. Stoyan Markov - scientist at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, associated with the development of high-performance computing, supercomputer systems and the automation of complex computational processes. He has a long-standing contribution to the development of scientific and technological projects in the field of informatics and is among the people who participated in the development of the Bulgarian computing infrastructure and international scientific collaborations:
Artificial Intelligence as a Modern Digital Librarian and the Visionary Insight of Stoyan Denchev
Modern artificial intelligence, and in particular systems such as ChatGPT, GEMINI, Claud, can be understood most accurately not as a “thinking machine“ in the human sense, but as a new type of librarian - extremely fast, multilingual, who purposefully extracts the information you are interested in from huge arrays of books and publications. He does not “understand“ texts as a person makes sense of them, but works through neural networks trained to find the “semantic connection“ between the words in the text as a sequence of most probable events. Once trained, they can construct a sufficiently adequate response that resembles understanding, but is actually an intelligent synthesis of information extracted from huge repositories. In mathematics, this apparatus for predicting events with high probability is called Markov chains, and Prof. Denchev knows this section of probability theory well. This was a digression to mention his area of interest as a mathematician.
Looked at from this angle, the Internet becomes an endless library, and artificial intelligence - its new type of librarian. It “looks for a book“ not on the shelves, but flips through billions of pages simultaneously, arranges them by significance, correlation and relevance, regardless of language, and finally presents a synthesized response. This answer is a generalized view of human knowledge on a given issue, often with the ability to track and verify sources. This saves a lot of time, overcomes language barriers and makes accessible knowledge that would otherwise require decades of training and proficiency in multiple languages and disciplines. No person knows 60 languages, nor can think and reason in the seconds that AI can.
At the same time, there is no “universal“ artificial intelligence that can master everything equally well, and therefore specialized agents must be created, trained in specific areas of medicine, chemistry, biology, aerodynamics and others, including the humanities.
For example, in medicine, such an agent must “know“ anatomy and physiology at the level of a good doctor with many years of experience. Therefore, the key role is transferred to the people who create these systems – multidisciplinary teams of graduates of UniBIT and other universities and research centers, who use algorithms and methods to teach the “librarian“ to search for and organize knowledge and formulate adequate answers in a given area of human knowledge.
And it is here that the far-sighted intuition of Stoyan Denchev appears, who long ago felt, understood that library science and informatics are not separate worlds, but two sides of the same evolution. In his view, these sciences inevitably meet - one as a science of knowledge and its organization, the other as a science of its automatic extraction and arrangement from the gigantic arrays stored on the Web.
And so the two “parallel paths“ -of librarianship and artificial intelligence, now have an intersection. A perfect digital librarian of the future is being created. Just like in a modern “Alexandria Library“, it will serve people with different professions, with different interests, who think, create and implement.
In this sense, Stoyan Denchev's insight that these two paths would intersect turned out to be a correct prediction of the digital transition to “total awareness“, about which so much is written and talked. His academic idea simply happened.
Dr. Marcel Israel, ctn - member of the governing boards of international organizations working in the field of interreligious dialogue and cooperation, including “Religions for Peace – Europe“ (Berlin), the Bulgarian Forum for Interreligious Dialogue and Cooperation, the German-Bulgarian Forum for Cooperation (Berlin) and the Avram Forum for Interreligious Dialogue (Madrid):
Prof. Stoyan Denchev – a bridge between exact sciences, technologies and humanities
Prof. Stoyan Denchev is a prominent Bulgarian scientist in the field of mathematics and computer science, with an internationally recognized contribution to the development of information systems – both in the software and hardware fields.
He is the founder of the University of Library Science and Information Technology (UniBIT) - a unique academic institution in Bulgaria in its concept and structure, which combines the development of modern technologies with research in the field of cultural heritage, as well as initiatives for interreligious and interethnic dialogue.
It is difficult to name another scientist who unites in his work such a wide range of fields - from the exact sciences to the humanitarian and spiritual dimensions of knowledge, as Prof. Denchev does.
He invariably demonstrates a willingness to offer new ideas and solutions both on scientific issues and on university-administrative challenges. In addition to an established academic supervisor, he is also a respected colleague and partner in the scientific community.
It is precisely for this reason that Prof. Denchev enjoys high respect among both scientists and students - the future generation of the scientific community.
Plamen Vachkov - a leading Bulgarian engineer and manager in the field of electronics and information technologies, with a key role in the modernization of the national IT and telecommunications infrastructure. He has gone through an impressive professional path from scientific research at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences to senior management positions in industry and government, including Chairman of the State Agency for Information Technologies and Communications (2005-2009) and international technological structures. With solid academic training from Moscow and specializations in Japan, the USA and France, Vachkov has established himself as a strategic leader, connecting science, business and state policy.
Prof. Stoyan Denchev – pioneer of Bulgarian informatics and modern institution builder
I have known Prof. Stoyan Denchev since 1982, when he held the position of Deputy General Director of the TC “Informa“. Even then, he stood out as one of the pioneers of Bulgarian informatics – a man with clearly expressed strategic thinking and a flair for new technological and organizational processes.
In the different stages of his professional path – in the state administration, in the diplomatic service and in the management of large private companies, Prof. Denchev consistently left a lasting mark. He is distinguished by high competence, determination and the ability to achieve real and sustainable results.
Especially significant is his contribution to the creation and establishment of the University of Library Science and Information Technologies (UniBIT) – today a leading university in the field of informatics, information sciences and library work. Under his leadership, the institution has developed as a modern academic center with a clear mission and a recognizable profile.
No less important is his role in the preservation and development of Bulgarian community centers. Thanks to his efforts, they are gradually establishing themselves as modern information and cultural centers, combining tradition with the requirements of the new era.
In this sense, Prof. Stoyan Denchev stands out as a person who successfully combines professional expertise, institutional thinking and long-term social vision.
Source: www.unibit.bg