Applied Reconfigurable Computing Group

Assoc. Prof. Paul FARAGO was honored to chair the Trusted Artificial Intelligence (Part II) workshop at the 2025 IEEE 21st International Conference on Intelligent Computer Communication and Processing (ICCP).

Why it matters: Trust is a system property—spanning data governance, robust modelling, explainability, and HW–SW co-design. From safety-critical electronics to medical AI and media integrity, we’re building AI that’s accurate, reliable, transparent, and deployable—together across academia, industry, and regulators.

The Romanian Artificial Intelligence Hub – HRIA, a strategic project of national scope, which marks an essential stage in positioning Romania as a key player on the European map of excellence in artificial intelligence, has been officially launched.

The HRIA project is coordinated by the National University of Science and Technology
POLITEHNICA Bucharest, in partnership with six prestigious universities in Romania:
Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, “Babeș-Bolyai” University of Cluj-Napoca,
West University of Timișoara, “Gheorghe Asachi” Technical University of Iași,
Politehnica University of Timișoara, University of Bucharest, along with eight innovative SMEs with a technological profile.

The ARC group is pleased to participate with innovative research topics within the HRIA project, encompassing the application and implementation of AI structures on programmable logic areas in the field of biomedical electronics, advanced biometric signal processing, and radio communications.

Today, 30th October 2022, the official site of the Applied Reconfigurable Computing (ARC) Group is created. For me, and hopefully also for my fellow colleagues, this date will mark the beginning of flourishing cooperation with each other and our industry and academic partners.

Sure, the effort of “unifying” our abilities has been around for a while, but creating a community is quite a challenge. An informal cooperation among the “founding” members exists back for many years and it was just time to form also a formal group to support various activities regarding Digital Design activities.

My firm belief is that the forming of this forum cannot more opportune then now. The local industry – not just in Cluj Napoca, the silicon valley of Transylvania, but also Romania and all over Europe – governments are concerned of (re)igniting the silicon industry in the European Union as the acute chip shortage could not be addressed with other means. As a result, public policies encourage investments into microelectronics and nanotechnologies. This means the creation of new job opportunities including digital designers from design and verification to physicals design of chips. Hopefully, the Romanian society will be receptive for the provocation of the next decades and will be active part of the solution. The IT industry is thriving in Cluj Napoca, including a fistful of companies that requires digital design abilities manly targeting FPGAs (former Digilent, now National Instruments, Analog Devices, etc.), but none of them ASICs. My personal assessment is that some companies wish to make the leap from FPGA to ASIC implementations, and they require the assistance of academics.

The ARC Group’s scope is to provide a forum where anybody can get an answer concerning Digital Design and related application areas (wireless communications, signal processing, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, etc.). Our intention is to provide teaching resources and hand-on experience for beginners, lifelong learning courses for professionals, digital design expertise for companies. We are open 24/7!

Assoc. Prof. Botond KIREI