Academic staff
Alin Moldoveanu is Professor (teaching Software Engineering and Virtual Reality) and Vice-dean (in charge of the master studies) at the same faculty that he completed as valedictorian, 20 years ago – Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, from POLITEHNICA University of Bucharest.
He’s teaching software engineering at bachelor level and virtual and augmented reality at masters, focusing on applied research in virtual and augmented reality (exploring and applying immersion, sensory substitution, and distorted reality), eHealth (assistive and rehabilitative solutions, prevention of hospital acquired infections) and eLearning & eCulture (mixed-reality campuses and cultural environments).
Director or responsible for many national or European research projects in these areas, such as Sound of Vision, TRAVEE, HAI-OPS, Lib2Life. List of projects and publications available at: https://cs.pub.ro/index.php/people/userprofile/alin_moldoveanu.
His research works received several prestigious prizes, such as Best “Tech for Society” Horizon 2020 project, Awarded by EC through Innovation Radar, at ICT 2018 – received by Sound of Vision, where he acted as technical coordinator and UPB team responsible.
Florica Moldoveanu is Professor at the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, from POLITEHNICA University of Bucharest and coordinator of the master’s programs “Graphics, Multimedia and Virtual Reality” and “Management in Information Technology” of the same faculty.
She is teaching Computer Graphics, Computer Vision and Software Engineering. She is also scientific coordinator for PhD studies beginning with 2000. Until now, 31 students finished successfully their PhD thesis under her coordination (http://doctorat.acs.pub.ro/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/m-Scientific-Offer-F_Moldoveanu.pdf). Throughout the years, she contributed to many European or national research projects, as project director, UPB responsible or project team member. Her research interests are in the areas of Computer Vision, Real Time computer Graphics, application of Virtual and Augmented Reality in the medical field, e-Health. She published over 240 scientific papers (https://cs.pub.ro/index.php/people/userprofile/florica_moldoveanu), 26 books and is co-author of on-line courses in partnership with European universities (http://mydecamp.eu/). Also, she is co-author of the standard ISO IEEE 11073-20601, Dec. 2008: Health informatics - Personal health device communication Part 20601: Application profile- Optimized Exchange Protocol.
Irina Georgiana Mocanu is Associate Professor Department of Computer Science and Engineering of UPB and member of the AIMAS Laboratory. Her research interests are in image processing, machine learning, computer games and applications of ambient intelligence. She has published over 50 research papers in journals and international conferences. She coordinated the national project Mobile@Old - Assistant for the ageing based on mobility patterns and she led the AAL project IONIS - NITICSplus - Indoor and Outdoor Solution for Dementia. Now she is leading the UPB team in the EU AAL project INCARE Integrated Solution for Innovative Elderly Care. Also, she is MC Member for Cost Action CA19121 - Network on Privacy-Aware Audio- and Video-Based Applications for Active and Assisted Living and MC Substitute for Cost Action CA19136 – International Interdisciplinary Network on Smart Healthy Age-friendly Environments
Anca Morar received the B.S. degree in computer science from the Politehnica University of Bucharest, in 2009, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science, in 2012, in the field of medical image analysis and visualization. She is currently an Associate Professor with the Computer Science and Engineering Department, Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, Politehnica University of Bucharest.
She is very passionate about computer graphics and due to this domain, she decided to become part of the Computer Science Department. She teaches logic design, computer graphics and software engineering at bachelor level and volume visualization and computer animation at the Master in Graphics, Multimedia and Virtual Reality. For her, teaching and working as a researcher at UPB is the perfect job, since it combines both theoretical complex elements, as well as practical ones and it allows her to interact with people (students and professors) who are as passionate as she is. As part of the graphics group, she is involved in research projects in the following domains: eHealth, computer graphics and computer vision, virtual and augmented reality.
Victor Asavei got his PhD degree in Computer Science from POLITEHNICA University of Bucharest, in 2011. He is currently a lecturer at the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, from the same university. His current domains of interest (teaching and research) include real-time 3D computer graphics and GPGPU (General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units). Victor is the co-author of over 60 research papers and 5 books in the fields of real-time 3D computer graphics, parallel and distributed computing, software engineering and medical IT and he has participated in many national and international research projects.
Profile Link: https://cs.pub.ro/index.php/people/userprofile/victor_asavei
Oana completed her PhD in Computer Science at University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest, Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, in 2015. During her doctoral studies, she developed and tested virtual environments in order to improve the navigational skills of visually impaired people through perceptual feedback, sensory adaptation and procedural learning. Now she occupies the position of lecturer and teaches Computer Programming, Object Oriented Programming and Data Structures. As for the research part, she is interested by fields such as automatic emotion recognition, virtual reality and video games development. Over the 2015-2017 period, she worked in the Sound of Vision project and in the last two years, in the field of applications for phobia therapy in the SAFE-VR project as project manager (UPB internal grant) and as a researcher in a scholarship funded by ERC Research Grants, on the same subject. Since June 2020, she has also participated in the PhoVR project, together with colleagues from UPB, University of Bucharest, Faculty of Biology and IPRINT 3D company. The results of their studies are promising, benefiting from great acceptance in the scientific community at high level, as they have published papers in top journals and conferences.
Alex Gradinaru is a Lecturer at the Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science of University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest. His research interests and expertise span the area of Virtual and Augmented Reality, e-Health, e-Learning, Computer Graphics, Game Development and Software Engineering, Distributed systems, DevOps, Web/Cloud Services and application development. He is involved in many research projects and has experience in entrepreneurship.
He got his PhD in Computer Science in 2019 from POLITEHNICA University of Bucharest with a contributions to educational virtual environments.
PHD students
Silviu Ivascu graduated in 2015 from the University of Pitesti, Faculty of Electronics, Communications and Computers. During his bachelor studies, he participated each year at the Students Scientific Communication Sessions, including CERC2015 organized by the Military Technical Academy. In the same time period, he worked as a web developer. In 2017, he finished his master’s studies in Graphics, Multimedia and Virtual Reality at the POLITEHNICA University of Bucharest. During his master’s studies, he worked for some time as a web developer at IBM, then he became responsible for the development of virtual environments for training visually impaired people in the Sound of Vision project (www.soundofvision.net), research project where UPB was one of the coordinating universities. He is currently a PhD student, doing research activity at UPB and he is the owner of Augmented Arts SRL – company which provides services for the gaming industry (www.augmentedarts.ro and www.acousticarchitect.com ).
Iulia Stanica finished her bachelor studies in Computers and Information Technology in French, at the Faculty of Engineering in Foreign Languages (FILS), UPB, as a valedictorian, being the beneficiary of a performance scholarship. She has two master’s degrees from 2018: one in Graphics, Multimedia and Virtual Reality (ACS) and a second one in Management, Innovation and Technology of Collaborative Systems in French (FILS), both of them graduated with 10. She is currently a PhD student at the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, UPB.
Since 2016, she worked as a research assistant at UPB, in the Horizon2020 project entitled “Sound of Vision”, which received the grand prize (Best “Tech for Society”) from the European committee. She is currently dedicated to her teaching career, working as a teaching assistant at FILS and research assistant in the Lib2Life national project.
She loves photography, computer graphics, virtual reality and games, trying to include them into her projects, usually related to the medical field (e.g. treating phobias using VR, creating virtual environments for visually impaired, neurorehabilitation using VR).
Anca Balutoiu finished this year her master’s studies in Graphics, Multimedia and Virtual Reality. She always loved video games, and this probably stands as the motivation of following this master program after finishing her bachelor studies (also at the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, from POLITEHNICA University of Bucharest). At the moment, she is working in different research projects at the faculty, mostly related to virtual reality and computer vision. She considers that this type of interactive applications can help us create a more performant educational system. In the last 5 years, she has been teaching programming to children of all ages. Over the years, she noticed that each child prefers to learn through play (interactive applications, examples and experiments). Therefore, using her knowledge acquired during her master’s studies, she would love to continue working in projects meant to transform the learning process into an easier, more interactive one.
Alex Dinu. Somewhere between a technical artist and a gameplay programmer, in love with character design & mechanics, animation and toon shading. Also a Batman fan.
Profil linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-dinu-0b1b21146/
Roxana Draganoiu is a 41 year-old PhD student at the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers. Her lifetime passion is the study of mathematics using graphical programming. She is the author of the DigiMathArt concept, which is both a parametric modeling method and a correlated teaching method of mathematics and programming – representing also the subject of her PhD thesis. Her dream is to create a holistic education system, based on practice – the first step in this direction being the creation of CEREHARD school (British - Romanian educational pilot project, accredited through EOTAS - Education Other Than At School).
Anca Teodora Prazaru graduated from the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, at POLITEHNICA University of Bucharest. As she loves games and 3D modeling, she continued her master’s studies in Graphics, Multimedia and Virtual Reality, where she learnt many interesting things. This master’s program gave her the opportunity of getting familiar with the Sound of Vision research project and participating to a project in Iceland related to developing games for visually impaired people. This experience made her eager to continue exploring the creation of applications for disabled persons as part of her PhD studies.
Collaborators
Education: Bachelor Degree in Computers at the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, from POLITEHNICA University of Bucharest (UPB), Master’s Degree in Graphics, Multimedia and Virtual Reality (also UPB)
Occupation: Part time indie game developer, full-time software engineering and technical trainer
Gabriel has a passion for complex architectures of real-time software applications, 3D graphics (shaders), visual applications, GPGPU processing, animations and web technologies.
UPB collaborator: Gabriel had a great contribution in the development of research projects (Sound of Vision 2015 - 2018) and the elaboration of teaching material for 3D graphics subjects (bachelor and master’s level, 2017-2019) , lab assistant (2016-2019).
Personal projects:
Zoria - zoriagame.com (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1159090/)
- Classical RPG fantasy game developed in Unity. The entire technical project was developed from scratch as a reusable framework: quest system, visual quest designer (dialogues, events, monitoring, items), interaction system, general game settings, saving-loading and so on.
SessionSync - https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/session-sync/
- Firefox Addon for managing browsing sessions by using bookmarks. Used by over 15K users.