West University of Timisoara

The West University of Timișoara (UVT) stands as one of the largest public institutions of higher education in western Romania, boasting an enrollment of over +15,000 students and a staff of 1,100. UVT is part of the UNITA European University.  Established in 1994, the Center for Research in Computer Science (CeRiCS) evolved from a Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence and Parallel Computing to a nationally recognized research hub in 2001. CeRiCS spearheads groundbreaking research in various fields including Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Parallel Computing, Distributed Computing, Image Processing, CyberSecurity and Blockchain, Quantum Computing, Theory of Computing and  Computational Mathematics. CeRiCS possesses a nationally and internationally recognized HPC infrastructure. The group's expertise, demonstrated through involvement in various national and international projects and publication of research papers, spans several areas including agent-based models, machine learning for data knowledge extraction, anomaly detection, intelligent environments, heuristic methods, scalable architectures for big data processing, task distribution in intelligent systems and additionally, in studying dynamic systems, with applications in analyzing neural network behavior. Recent achievements within the last five years include the development of fast algorithms to bolster blockchain attack resilience, high-performance architectures for big data forensics and adaptive blockchain smart-contract execution, application of machine learning in anomaly detection and industrial flaw detection, creation of architectures and tools for sensor-based vital sign monitoring, and design of scalable algorithms for resource allocation in distributed systems. CeRiCS team groups +30 researchers working on topics related to distributed computing, high performance computing and artificial intelligence and over 20 PhD students. In the last +10 years the CeRiCS team was involved in 13 national and international research projects, while 9 projects (2 research projects and 7 projects for the development of the research infrastructure) have been financed from structural funds. The Department of Computer Science from UVT offers several master programs including Artificial Intelligence and Distributed Computing (since 2008, in English), Big Data - Data Science, Analytics and Technologies (since 2018, in English) and Cybersecurity (since 2022, in English).  The Computer Science Department is the initiator and co-organizer of the SYNASC  international conference which includes an Artificial Intelligence and Distributed Computing tracks and a special session on secure algorithms for permissioned and permissionless blockchains.