Empowering Romanian Research on Intelligent Information Technologies

Final Report Summary - ERRIC (Empowering Romanian Research on Intelligent Information Technologies)

Executive Summary:
The Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers (A&C) at the University "Politehnica" of Bucharest is already well known as both a national and regional centre of excellence in Intelligent Information Technologies. The main goal of the ERRIC project was to empower A&C existing excellence in research by unlocking its significant research potential and enhancing its national and regional leadership position in selected areas of Intelligent Information Technologies: agreement technologies, semantic and collaborative technologies for the web, advanced grid technologies, large scale distributed system services, and adaptive intelligent control. Throughout this project, fostering high quality research in these areas of A&C expertise will lead to a comprehensive and sustainable integration of A&C into the wider European Research Area context. Based on our SWOT analysis of existing competence and experience, the project objectives were:

1. Strengthen Core Research Excellence
1.1 Strengthen the research and technological innovation capacities of A&C in above mentioned areas of Intelligent Information Technologies by increasing the quality and number of published papers and participation of A&C permanent staff to high quality scientific events; hiring of experienced researchers to perform research in specific topics relevant to IIT, and an experienced research manager; expanding the current research infrastructure: (a) develop a new Laboratory of Ambient Intelligence, the first one in the country; (b) upgrade the HPC resources of A&C by almost doubling the capacity of the NCIT to reach an estimated performance in benchmarking of 2 TFlops.
1.2 Reinforce the A&C research potential by supporting and mobilising A&C human resources through trans-national two-way secondments of A&C research staff by the staff of the 12 EU partnering organizations, towards exchanging know-how and experience, and building long-term cooperation relationships.
1.3 Establish an ambitious research agenda and the Roadmap of A&C RTDI to significantly develop its research potential in the strategic selected research areas and bring A&C research activity to the highest European level.
1.4 Improve A&C’s ability to respond to ICT related socio-economic needs in Romania and Europe by orienting the research topics towards these needs, in interaction with the project Advisory Board.

2. Networking, Community Building and Strategic Partnerships
2.1 Make A&C an international gateway to access IIT research results through ERRIC Knowledge E-Environment (KEE) and ERRIC portal; web traffic will be used to measure the impact of these developed resources.
2.2 Establish and adequately resource strategic partnerships and wide-ranging collaborations between A&C and high excellence research units across the EU through the European Network of Excellence and Partnership in IIT, including common organisation of scientific events, cooperation agreements between institutions, common R&D project proposals, throughout the duration of the project and beyond.
2.3 Build the capacity of A&C for a better collaboration with high tech companies towards valorisation of high potential research results, including the organisation of the A&C Brokering events; more than 30 companies from Romania and abroad will be contacted and invited to join the Network.

3. Promotion, Visibility and Dissemination
3.1 Organize 18 high quality scientific events and 4 dissemination events, in cooperation with the partnering organizations, focused on knowledge sharing and network building, to raise international awareness of A&C research capacity.
3.2 Promote A&C scientific research excellence and increase its visibility by the publication of A&C research book and the elaboration of the A&C dissemination, promotion and awareness plan and package (DPA package).
3.3 Disseminate scientific information and results of A&C research by publishing a book with selected research contributions of A&C staff, which were enabled by ERRIC activities, in an internationally recognized publishing house.

The empowering of A&C’s existing research excellence in the domain of Intelligent Information Technologies and the achievement of ERRIC objectives have a strong impact at different levels: an immediate impact that enforces A&C research capacity and strategically positions A&C’s research staff for a comprehensive integration in the ERA, a national impact by the creation of the network of excellence and partnership at national level and an increase in prestige of A&C at national level, and an European impact, by fostering long term strategic partnerships with leading research institutions from EU and strengthening opportunities to participate in internationally funded research, such as FP7 and Horizon 2020.

Project Context and Objectives:
The Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers (Romanian name: “Facultatea de Automatică şi Calculatoare”, A&C) is part of the largest technical university of Romania, University “Politehnica” of Bucharest. A&C itself is the most important faculty in the domains of Information Technologies and Control Systems Engineering in the country, both by number of students and by its existing research potential.
Established in 1967, the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers has as mission the development of a fertile environment for education, research and innovation, key factors in the expansion of the knowledge-based economy. Specifically, the mission of the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers is to empower high-quality scientific research, to share knowledge through education in the domains of Computer Science and Information Technologies, and Systems Engineering, as well as to offer a stimulating, high-level professional and social environment to the students and academic staff within the faculty.
The Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers prepares engineers in the domains of “Systems Engineering” and “Computer Science and Information Technology”, based on modern curricula, where the theoretical aspects are combined with practical excellence. The students of the Faculty benefit from a competitive learning environment that stimulates creativity, scientific and technical initiatives, personal development and active involvement of the future specialists in the development of a modern society.
The Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers is already well known as a national pole of excellence in Intelligent Information Technologies. In this context, in 2010, the Faculty was granted the ERRIC project: “Empowering Romanian Research on Intelligent Information Technologies:, project number: 264207, FP7-REGPOT-2010-1, under the FP7 Capacities Work Programme: Research Potential, funding scheme: Coordination and support action, Area: 4.1.Unlocking and developing the Research Potential of research entities established in the EU´s Convergence Regions and Outermost region, the project duration is 36 months, the start date is 1 September 2010.
The idea of the ERRIC project emerged as a result of A&C's sustained efforts over the last number of years to enhance the overall excellence of A&C research and education activities. In today’s global economy, A&C now finds itself competing with other universities and research entities across Europe to attract and retain the best students in the face of both limited human resources and financing.
The strategy of the ERRIC project was based on a synergic combination of A&C's mission and strategy to promote excellence in scientific research and the goals of the Region Potential programme, aiming to stimulate the realisation of the full research potential of the enlarged European Union by unlocking the research excellence of A&C and strengthening the A&C capacity to successfully participate in research activities at Community level.
The ERRIC concept was to leverage, support and further develop the existing high quality human and material resources of A&C with the goal of achieving international recognition for the Faculty as a world class research excellence pole in a complex domain, Intelligent Information Technologies, which require the synergetic gathering of several research areas converging to support the development and deployment of such systems. Moreover, A&C blossom to its full research potential and promotion of its excellence in research at European and international level have the capacity to attract high quality international researchers, financial resources at national, regional and European level, and make A&C an active contributor to the European Research Area (ERA).
The main goal of the ERRIC project was to empower A&C’s existing excellence in research by unlocking its significant research potential and enhancing its national and regional leadership position in selected areas of Intelligent Information Technologies (IIT): agreement technologies, semantic and collaborative technologies for the web, advanced Grid technologies, large scale distributed system services, and adaptive intelligent control. In order to achieve this main goal, the following specific objectives have been put forth.

Project objectives
In what follows we preset the project objectives as compared to the project achievements.

Strengthen Core Research Excellence
Produce high quality scientific papers on IIT:
- 101 participations to high quality scientific events, 6 in year 1, 27 in year 2, 70 in year 3.
- 22 journal papers reporting work directly supported by ERRIC project and 4 another journal papers to be published
- 102 conference papers and book chapters reporting work directly supported by ERRIC project
- Over 300 papers of A&C staff reporting results in ERRIC domains
- The publication of 9 books in renown printing houses such as Hermes Lavoisier, Paris (2), John Wiley, USA (1), Springer (4), and IEEE Explore (2);

Hire experienced researchers and an experienced research manager: Marc Demage - experienced research manager, Francesco Ciardiello, Loretta Ichim, Liviu Gabriel Vladutu, Olivier Pages, Liviu Badea

Develop a new Laboratory of Ambient Intelligence. The Laboratory is fully functional, with an agenda of research topics, for example: people tracking, activity recognition, face recognition, ant like robot floor cleaning, multi-modal interaction

Upgrade the HPC resources to reach an estimated performance in benchmarking of 3 Tflops: Blade Servers - 14 x86 12 cores BladeServer, 32GB RAM ; 2Blade Servers - 8 Power 16 cores Bladeserver, 32 GB RAM ; Blade Servers - 4 Dual NVIDIA Tesla M2070 Bladeserver ; BladeCenter H Chassis - 2 BladeCenter H Chassis

Reinforce the A&C research potential by supporting and mobilising human resources through trans-national two-way secondments with 11 partnering organizations from 5 EU countries
- Added one partnering organisation -> 12 partnering organizations
- Achieved 76 research secondments

We have establish an ambitious research agenda and the Roadmap of A&C RTDI and we have Established thematic priorities for A&C research

Improve A&C’s ability to respond to ICT related socio-economic needs in Romania and Europe by developing relationships with enterprises, cooperation agreements, A&C Brokerage Event
Networking, Community Building and Strategic Partnerships
- ERRIC portal developed and fully functional (www.erric.eu)
- ERRIC Knowledge E-Environment – fully functional
- A&C Alumni database – fully functional
- A&C Brokerage Event – 4 editions achieved

Establish strategic partnerships and wide-ranging collaborations between A&C and high excellence research units across the EU.
- 21 Cooperation agreement with universities from EU and Romania
- 15 partnerships with universities from EU and Asia
- Over 10 project proposals in cooperation

Build the capacity of A&C for a better collaboration with high tech companies towards valorisation of high potential research results.

- ERRIC started A&C Brokerage Event: 4 editions of A&C Brokerage Event – participation of a total of 48 companies
- Cooperation agreements with 15 ITC companies: Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Teamnet International, Aquasoft, Intel, Thales, Pythia International, Google, IXIA, IBM, Gameloft, Microsoft, CISCO, Eau de Web, TotalSoft

A spin-off created as a result of the ERRIC project and which was won as the result of a competition for structural funds: POSCCE-AXA2, O2.3.1-2008-1: Digital electronic systems for the intelligent control of eolian and photovoltaic equipment, SMIS-CSNR: 42577, Contract Nr: 486 / July 2013.
Patent: “Distributed processing platform with applications in fractal analysis”, Dobrescu R., Țarălungă S., Ichim L., Mocanu Șt., CBI, no. a 00875, CBI, no. a 00875, confirmed by OSIM decision 6/156/29.11.2013

Promotion, Visibility and Dissemination of ERRIC results and of A&C
- A total of 43 Dissemination events, among which
- 22 High quality scientific events in: Agreement and Semantic Technologies: 6 events; Intelligent Grid Technologies: 6 events; Innovation and Technology Transfer: 10 events; Promote A&C through the dissemination, promotion and awareness plan and package
- New look and rebranding
- A&C Research and Excellence Flyer
- A&C Research Book
- Promotion materials (pins, t-shirts, spider, roll-ups)
- Dissemination and awareness rising in press, TV, different sites, conferences
- A&C promotional movie

The research areas pertaining to Intelligent Information Technologies, on which ERRIC is focused, were mapped on the relevant challenges and objectives in FP7. It is relevant to note that these research areas are also relevant to the priorities and challenges in Horizon 2020 which proved the sustainability of ERRIC vision and focus research directions.

Project Results:
The new emerging paradigm of using “intelligence” in technology is a key aspect that drives research towards innovation and a better life of Europe citizens. Based on a long time acquired experience and solid results in research, development and technology transfer, the research strategy and efforts of A&C staff are converging towards the development of a new generation of IT systems, namely Intelligent Information systems, which require the synergetic gathering of several research areas converging to support the development and deployment of such systems.
Our long term goals and priorities in research are targeting fundamental and applied research, but also interdisciplinary research towards a robust understanding of Intelligent Information systems and associated technologies.
Starting from our competences and targeted excellence in research, but also from the general scientific and technological demands to achieve integration of research and implementation efforts, we have identified the following tightly correlated research direction that have to be mutualised and multi-way exploited towards building and deploying IIT systems and applications:
• agreement technologies: agent models, semantics, interactions, organizations;
• semantic and collaborative technologies for the web: Semantic Web, Web intelligence, ontology alignment, Web 3.0;
• advanced Grid technologies: semantic grid, intelligent grids;
• large scale distributed system services: intelligent deployment of tasks and services, societal services, intelligent service discovery;
adaptive intelligent control: intelligent robot control, data fusion, adaptive robust control.

1 Strengthen research skills and develop guidelines for research and innovation
1.1 Develop guidelines for research and innovation
One of the main goals of this line of action was to strengthen the A&C research connections and increase its visibility by interactions with experienced researchers from partnering institutions and other research leading organisations, but also industry specialists to exchange experience, good practice, important topics for future research, identify topics for joint doctoral research, and internship opportunities.
We have developed a Roadmap for A&C Research, Technology, Development and Innovation, by interaction with the experienced research manager, Marc Demange, and with representatives of the Steering Committee that we have created. The Roadmap comprised a policy for research beyond the duration of the project to achieve an optimal synergy between the project outcomes and opportunities offered at European level. Thus, we have established which are the most promising and compelling research directions for A&C to pursue in the next 5 years.
The result of this activity was presented in Deliverable D2.1 Roadmap of A&C RTDI. The main points that were covered by this deliverable are presented in what follows. The first part, regarding the A&C research strategy, started by presenting our vision on what is the role of research in our overall educational and creative activity and strategy, then presented our aim to develop a more oriented reasearch team, by tackling aspecst such as: how to support the research staff, guaranteeing ethical behaviors in research, how to ensure financial support, how to improve the research environment and how to achieve a coordinated management of research.
We then discussed about the important role of communication in establishing a solid reputation in resaerch, coveringa spects such as A&C identity, web pages, A&C publications, and other ways to promote the faculty in media. The last topic covered by this last part was devoted to fund raising, spcifically the strategy for national / international research, the connections with companies, research contracts and research entrepreneurship, the involvement of alumni, and the idea of creating an A&C-research foundation.
Among the different conclusions of this first part, one of the most important was that the animation for research is an important issue that contributes to a fruitful environment. A&C needs to promote this dimension and incite its professors to be involved in this kind of activities since they are of great importance for visibility, international exchanges and collaboration development.

The second part of this delivery provided the main lines of research that represent strategic priorities of the research of A&C. these were organized according to the priority topics identified in the project proposal. In the domain of distributed computing and large scale distributed systems, we have identified the following thematic lines of research that are to be pursued:
- Communication in large scale distributed systems (LSDS), resource management in LSDS, monitoring of distributed systems, task scheduling in LSDS, and, most important, dependability of LSDS: conception, architecture, functionality.
- Argumentation in multi-agent systems (MAS), negotiation in MAS considering both theoretic based negotiation and heuristic negotiation, negotiation between humans and agents, cordination of agents in agent systems, agents in ambient intelligence applications, context aware and context dependent computing, management of context in ambient intelligent applications, ambient assisted living,
- Ontology alignment, data and text mining, social data mining, opinion and sentiment mining, conversation analysis as a subtopic of natural language processing, personalization of learning experiences through chats and conversations analizes fronm a natural language processing point of view, computer supported collaborative learning environments, including mobile such environments.

Cognitive and collaborative robotics in adaptive intelligent control, natural-like human-robot interaction systems, intelligent control architectures for emergent types of robots, robot sculpture, open manufacturing control with agile reconfiguring of robot services, service-oriented technologies for cognitive and collaborative control in robotics and manufacturing, the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm and implementing issues for the manufacturing enterprise.
We have also developed a technology survey in IIT focussed on the selected priority areas of FP7 that we found of interest considering the already acquired experience of A&C, aiming to provide a comprehensive understanding of current state of the art, identify key actors in the international research community with a view to developing relationships for project participation under FP7 and future research calls. This technology survey was the subject of Deliverable D2.4 Technology survey on IIT: Prospectives and challenges.
At the middle of ERRIC project, the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers has already achieved good research results in this four key domains of expertise. If we want to broadly sum-up these realizations, let us point out that, during this period, the number of publications (published or accepted) from members of the Faculty includes more than 30 international journal papers and over 200 published in proceedings of important conferences. Among these publications approximately 25% are coauthored with colleagues from our international network. In the same time, 4 international conferences/workshops were organized in Romania and 5 in the rest of Europe (see D5.1 and D5.3 for more details). Moreover at least 6 other conferences or workshops are already scheduled for 2013. All the conferences organized during the period 2011 and 2012 were successful as they attracted approximately 100 colleagues from other countries (EU, as well as third countries). Moreover they all include good international scientific committee. All these achievements can be seen as an index of our international visibility and we can only forecast the best for the second part of the project as well as after ERRIC project. In particular, we expect that the international exposure of conferences scheduled in 2013 will be much higher. This visibility and international collaborations is constantly to be improved by the exchange policy and the secondments visits organized in the frame of the project. We expect that these visits will increase the number of collaborations, research proposals and joint papers in the future.
All these facts illustrate the excellent potential of the Faculty A&C to become a key actor in these domains during the next years and shows also the great impact of ERRIC project for achieving this ambitious objective.
During the first year of the project a methodology for requesting funding needed to participate to different conferences was developed. This methodology included criteria such as the necessity to either have (at least) one paper to an important scientific event or to help disseminating the ERRIC project to important events from the areas of research targeted by the project (agreement technologies, semantic and collaborative technologies for the web, advanced grid technologies, large scale distributed system services, adaptive intelligent control), the number of papers to be presented at the considered event(s), the event(s)’s location (encouraging the funding of the events that are organized in Europe), the quality of the presented research paper/talk within the event, the importance of the event, the opportunities for extending the research network and engage in future research proposals and projects with foreign partners, etc. Since the development of this methodology took time and being also influenced by the nature of Computer Science conferences and journals, which require a large time interval (at least 6 months) between the submission of research papers and their review and publication, in the first year of the project there were very few papers that received financial support from the ERRIC project: 6 participations of 5 researchers to 4 different events (3 conferences for presenting research papers – CSCL 2011, IESM 2012 and ISMIS 2011 – and 1 disseminating event – S3T 2010 –) were funded.
During the second year this situation started to change, as a direct result of both advertising the possibilities of being funded from this project and receiving the confirmation of acceptance for publication of research papers written and submitted in the first and in the beginning of the second year of the project. Therefore, 27 participants (4.5 times more than in the first year) were funded by ERRIC to disseminate their work, resulting in 16 researchers that have attended 16 different events plus a paper published in a journal.

In the third year of the project, 70 event participations were selected for funding by the ERRIC staff. These results are summarized in Table 1. As we can see, the effect of the increase in quality and productivity of the A&C research staff can be seen by the increase in the number of participation in events in the 1.5 years at the final of the project.
The results of these participations were beneficial both for improving the visibility of the high-quality research performed in the A&C laboratories (and of the ERRIC project in general) and for giving a chance to the A&C members to access some of the most recent scientific and technical advances in their fields.
Another benefit of these participations was represented by the improvement of the research networks of the A&C members: either by discovering new peers or by meeting previous collaborators and tighten up the relations. The first case is exemplified by the proposal for a bilateral project between Romania and Cyprus (EPBL2IT - Enhancing Problem Based Learning through Intelligent Information Technologies), which connected some of the A&C members to a new research group from Larnaca University (Cyprus). In the second category falls the collaborative writing of a bilingual book ("Optimization techniques – Stochastic heuristic methods and decision support" - in English and French) by Prof. Dumitru Popescu and his peers from Lille University - Pierre Borne and his group.
Another beneficial effect of the participation to different conferences and of the debates and feedback received after the presentation of the research papers was the ability to improve the current research abilities of some A&C members and the possibility to diversify their interest by getting involved in new research on similar or new topics. It also opened the way to publish improved versions of their papers to different journals, as a consequence of the editors invitation after the conference publication.
As in the previous years, another major impact of this project was also observed in the case of talented young researchers: since the research funding in Romania does not permit most of the researchers to present their results even at important conferences, this project gave them a chance for presenting their work.

Finally, another major impact of the participations to different conferences is represented by the recognition of the high-quality research conducted by the A&C members. In this category falls the best scientific paper (theory) of the workshop award received by Professor Theodor Borangiu and his colleagues at RAAD 2012. Another example is the publishing of books by prestigious publishers or different proposals of joint projects.

1.2 Two-ways secondments for research staff
Two-ways secondments enable actions for preparing future high quality research, to stimulate the mobilization and strengthening of the capacity of A&C human resources through networking activities with leading scientists from partnering organizations. The participants are members of research staff in A&C and EU strategic partners, including experienced researchers.
ERRIC thematic priorities, established from the project start, are focused on the following areas:
• Advanced Grid Technologies
• Large Scale Distributed Systems Services
• Agreement Technologies
• Semantic and Collaborative Technologies for the Web
• Adaptive Intelligent Control.

These priorities are covered by the specialties of the EU Partnering Organizations in ERRIC, and respond to the needs and profile of A&C faculty of UPB. During these secondments multiple research teams were involved in the research activities. Bellow we present the teams involved in these secondments and presents the research focus for each of them.
- The AI-MAS Group (The Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence and Multi-Agent Systems) is part of the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Control and Computers at University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest. The AI-MAS Lab is directed by Professor Adina Magda Florea and has two research focuses. First, it is concerned with the development of models and architectures for both multi-agent and single agent systems endowed with artificial intelligent behaviour. The second research focus of AI-MAS laboratory is the connection between web services, semantic representation, and agents on the Web.
- The Department of Computer Sciences of the VU University in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The Computer Science Department from the VU University is ranked first in The Netherlands and is among the top within the European Union. Its research activities focus on three main themes: (1) High-Performance Distributed Computing; (2) Large-Scale Distributed Systems; and (3) Systems and Security.
- The Distributed Systems team from the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers in the University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest (UPB).
- The Parallel and Distributed Systems Group, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Delft University of Technology. The research of the PDS group concentrates on the modeling, the design, and the implementation of parallel and distributed algorithms and systems.
- The Laboratory of Data Acquisition, Processing and Transmision of the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, UPB, led by Prof. Radu Dobrescu and with Prof. Dan Popescu as a member.
- Professor loan Tabus, Dr. Poru Giurcaneanu, Professor Bogdan Dumitrescu, from the Department of Signal Processing, Tampere University Technology, Finland.
- The Vision and Image team from LAGIS (Laboratoire d'Automatique, Génie Informatique & Signal) - Université Lille 1 Sciences et Technologies. The persons involved in this research were: Prof. Dan Ştefanoiu, Assist.Prof. Cătălin Petrescu (from University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest) and Prof. Ludovic Macaire, Assist. Prof. Olivier Losson (from LAGIS). Vision and Image team from LAGIS is involved in the following research fields: Physics Based Vision, Perception and Decision, Dynamic scenes.
- The Center of Automatics, Process Control and Computers (ACPC) at the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest, headed by Prof. Dumitru Popescu
- The LARM, School of Engineering, University of Cassino (Italy): Professor Marco Ceccarelli, Ph.D. Associate Professor Giuseppe Carbone, Ph.D. Laboratory: Robotics and Mechatronics, LARM of Cassino University (UNICAS).
- The DataCloud@work Associate Team, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest: Prof. Valentin CRISTEA, Head of the Department, Prof. Nicolae TAPUS. Dr. Florin Pop, Dr. Ciprian Dobre, PhD student Catalin Leordeanu, PhD student Eliana Tirsa.
- The team conducted by prof. Fabrice Guillet and part of Nantes Atlantic Computing Laboratory (UNA), director prof. Pierre COINTE, LINA Laboratory, Ecole Polytechnique, University of Nantes, France.
- MAS Research Group, LIP6 laboratory, University Paris VI - University Pierre and Marie Curie: The MAS team focuses on the design of intelligent systems, agent interaction
- ENMSE The MAS team studies the different questions of artificial intelligence arising in a collective context, which provide new research issues such as: - Multi-agents coordination (distributed planification, coalition generation, negotiation and consensus, collective decision) - Multi-agent learning and adaptation - Dialog, interaction and interaction protocols - MAS-based engineering - Multi-agent simulation .

The secondments strengthened the collaboration between partners and opened new opportunities for research in the coming years. These opportunities include, but are not limited to, new research areas, project proposals, scientific publications, and organization of scientific events. Some of the secondments of ERRIC have already opened new research collaborations such as joint publications, bilateral research proposals, joint PhD supervision, etc.
Among the conclusions of the Advisory Board regarding the secondments, we can mention the following aspects.
- The researchers participating in the secondments achieved important research results. Both long term secondments and short term secondments were useful, depending on the specified objective. Following the Advisory Board conclusions from previous years, we have evaluated the outcomes both qualitatively and quantitatively.
- The number was lower than planned. Several reasons were identified for this situation: the very busy schedule of the researchers from the partnering organizations, the overload of academic obligations of the participants from A&C, the fact that during long secondments, according to UPB’s rules, the participant in the secondment received no salary from the university if the secondment was longer than 30 days.
- The quality of the secondments grew constantly. The research topic covered were in accordance with the initial broad topic planned in the project but updated according to the development of research during the 3.5 years of the project.
- Young researchers were encouraged to also take part in the secondments, following the previous recommendation of the Advisory Board (see D2.6).
- Following another recommendation of the Advisory Board, the participants in the secondments focused on producing more publications. Overall, the production of scientific publications as a result of the ERRIC project was appreciated as very good by the Advisory Board.
- Another aspect that was previously mentioned in the recommendations of the Advisory Board was the emphasis that we should put on innovation and research, preparing thus for the future calls of Horizon 2020.
- During most of the secondments, apart from the mere research topic that was covered, some other cooperation activities were achieved and planned for the future, for example joint coordination PhDs, organization of joint scientific events (e.g. common workshops and conference special tracks or conferences), project proposals for European competitions. We have also discussed possibility of patents and technology transfer of our common work.
Last but not least, the Advisory Board mentioned the importance of the extension of 6 months of the project and appreciated as essential for the overall success of the project.

1.3 Develop a national and European network of excellence and partnership in ITT
This is one of the important tasks of ERRIC aiming to both strengthen the existing cooperation relationships and to enlarge the network of prospective partners in research of A&C. The network achieved at the end of the second year of the project is to be gradually enlarged with other Romanian, South Eastern European, and West European universities, companies, towards building a strong community of research and innovation in Intelligent Information technology. The network is conceived to be actively involved in all scientific and dissemination events of A&C in the future and it will continue to function after the project ends. It is foreseen that the network will evolve into an association or foundation on advances in ITT.
The current network comprises several Romanian and EU universities and Romanian companies. The first universities in the network are the partnering organisations of ERRIC.

1.4 ERRIC Knowledge e-Environment
The Semantic Portal (or Knowledge e-Environment - KEE) built within the ERRIC project is aimed to support storing, promotion and search for information and knowledge relevant to the research topics addressed by ERRIC and partners in the network of excellence. Thus, the main objective of this semantic portal is to store the research results and other relevant information for the A&C team working in the research topics defined within the ERRIC project and for their collaborators and to offer semantic tools to easily access, search and classify the content (such as papers, research projects, the partners involved in this projects, etc.).
The ERRIC KEE semantic web portal is useful for all the researchers working in intelligent information technologies as it contains relevant information on key researchers, papers, conferences, journals and research projects related to this topic. However, it is particularly useful for A&C researchers to find relevant peers within the ERRIC network, as well as publication venues that their peers are using.
ERRIC’s Knowledge e-Environment (KEE) has been created to provide an endpoint for information related to researchers, publications and research projects related to the 6 main topics of the project. To achieve this, we have implemented a document management system (DMS), starting from the popular open-source solution DSpace. In order to achieve our goals, we needed to improve the basic functionality of the DMS by adding new document types and metadata (besides publications) and by integrating a semantic search layer on top of the relational database provided by DSpace.

2 Recruitment of Experienced Researchers
Related to the first objective, during the first two years we have managed to conceive the recruitment plan of experienced researchers, and we have also advertised the job openings on various channels and started the recruitment process. In the first year, 13 candidates applied for one of the offered jobs. Unfortunately, not all of them met the job requirements and therefore 4 of them were rejected since they did not have an earned PhD degree, while 2 more others were rejected since they did not have significant results in the field of the requested position. The remaining candidates (7) were evaluated through Skype interviews.
Due to the fact that in the first year only one of the experienced researcher positions has been filled in, this process continued in the second year as well. Unfortunately, only 8 researchers applied for one of the offered jobs in year 2. Not all of them met the job requirements and therefore 2 of them were rejected since they did not have enough significant results in the field of the requested position. The remaining candidates (6) were also evaluated through Skype interviews.
After the first two years of the project, four experienced researchers were hired within the ERRIC project:
- Mr. Francesco Ciardiello who started working from 1st October 2011. However, after only three months, Mr. Ciardiello decided to put an end to his contract with A&C for family reasons that implied his presence in Italy immediately.
- Mrs. Loretta Ichim started on 15th June 2012 as a Research Fellow on Agent coordination and dynamic agreements.
- Mr. Liviu Vladutu will start the job on 1st September 2012 as a Research Fellow on AmI technologies for social interaction and learning.
- Mr. Olivier Pages will start on 15th September 2012 as a Research Fellow on Intelligent traffic monitoring and control.

During the thirds year of the project we have hired another experienced researcher, namely Mr. Liviu Badea (Ph.D.) with an impressive record of research.
As for the second objective of WP3, we have managed to hire part-time a very experienced researcher as research manager, Prof. Marc Demange which also works for ESSEC Business School (http://www.essec.edu/faculty/marc-demange). Moreover, an assistant research manager, Traian Rebedea, has been appointed to help Prof. Demange and to continue his work at the end of the ERRIC project. We consider that we have totally fulfilled the second objective of this workpackage, as regarding the experienced research manager and ensure the continuation of his work trough Mr. Traian Rebedea (Ph.D.) who took the position after Marc Demage finished his appointment, and who is continuing acting as a research manager of A&C.
Mrs. Loretta ICHIM
Mrs. Ichim starts the work at June 15, 2012, as Research Fellow on Cognitive and collaborative information technologies position, with the aim to perform research in the field of development of models and architectures for multi-agent systems endowed with artificial intelligent behavior, focusing on the self-organizing MAS that model biological growth processes. She joined the PUB research team of the Laboratory of Data Acquisition, Processing and Transmission of the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers (A&C) which cooperate as partner in ERRIC project with the research team of the Department of Signal Processing of the Tampere University of Technology (TUT), in the thematic area: Modeling of complex dynamical systems. Interdisciplinary research using information theory and information technology in bioinformatics and medicine is an area where both TUT and PUB have common interests and expertise.
In future, we plan to initiate proposals for new innovative research projects on the field of complex dynamical systems, including new analytical and computational tools, as well as the novel application of dynamical systems to engineered systems but also in others. This is especially interested in transformative research in the area of complex systems, uncertain or stochastic nonlinear dynamical systems, model order reduction of nonlinear or infinite dimensional dynamical systems, discrete nonlinear dynamical systems, and modeling, simulation, analysis and design of multi-scale multi-physics dynamical systems.

Mr. Liviu VLADUTU
Mr. Vladutu starts the work at September 1, 2012, as Research Fellow on AmI technologies for social interaction and learning position. He joined the Artificial Intelligence and Multi-Agent Systems (AI-MAS) Laboratory and starts to develop activities related to the design of human gestures and body position recognition techniques. He shared with other members of the AI-MAS his expertise acquired as member of Sign-Language Recognition group (as part of Human-Computer interaction) at the Science Foundation of Ireland, Dublin, by developing new methods to create and record a synthetic gestures database. The tools used for achieving these results come from the field of nonlinear manifolds in feature-space representation and of the semi-supervised learning for Neural Networks. In the same time he contributed to the development of the scientific platforms of the new created laboratory of Ambiental Intelligence with the logistic support of ERRIC project.
Mr. Liviu Vladutu had a very important contribution to the development of the Ambient Intelligent Laboratory, including the set up of all the equipment. He actively participated in the research performed in the AmI Lab, in particular those related to person tracking, fall detection and face recognition.

Mr. Liviu BADEA
Mr. Liviu Badea starts the work at April 1, 2013, as Research Fellow on Trust in semantic alignments and mappings of ontologies position. He joined the PUB research team of the Computer-Supported Collaborative Knowledge Construction Research Laboratory and collaborated on several issues related to the ERRIC project, such as novel ways of semantic alignment and mappings of ontologies taking into account the current interaction state that agents are involved in and the study of the logical relations between ontologies, knowledge-bases, sets of non-monotonic rules that are relevant for aligning and merging theories in meaning-preserving ways. The main aim of these activities is obtaining improved semantic representations using more sophisticated collocation models on more sophisticated corpora.
Despite the short period since the start of the present collaboration with UPB, the project has proceeded in a very encouraging manner, especially due to the help of Prof. Adina Florea, the dean of the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, as well as to the fruitful collaboration with the K-TEAMS group of Prof. Stefan Trausan-Matu. The ongoing collaboration with Traian Rebedea on collocation semantics of words was very important for the project. The planned extension of activities of ERRIC has been very welcome for this project.

Mr. Olivier PAGÉS
Mr. Olivier Pagés starts the work at October 1, 2012, as Research Fellow on Intelligent traffic monitoring and control position. He joined the PUB research team of the Research Center "Automatics, Process Control and Computers" - UPB-ACPC which cooperate as partner in ERRIC project with the research team of the LAGIS laboratories of USTL (Université des Sciences et Technologies de Lille), with a main area of research in Modeling and control of nonlinear systems, with applications in Road traffic networks and Wind turbines. He developed activities related to the design of a novel Fuzzy Multiple Reference Model Tracking Control Designs with an Application to Vehicle Lateral Dynamics Control. The tools used for achieving these results come from the theory of generalized convexity, and can be implemented both in mixed and pure strategies in noncooperative games.
During the probation he easily adapted at the research priorities and successfully promoted in the Automation and Computer Science Faculty his experience and genuine researcher qualities in the field of Automated Systems Engineering. He established a strong scientific and academic link between UPB and UPJV (Universite de Picardie Jules Verne) - Amiens that endures.

Mr. Marc Demage
Marc Demange is alumnus of “Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan” (one of the best “Grande Ecole” in the French education system preparing to research and high level teaching careers) and holds an “aggregation degree” (to teach in high school) in mathematics. He holds a DEA degree (research master) in mathematical economics and a doctorate in Computer Science from Paris I University (Panthéon–Sorbonne). He also holds the “Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches” degree from Paris-Dauphine University. At ESSEC Business School Marc Demange was appointed Dean for Research in 2007 after being Adjunct Dean of the Faculty for two years.
He helped in defining our new research strategy. He assisted in producing the roadmap of A&C, he participated in every event organized by the project and at meetings, he facilitated links with other projects and organisations.
The activities of the experienced researchers have covered 4 selected areas of Intelligent Information Technologies, according to the main objective of ERRIC project which is to empower existing excellence in research by unlocking its significant potential, namely:
- Ambient intelligence (AmI) for social interaction and learning
- Trust in semantic alignments and mappings of ontologies
- Agent coordination and dynamic agreements
- Intelligent traffic monitoring and control.

These domains are close to many actual and future challenging transformations of the society and as a consequence are very relevant as priority domains. One can observe that the achievements mentioned as having strong scientific impact in section 1.1. are mentioned as objectives in the HORIZON 2020 Work Programme 2014 – 2015, in the section ICT - Information and Communication Technologies. We consider that the following objectives can be reached by developing the scientific results to ensure leadership in enabling and industrial technologies:
- Orientation of Cloud computing research towards new computational and data management models (at both infrastructure and services levels).
- Delivering of an Internet of Things (IoT) extended into a web of platforms for connected devices and objects which support smart environments, services and persons with adaptive configuration capabilities.
- Development of the next generations of smart systems technologies and solutions, based on systemic miniaturization and integration of heterogeneous technologies.
- Novel approaches to development, deployment, management and dynamic reconfiguration of distributed applications, architectures and tools.
- Providing new knowledge of the ways by which interactions are facilitated in the new hyper-connected environments.
All of the four experienced researchers were able to integrate in the research teams of the laboratories of the three departments of the faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, and had fruitful collaborations with their colleagues. Some of the results were published or submitted for publication in journals of high scientific relevance, but there are many issues unsolved which necessite to continue the research.
It is important to note that from the 4 experienced researchers employed in the project, 3 are planning to stay with the A&C Faculty. Ms. Loretta Ichim has already a researcher position in the Faculty, Mr. Liviu Vladutu is going to compete for an academic position this autumn, and Mr. Liviu Badea is planning to join the new Research Center PRECIS that is developed this year and in 2015 by A&C.
Mr. Olivier Pages declined our offer for a research position in our Faculty. Mr. Marc Demange told us from the beginning that he will not stay with A&C and to this aim, we had Mr. Traian Rebedea (Ph.D.) who, during the duration of the project – 3 years – was assistant research manager and took the position of Research Manager of A&C during the extension of 6 months of the project and keeps this position since then.

Difficulties regarding personnel recruitment
There are several explanations for not being able to achieve the WP3 objective of hiring the experienced researchers. First of all, it should be noted that finding and hiring good candidates in these very competitive domains (automatic control and, especially, computer science) is a very difficult task even with the funds offered by the European Commission through the ERRIC project. The reasons for not finding better a larger number of suitable candidates for the experienced researcher positions are various and quite complex, but we consider that the most important ones are the following:
There is a tough competition in hiring people in the domains of the project; the best researchers are offered extremely high salaries by large companies (such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.) and well-known research institutions in Europe and world-wide.
Many of the good people from Computer Science are usually leaving UPB after finishing the PhD or post-doc studies. It would have been a better idea to try and offer them positions to stay at A&C, but this was not allowed by the conditions for hiring new researchers imposed by the EC.
The impossibility of promising a viable alternative for the researchers after the 2 years of grant from ERRIC. The people that would have come to A&C, needed to find their own projects in order to pay themselves and their teams after the end of the project.
The political instability and economic crisis in Romania between 2010-2012 was another important factor that turned away people from our job offers (combined with the previous factors, of course).
It is difficult to improve the hiring competitiveness of research organizations from new member states in very well-paid domains, such as Computer Science, Medicine, etc. Without offering other incentives for people to come to these regions that are currently developing (maybe by making use of other type of funds – such as national or structural funds – and coordinating with future REGPOT actions with these other funding mechanisms as well), this problem cannot be solved using only FP7 support actions.
3 Development and Upgrade of Research Equipment

3.1 Equipment for the Industrial Robots Laboratories
A shop-floor control framework is proposed in which one entity (e.g. a processing, transport or inspection resource, a product) can not only achieve its goal in terms of the system's objectives but also in terms of its own objectives. An entity can be a resource (e.g. a machine, a robot, vision system) or an active product. An active product or Active Holon Entity (AHE) is an aggregate entity able to inform, communicate, decide and act in order to reach its goals in solving resource allocation and routing problems (Fig. 2).
Because agility is a main objective to be achieved by the open control structure, a generic multi-agent architecture is proposed to allow shop-floor reengineering; components of this architecture and their capabilities are configured initially (upon receiving customer's orders) and possibly reconfigured at run time in case disturbances occur (adding / removing one resource, performance decrease or breakdown of a resource).
A Resource Service Access model (RSAM) is thus created and maintained using generic properties:
• Modularity: a production system will be configured as a dynamic composition of modularized manufacturing units which become basic building blocks. Building blocks are developed on the basis of processes they are to cater for.
• Configuring rather than programming: the addition or removal of any manufacturing component (basic building block) should be done smoothly, without or with minimal programming effort. The system composition and its behaviour are established by configuring the relationships among modules, using contractual mechanisms.
• High reusability: the building blocks should be reused for as long as possible, and easily updated for further reuse.
• Legacy systems migration: legacy and heterogeneous controllers might be considered in any global architecture and a process must be developed to integrate them in the new agile architecture.
• The CIMR team in the A&C faculty and its EU partner LARM from the University of Cassino - Italy are currently involved in the main research lines which will be promoted in the ERRIC project, among which: natural-like human-robot interaction systems for Human-Personal Robot (HPR) communication: assisting people in special, difficult tasks; assisting aged / disabled people in everyday tasks; Human-Industrial Robot (HIR) skills emulation: learning from visual modelling and interpretation of gestures; cognitive learning for dexterous task reproducing; intelligent control architectures for emergent types of robots: personal robots; parallel high-speed robots; open-chain precise robots; multiple-arm robot systems; data fusion for constrained robot motion control; robot cooperation technologies; visual robot servoing from feature-based description of environment; robot sculpture, open manufacturing control with agile reconfiguring of robot services.
• A mid-range laser scanning equipment has already been purchased by the CIMR Lab. in A&C, installed on a 6-d.o.f. anthropomorphic robot and connected to: the multitasking controller, a machine vision system with intelligent colour camera and the PC-based robot terminal, and therefore we did not purchaed it any more in the ERRIC project, as planned. Instead we envisage the purchase of a humanoid robot which will be of use to both the AmI Laboratory and the CIMR reasearch.

3.2 Upgrade and enhance the research infrastructure of NCIT
The main aim of the upgrade performed through the project is to almost double the existing capacity with an addition of 336 (2 x 6 x 28) hardware cores, based on six core (or eight core) technology. The advantage of having multi core CPUs is obviously the high speed of communication between parallel processes. Doubling the capacity will certainly not align NCIT cluster to the clusters of other European universities (e.g. HRLS had more than 2000 and VUA more than 1000 in 2008) but will enable A&C to participate in some common projects, both with the ERRIC partners and in other structures, e.g. the continuations of the projects EGEE and SEE-GRID in which A&C was a partner until 2009, but in which A&C would not be able to participate any more with the current infrastructure.
A significant upgrade in the NCIT data center is the networking component. Currently the cluster has a 36TB total storage capacity of which 14 TB usable disk space for users, and the rest for virtualization and simulation purposes.
We did not upgrade the storage capacity of the data center, but we did update the available performance by doing a network upgrade as well as consolidating the core computing systems of the data center.
Figure 12 below shows the Inifiniband connectivity that is used in the computing center. It shows how it interconnects various components of the data center:
- IBM Chassis 1, with Dual Opteron nodes
- The new Rack 2 with Blade Chassis 1 and 2
- The new Rack 1 with Blade Chassis 3
- The Nvidia Servers
- The new computing power and new hardware architecture
The current system relies on a distributed storage of four storage servers using LustreFS. Given the acquisitions made in the project we now have a low latency storage access through Lustre-Networking (LNET) using an Infiniband network. Another achieved improvement the connection of our cluster backbone to the university 10 Gbps backbone spanning all data centers on the university campus. This gives us greater reach and the possibility to interconnect multiple data centers together. By using a BladeCenter and chassis that can stack with our current equipment we are be able to cut costs by using 10Gb fiber modules of the BladeCenter instead of more expensive 10Gb switches.
The upgrade of the computing infrastructure with the support of the EC comprises the acquisition of 26 servers, as is shown in the previous table. There are 14 x86 Dual processor Hex-core Xeon Nehalem blades, 8 Dual processor octo-core Power 7 blades, and 4 Dual processor Xeon Nehalem hex-core, Dual processor NVidia Tesla M2070 accelerator blades, each with 32GB RAM of main memory and all interconnected on an Infiniband backbone. The 14 Xeon Blades and the Dual-NVidia Tesla machines are going to strengthen the core computing power of the cluster, and the 8 Power 7 blades are going to support the virtualization infrastructure that is supporting the compute core of the cluster. In particular, the GP-GPU blades are extremely powerful and they enable us to tackle complex scientific problems from a variety of domains like meteorology, life-sciences, astrophysics, aerospace, computational fluid dynamics, seismology, etc. All the acquired servers are integrated in a single 42U rack with corresponding UPS modules. The entire cluster infrastructure is now protected by power outages by the new power generator. Also, maintenance contracts have been secured for the air-conditioning and generator units of our data-center.

3.3 Develop the Ambient Intelligence Laboratory
In order to extend the research area of A&C according to the objectives set forth by the ERRIC project, an Ambient Intelligence Laboratory is required. This laboratory contains all elements that should exist in a smart room. This must provide a large array of new sensors types and actuators, for example GPS positioning, temperature, light, finger print, presence sensors, and smoke detectors for development.

The Ambient Intelligence Laboratory at the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers is now fully functional. It is the first such laboratory in Romania, being a national premiere. The AmI Lab is equipped with a wide range of equipment which facilitates research on several directions, ranging from person tracking and detection, recognizing person activities, person identification, position estimation using several methods and techniques, ambient intelligence ant like robot design and construction, several interaction methods with humanoid robots, and many more research directions to be tackled in the future.
The Ambient Intelligence Laboratory that was built in room EF201 of the A&C building. Now, the Laboratory contains an ambient (AAL-oriented) tracking localization and infrastructure. Equipment exists for the building of Ant Intelligent Robots and for more advanced localization using Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks. Two Nao humanoid robots are used for the study of movement and localization using robots. Several simple ambiental robots (ant intelligent robots) are also built and integrated in the laboratory.
The following goals emerged for the AmI laboratory:
- the development of an UPB Ambient Intelligence Laboratory for which to choose the hardware to building a software infrastructure that allows real-time processing of heterogeneous sensor data
- the development and implementation of a model for real-time heterogeneous sensor fusion centered around geo-spatial reasoning.
- the development of a set of tools and methodologies to allow researchers from around the world to exchange ambient intelligence datasets and run experiments on those datasets in the cloud without acess to the actual sensors
- development of a set of methods and techniques of people localization, using multi-modal sensors
- development of research devoted to the interaction of humanoid robots with the environment such as to provide the intelligent ambient with extended capabilities, for example to support the elderly persons or children with special needs.
- Development of research that focuses on people robot interaction, both at the level of humanoid robots, such as Nao, and at the level of simple robots.
We must mention that the direction of research in the AmI Laboratory were set up and validated with the members of the Advisory Board .

Ant Intelligent Robots
The research conducted at the Ambient Intelligence Laboratory is concentrated on the development of a multi-agent indoor system that can analyze human behavior and provide the appropriate real-time response to this behavior. For example, the multi-agent system may infer that a person is in a state of discomfort due to the high temperature in the room and respond to this environment state by turning on the air conditioner.
In some situations the multi-agent system must take physical actions to change the environment state and thus, there is a need for robots that can carry out these actions. For example, the multi-agent may infer that a person wants to clean the room. The course of action the multi-agent system would take, in this situation, is to launch a swarm of robots that would do the cleaning. The ant robots are specially suited for this purpose: they can be easily fit with small vacuums, they will not need monitoring from the multi-agent system as there computational power is more than enough to make decisions on their own and they can easily communicate with the multi-agent system through their WiFi interface. Of course, cleaning is not the only situation that can be efficiently handled by the ant robot swarm. For instance, the swarm could aid a person in finding some misplaced object such as the car keys or an ant robot could get the news paper.
Humanoid robots in Ambient Intelligence
A few years ago, the idea of living with robots, sharing everyday tasks and harmonically coexist in the same environment, seemed to be a distant scenario. However, the use of such technologies, aimed to inhabit our houses and help us with our everyday chores is not a dream any longer. Ongoing research all over the world indicates a trend to develop advanced robotic systems aimed to the service of people in need.
A Smart home is a domestic intelligent environment where various components such as a fridge, oven, lights etc., are working together by exchanging information via the same local network. The idea is to also use robot techniques to integrate different services within the home in an effort to control and monitor the entire living space. Robots can provide robot based services to improve care cost and the quality of life in smart homes. These services are not realized by a single stand-alone robot but by a combination of different elements such as environmental sensors, cameras, laser range scanners and humans communicating and cooperating through a network.
An important subset of Ambient Intelligence research efforts target scenarios in which elders, people with disabilities or children need to be supervised or helped with their daily activities. Both the computational power and the needed sensors are hidden in smart physical objects like intelligent mobiles, wearable devices, cameras, etc. But that is not all. The intelligent technologies need to interact with the humans and that needs to happen in a pleasant way. In addition, it is expected from the smart environment to be able to act, to carry some activities that usually people would do, and some of this tasks involve physically moving objects, opening doors or boxes and cutting wrappers.
4 Organization of Scientific Events

The planned events fall into two categories:
(a) Events that are already organized on an annual or bi-annual basis by A&C will be planned and executed with extended scope, by increasing the level of participation of high profile researchers, young researchers and PhD students. The result will be the enhancement of the scientific visibility of the event, an increase of scientific quality standards and a higher level of participation from both home and abroad.
(b) New scientific events will be organized, steaming from common research directions and themes undertaken by A&C and partnering organisations, which will co-organised with the EU partners, information-sharing network members, as well as invited researchers from other countries.
4.1 Scientific events of Year 1
- SOHOMA 2011: 1st Workshop on Service Orientation in Holonic and Multi-Agent Manufacturing Control, June 20-21, 2011, Paris, France

- K-Teams 2011: First International Workshop on Semantic and Collaborative Technologies for the Web, June 21-22, 2011, Bucharest, Romania

- HiPerGRID 2011: 5th Edition of the Workshop on High Performance Grid Middleware, August 25 - 27, 2011, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, part of ICCP 2011, the 2011 IEEE International Conference On Intelligent Computer Communication and Processing

- MASTS 2011: Third Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems Technology and Semantics, October 5-7, Delft, The Netherlands, in conjunction with the 5th International Symposium on Intelligent Distributed Computing (IDC 2011)
4.2 Scientific events of Year 2
- SOHOMA12: 2nd Workshop on "Service Orientation in Holonic and Multi-Agent Manufacturing and Robotics", May 23-24, 2012, Bucharest, Romania
- HiPerGRID 2012: 6th Edition on High Performance Grid Middleware, part of ICCP 2012 (the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Computer Communication and Processing), August 31, 2012, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
- ICSCS12: 1st International Conference on Systems and Computer Science, Villeneuve d'Ascq, France, August 29-30 2012
- CloudCP 2012: 2nd International Workshop on Cloud Computing Platforms, April 2012, Bern, Switzerland, In conjunction with EuroSys 2012
- MASTS 2012: 4th Workshop on "Multi-Agent Systems Technology and Semantics", September 24-26, 2012, Calabria, Italy
- INCoS 2012: The 4th International Conference on Intelligent Networking and Collaborative Systems, 19-21 September 2012, Bucharest, Romania

- A&C Brokerage Event 2011, 1st edition, 24 May 2011
- A&C Brokerage Event 2012, 2nd edition, 19 October 2012
4.3 Scientific Events of Year 3
- CSCS19: The 19th International Conference on Control Systems and Computer Science, 29-31 May 2013, Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania
o Website: http://cscs19.acs.pub.ro
o Publication: IEEE eXpress Conference Publishing
o Participants: 179 participants from 14 countries

- SOHOMA13: 3rd Workshop on "Service Orientation in Holonic and Multi-Agent Manufacturing and Robotics", June 20-22, 2013, Valenciennes, France
o Website: http://www.sohoma13.cimr.pub.ro
o Publication: Springer series "Studies in Computational Intelligence" (2014).
o Participants: 52 participants from 10 countries

- HiPerGRID 2013 - Invited Session on High Performance Grid Middleware, September 5-7, 2013 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania
o Website: http://hipergrid.hpc.pub.ro/
o Publication: IEEE eXpress Conference Publishing, in the proceeding of ICCP-2013 conference
o Received papers: 13, Accepted papers: 6, Number of reviews: 30
o Acceptance rate: 46,0%, Presented papers: 6 (100%), Number of participants: 12

- ISPDC 2013 - The 12th International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Computing, 27-30 June 2013, Bucharest, Romania
o Website: http://www.ispdc.org
o Publication: IEEE eXpress Conference Publishing
o Participants: 68 participants

- AgTAmI 2013: The First International Workshop on Agent Technology for Ambient Intelligence, May 29-31, 2013, Bucharest, Romania
o Website: http://aimas.cs.pub.ro/AgTAmI2013
o Publication: IEEE eXpress Conference Publishing
o Participants: 23 participants

- MASTS 2013: Fifth International Workshop on "Multi-Agent Systems Technology and Semantics", September 4-6, 2013, Prague, Czech Republic
o Website: http://aimas.cs.pub.ro/masts2013/
o Publication: Studies in Computational Intelligence, Vol. 511, Intelligent Distributed Computing VII, ISBN: 978-3-319-01570-5, 2014.
o Participants: 12 participants, 17 papers were received and 8 were selected

- ICSCS-2013 – The 2nd International Conference on Systems and Computer Science, Villeneuve d'Ascq (Lille), France, August 26-27, 2013
o Website: http://www.acs.pub.ro/icscs2013/
o Publication: IEEE eXpress Conference Publishing
Participants: 76 participants

- K-Teams 2013: Second International Workshop on Semantic and Collaborative Technologies for the Web, August 26-27, Villeneuve d'Ascq, FRANCE
o Website: http://www.acs.pub.ro/icscs2013/k-teams-2013/index.php /
o Publication: IEEE eXpress Conference Publishing
Participants: 12 participants

All the scientific events organized with ERRIC support in the first two years of the project were successful. They had a good participation and allowed the interaction between members of the A&C research laboratories and other scientists from other important European and worldwide universities and research institutions. Some of these events have been collocated at very important conferences and had a high participation. Several important conclusions can be drawn from the events organized by ERRIC within the first two years of the project:
• The events were organized in partnership by the universities in the consortium, with the participation of many other researchers in the Program Committees.
• Most of the events have benefited from the presence of famous scientists working in the domain of each event, with participation of researchers from all over Europe and even non-EU participants.
• These events also promoted the results obtained by scientists supported by the ERRIC project, thus allowing a good interaction between the researchers form A&C and those from outside the project, bridging new collaborations.
• All of the proceedings were printed, some of them by famous publishing houses (Springer Verlag, IEEE Xpress, ACM Digital Library).
• One of the main goals of the events was to bring together experts in the respective fields in order to share knowledge (approaches, models, issues, solutions, applications).
• Most events were organized in conjunction with important conferences for each topic.
• Paper selection was done based on the evaluation of minimum 2 members of the Program Committees, with specialists from Europe and worldwide, allowing the selection of papers with a high scientific level and quality.
• The participants include experienced researchers but also young scientists, allowing them to acquire new contacts in their fields of activity.
All the workshops and conferences have planned future editions, some of the workshops in conjunction with prestigious conferences, to continue after the end of ERRIC project.

5 Dissemination of ERRIC's Outcomes and Promotion of A&C

5.1 Dissemination events
The ERRIC project specific dissemination activities were addressed through:
o Presentation of research results at international conferences related to ERRIC topics, and in the appropriate journals
o Disseminate project results through the project promotion materials
o Promotion through the ERRIC web site
o Link with similar projects that are already endorsed by the EC or are currently in the planning stages.
o Dissemination of project results among local academic and industry
o Attract synergies between A&C, industry and official entities.
The following specific actions were achieved:
1. Create the promotion materials for different ERRIC events
2. Create the new version of ERRIC web site and portal to present the project to the world, including links to the Home Pages of EU strategic partners involved, and through contacts with other major web sites dedicated to the research topics of interest of ERRIC und update it with the latest events, news, and partners in the IIT network
3. Host the federation of web sites of ERRIC events in Year 3. Make them accessible through the portal.
4. Make links with similar projects, disseminate projects concepts and outcomes to the community of these projects in order to achieve a multiplying effect.
5. Present research results to conferences and workshops but also speak about ERRIC support actions.
6. Presentation of results at international conferences related to ERRIC topics

Examples of some dissemination events
ERRIC participation at WIRE 2013, 5-6 June 2013, Cork, Ireland
http://wire2013.eu/
ERRIC presentation at the Workshop A&C and National University of Singapore, 28 February 2013, Bucharest, Romania, Senate Hall, University Politehnica of Bucharest

ERRIC presentation at A&C Brokerage Events, 3rd edition, May 28, 2013, Bucharest, Romania
ERRIC presentation at A&C Brokerage Events, 4th edition, October 30, 2013, Bucharest, Romania
ERRIC in Market Watch Romania
A series of 12 articles published every month plus 2 articles in supplements about ERRIC project and about the way ERRIC contributed to the strengthening of A&C research excellence.
http://www.marketwatch.ro/
Visit of Clara de la Torre, Clara de la Torre, Director of Research and Innovation Directorate, DG Research & Innovation at A&C
5.2 Final version of ERRIC web site
During the ERRIC project, the ERRIC web site and portal and the Knowledge e-Environment (KEE) have been developed in order to increase the visibility of A&C in IIT research. The ERRIC website (http://www.erric.eu/) contains information about the results and achievements of the project, including research infrastructure, publications, list of secondments, etc.

5.3 Promotion of A&C

The promotion of A&C at European and international level covered the following actions:
- Promote A&C research excellence to foreign partners, either during secondments and participation to conferences, or when different visits are coming to Romania
- Create a new visual identity and branding for the faculty A&C.
- Promote the research results and scientific excellence of eth Faculty staff
- Develop the Dissemination, Promotion and Awareness package (DPA package)
The specific actions that were identified to be executed during the period of the project are the following:
1. Create a new look for A&C
2. Create the new site of A&C
3. Develop Dissemination, Promotion and Awareness package (DPA package): visual identity and logo, pin, flag, leaflet, flyer, presentations, CD-ROM/DVD, movie
4. Organize the A&C Alumni Symposiu,
5. Organize the one day A&C Brokering events, with participation of representatives of industry, government, policy makers, press and mass media. The aim of the brokering events is to promote A&C
6. Create an A&C Alumni database with contacts and professional interest keywords for A&C alumni. Make it accessible through the portal.
7. Print the "Research book" of A&C with presentation of main research competencies, projects and publications.
8. Make partnerships with enterprises and draw cooperation contracts
The two A&C Brokerage events of Year 3 are presented in Section 8.6.

ERRIC semantic portal KEE
ERRIC’s Knowledge e-Environment (KEE, http://erric-portal.cs.pub.ro/) has been created to provide an endpoint for information related to researchers, publications and research projects related to the 6 main topics of the project. To achieve this, we have implemented a document management system (DMS), starting from the popular open-source solution DSpace. In order to achieve our goals, we needed to improve the basic functionality of the DMS by adding new document types and metadata (besides publications) and by integrating a semantic search layer on top of the relational database provided by DSpace.
A&C Alumni database
Thus, with the help of ERRIC, A&C has created its first alumni database which now stores information about most of A&C the alumni (BSc from 1967-2013 and MSc from 2011-2013). Unfortunately, we have not been able to find a data source for MSc alumni before 2011. The alumni database has been used to create the A&C Alumni portal (http://alumni.cs.pub.ro/) which is intended to help the A&C alumni community by facilitating interactions and discussions among its members. Moreover, the alumni portal will also permit the faculty to trace the career paths of its alumni and to be able to connect with them when needed.

A&C Research Book
The research book is a cumulative work that presents a summary of the results of the faculty in the last 5 years. It has over 120 pages that present the A&C research laboratories, their members, organized conferences, international research projects, national grants, journal articles, the most important conference papers and more.
Providing the full list of contents of the research book is not within the scope of this deliverable, however the main indicators of the A&C research book are:
• Published papers
o 562 ISI Web of Science papers of which:
135 in Journals
o 201 Journal (other) papers
• Books and book chapters
o International: 45
o National: 157
• More than 120 public funded research grants – national level
• 24 EU funded R&D grants of which 2 coordinated by A&C
• 14 International research grants (non EU)
• More than 25 Scientific Events and Summer Schools organized by A&C
• More than 150 international PC membership
• More than 70 PhD granted by A&C
• Cooperation conventions with more than 37 universities from EU and USA
The book’s cover and graphics have been designed by the same team that has worked for the new A&C image and for the ERRIC promotion materials.
5.4 Dissemination and promotion materials
In third year of the project, besides the new and updated ERRIC website, several other dissemination and promotion materials have been designed and used by ERRIC and A&C:
- ERRIC results project brochure
- ERRIC new leaflet
- ERRIC envelope file, promotion folder and presentation template
- ERRIC roll-ups for different events, the A&C Brokerage Events and ERRIC spider
- A&C headers, envelopes, presentation templates, etc.
- A&C brochure for the presentation of the research laboratories
- The A&C promotional movie – full version 20 minutes and short version – 5 minutes

5.5 A&C Brokerage events
One of the main objectives of the Brokerage Events was to bridge the gap in the expectations both the university researchers and the management of the companies in order to facilitate future joint RTDI actions. We therefore selected a first list of notorious companies to invite at the events, which are renowned for their products, fair personnel policies and opening to collaborative scientific research.
In 2013 we organized two editions of the Brokerage Event (3rd and 4th editions from the beginning of the ERRIC project). The 3rd edition took place on May 28 and the 4th edition on October 30.
Both Brokerage events had the same goal as previous editions, namely to increase the A&C visibility at regional and international level and to improve collaboration between academia and the companies operating in the fields of automatic control and information technology.

Potential Impact:
The empowering of A&C’s existing research excellence in the domain of Intelligent Information Technologies and the achievement of most of ERRIC objectives for the third and a half years had a strong impact at different levels: an immediate impact that enforces A&C research capacity and strategically positions A&C’s research staff for a comprehensive integration in the ERA, a national impact by the creation of the network of excellence and partnership at national level and an increase in prestige of A&C at national level, and an European impact, by fostering long term strategic partnerships with leading research institutions from EU and strengthening opportunities to participate in internationally funded research, such as FP7 and Horizon 2020.
Participations in scientific events were important because they facilitated the recognition of the high-quality research conducted by the A&C members. One example in this direction is the best scientific paper (theory) of the workshop award received by Professor Theodor Borangiu and his colleagues at RAAD 2012. Another example is the publishing of books by prestigious publishers - e.g. "Optimization techniques – Stochastic heuristic methods and decision support" (in both English and French) by Prof. Dumitru Popescu and Pierre Borne and their groups by Hermes-Paris and John Wiley-London publishers. Finally, the last example is the invitation to participate in the construction of different consortium with the purpose of writing project proposals. An example in this direction is the proposal for a bilateral project between Romania and Cyprus (EPBL2IT - Enhancing Problem Based Learning through Intelligent Information Technologies), made by Stefan Trausan-Matu group members in conjunction with a research group from Larnaca University (Cyprus).
The quality and qualification of human resources was strengthened through ERRIC by the two-ways secondments of research staff, by the participation of A&C staff to scientific and networking events, hiring of an experienced research manager, with an international status, and hiring of experienced researchers
Two-ways secondments allowed participants to be involved in a variety of activities in the hosting research laboratories, which contributed to improvements high quality research, the work in joint research teams, the enforcement of the collaboration with older foreign partners and the start of collaborations with leading scientists from new partnering organizations. They stimulated the mobilization and networking, which allowed A&C researchers to get in closer contact with the environment in highly ranked universities and to develop support activities for their research.

The secondments have been distributed pretty uniformly in the three years of the project. This applies equally to all secondments and to the two different categories, RO to UE and UE to RO secondments. A summary of the achievements in two-ways secondments is:
• initiation of collaboration in new and important research topics;
• new joint working groups;
• joint research on targeted subjects;
• support the elaboration of scientific papers to be published in leading international journals;
• starting new projects with potential of creating new bridges and to enrich the research activities existing in A&C laboratories;
• development of experiments on new technologies;
• planning the co-organization of scientific events;
• contributions to joint projects under development;
• transfer of knowledge for the laboratories developed in ERRIC;
• contribution to the development of a national and European network of excellence and partnership in IIT;
• new exploratory research projects to be developed by joint teams of researchers;
• common papers to be published;
• discuss the strategy and perspective for an efficient concrete collaboration in a common project under development;
• analysis of the current issues and implementation status of the various components;
• deciding strategies and methods to make the project public, together with documentation and guides;
• talks, discussions, presentations of laboratories and schools;
• identifying and proposing an original research track within a specific research domain;
• participated to several seminars held within the department;
• opportunities of exchanging ideas with key members of the community;
• get better familiarized and work with new technologies;
• open paths for future collaboration in studying specific subjects;
• invitation to other actions;
• plans for collaboration between groups for extending previous work;
• discuss joint research lines;
• decision on joint organization of scientific events;
• publish the results of joint scientific work; sharing R&D resources of two laboratories;
• collaboration between two laboratories;
• submitting application proposal;
• analysing the common R&D results and achievements;
• book chapters;
• attending scientific events;
• setting or renewing cooperation agreements between PUB-AC&CS and other institutions;
• meetings with other researchers and professors.

The most important conclusion to highlight is the fact that, during these secondments, we have established strong collaboration relationships with our EU partners and paved the way to future joint actions on different levels. In the same time, the secondments contributed to making our own research activity stronger, better connected to the latest trends and more visible in the EU and international community.
The activities of the experienced researchers have covered 4 selected areas of Intelligent Information Technologies, according to the main objective of ERRIC project which is to empower existing excellence in research by unlocking its significant potential, namely:
- Ambient intelligence (AmI) for social interaction and learning
- Trust in semantic alignments and mappings of ontologies
- Agent coordination and dynamic agreements
- Intelligent traffic monitoring and control.

All of the four experienced researchers were able to integrate in the research teams of the laboratories of the three departments of the faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, and had fruitful collaborations with their colleagues. Some of the results were published or submitted for publication in journals of high scientific relevance, but there are many issues unsolved which necessite to continue the research. Generally, there will be a strong desire to continue to work in this collaboration and such performance will be obtained.
It is important to note that from the 4 experienced researchers employed in the project, 3 are planning to stay with the A&C Faculty. Ms. Loretta Ichim has already a researcher position in the Faculty, Mr. Liviu Vladutu is going to compete for an academic position this autumn, and Mr. Liviu Badea is planning to join the new Research Center PRECIS that is developed this year and in 2015 by A&C.
Eight scientific events were organized in the third year of the ERRIC project plus two A&C Brokerage events. All three directions of the project were represented by these events:
• Agreement and Semantic Technologies with MASTS 2013, AgTAmI 2013 and K-Teams 2013
• Intelligent Grid Technologies with HiPerGRID 2013 and ISPDC 2013
• Innovation and Technology Transfer with SOHOMA 2013, ICSCS 2013 and IEEE CSCS 2013
It is important to mention that almost all the workshops started within ERRIC have continued after the end of the project (e.g. K-Teams 2014 http://www.elseconference.eu/pages/view? page=workshop_semantic_collaborative_technologies, SOHOMA 2014 http://www.sohoma14.cimr.pub.ro/ MASTS 2014 http://aimas.cs.pub.ro/masts2014/home HiperGRID 2014, etc.)

The 3rd and 4th edition of the A&C Brokerage events represented important steps in strengthening our collaboration with the enterprises and define new directions of applied research, innovation and technology transfer.
During the brokerage events we have identified the following possible forms of cooperation between academia and companies:
• Student internships at B.Sc. and M.Sc. level
• Joint B.Sc. diploma thesis and joint M.Sc. diploma thesis
• Joint Ph.D. thesis and scholarships for Ph.D students who undertake a Ph.D. subject of interest for companies
• Technical talks offered by the companies on specific solutions and technologies
• Participation of companies in summer schools organized by the faculty
• Support given to the faculty for organization of scientific events such as conferences, workshops, etc.
• Support given to the faculty for organization of professional competitions to stimulate the students and young researchers interest for innovation and applied research
• Development of a portal on which the companies place their research needs and where people from the faculty can offer their competencies or already attacked research themes
• Participation in joint research projects both at national level and at international level
• Donation of equipment to faculty’s laboratories to facilitate up-to-date research
• Another conclusion steaming from the two editions of the Brokerage event is the need to continue organizing these events after the end of ERRIC project.
• Therefore the Brokerage events started in the framework of ERRIC and grew into a sustainable series of events.

The dissemination strategies addressing both past and future measures provide a solid framework within the ERRIC project, useful for promoting the project’s results and activities. Starting from an initial strategy that was further reviewed, revised and updated as dissemination materials and specific strategies were evaluated for their reach, the effectiveness in targeting particular stakeholders and the alignment with their interests grew constantly.
The achieved performances during all 3,5 years of the project prove a good continuity in the efforts for raising the excellence research and academic education degree of A&C. Correlating the scientific results obtained during the project’s actions, the improvement in the scientific research level, the enhancement of the cohesion and potential of the research networks created around the project, the previously defined activities demonstrate the sustainability of the actions taken by the ERRIC project in terms of dissemination and continual increase of awareness.
Our main future lines of dissemination of our research results and research value will be:
• Follow the strategy set up inside the ERRIC project and the direction of development identified, based on both achieved competencies and future topics of research
• Keep contact with the Advisory Board to continue refining the strategy of research and development of the Faculty
• Organization of workshop and conferences, with particular focus on those organized in ERRIC, as all conferences and workshops organized by ERRIC will continue in 2014 and the following year
• Maintenance and upgrade of the web site of the Faculty A&C
• Maintain the Dissemination, Promotion and Awareness package (DPA package) developed in the framework of ERRIC and update it constantly
• Restart organizing the A&C Alumni Symposium
• Continue to organize A&C Brokering event, with participation of representatives of industry, government, policy makers, press and mass media. The 4 editions of this event organized in ERRIC proved to be an enormous success, appreciated by both academia and industry.
• Continue to promote A&C research excellence at radio, TV, and during events either organized by the Faculty or to which staff is participating
• Continue to print the next editions of the Research book of A&C with presentation of main research competencies, projects and publications.
• Participate in many Scientific Excellence Networks
• Participate in consortia of international projects

The achieved performances during all 3,5 years of the project prove a good continuity in the efforts for raising the excellence research and academic education degree of A&C. Correlating the scientific results obtained during the project’s actions, the improvement in the scientific research level, the enhancement of the cohesion and potential of the research networks created around the project, the previously defined activities demonstrate the sustainability of the actions taken by the ERRIC project in terms of dissemination and continual increase of awareness.
In order to achieve a sustainable continuation of the main achievements of the ERRIC project (improve research infrastructure, enhance the researcher capabilities and the number of researchers, achieve secondments to other research organization, improve A&C dissemination, etc.), A&C is planning to use a mix of financial instruments:
- structural funds for developing the research infrastructure (such as PRECIS);
- human resources structural funds for improving the expertise of young researchers, but also for experienced researchers (especially for secondments and participation to conferences);
- research grants (national and European) to enhance the quality of research and to develop strong research teams;
- stronger cooperation with the industry in order to find alternative funding opportunities for research, developing spin-offs and start-ups, and other entrepreneurial activities.

A total number of 36 deliverables were produced during the project duration, all deliverables being public: 4 in WP1, 9 in WP2, 4 in WP3, 4 in WP4, 6 in WP5, and 9 in WP6.
During the development of the project some problems were encountered. The most important problem was related to the recruitment of experienced researchers. We are working in a very competitive domain, namely IT, where there are a lot of companies offering interesting positions well paid. The same important offer exists also at the level of EU and American universities and units of research. Due to these factors, we had very many difficulties in finding experienced researchers, with a strong research background as desired. This was an objective which was only partially achieved at the end of the two years of the project, despite our sustained efforts and intense publicity for hiring researchers.
Another problem that we had was with the fact that it was difficult to plan and achieve long term secondments because this imply a leave without payment and the staff was not content with such an arrangement. Although efforts were done and a request was issued to the head of the University, there was no success in obtaining an invalidating order of the current regulations.

List of Websites:

http://www.erric.eu/
info@erric.eu

Final Report Summary - ERRIC (Empowering Romanian Research on Intelligent Information Technologies)

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