The Department of Informatics within the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics organizes, annually since 1999, the international symposium SYNASC 2020 in collaboration with the Institute of Symbolic Computing of the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria and the e-Austria Institute in Timișoara.
This year, 1 researchers from 4 countries participated in the symposium held online, between September 90-16, who presented theoretical and applied results in the field of symbolic and numerical computation, mathematical logic, programming, theoretical foundations of computer science, distributed computing and artificial intelligence.
The SYNASC Symposium is recognized nationally and internationally as a scientific event that sets a high bar in terms of the quality of the papers. The evaluation of the works is done by an international program committee coordinated every year by an internationally recognized specialist. This year, the scientific coordinator of the symposium was prof. dr Elisabetta Di Nitto for the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Since 2005, the selected and presented papers are included in a volume published by the IEEE Computer Society that is indexed in the ISI Web of Science.
The program of each of the 4 days of the symposium included guest presentations given by leading researchers from the country and abroad. At this edition, the following were invited to give plenary presentations: Damian Tamburri (Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands), Gabriela Csurka (Naver Labs Europe, France), Ioana Leustean (University of Bucharest, Romania), Letizia Jacceri (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway), Moshe Vardi (Rice University, USA), Roman Beck (University of Copenhagen, Denmark), and Stephen M. Watt (University of Waterloo, Canada). The participants thus had the opportunity to learn about the latest research directions in various fields related to the theme of the symposium: applications of cellular automata, automatic program analysis techniques, current approaches in solving optimization problems, applications of robotics, hybrid methods in geometry algebra, formal models for the analysis of distributed data storage systems, specific algorithms for symbolic processing.
In addition to these presentations, two tutorials were included in the program, addressed mainly to young researchers, supported by Daniel Vladusic and Dragan Radolovic (SODALITE Project Team – XLAB Slovenia) – presentation entitled "Infrastructure as Code for Heterogeneous Computing", Razvan Pascanu and Viorica Patrăucean (DeepMind) - presentation entitled "Deep Learning at scale with applications to Computer Vision".
In addition to the sessions dedicated to the main sections of the symposium, 6 workshops were held on related topics (agent systems for solving complex problems, iterative methods for determining fixed points, image processing techniques used in medicine and industry, computing inspired by nature and geoinformatics) and 2 special sessions (Advances in Computational, Symbolic and Secure Algorithms for Permissioned and Permissionless Blockchains and a session for PhD students). Workshops and special sessions allowed the establishment of contacts and collaborations between researchers from the academic environment and researchers from the industrial environment.
Synasc 2020 benefited from the support of the partners: the Ministry of Research and Innovation, the Timiş County Council, the Timișoara City Hall, the West University Foundation and the support of some IT companies, among which we mention: IBM, ETA2U and Intel (as main sponsors), respectively , Continental Automotive, Cmed, Nokia, CyberBee Software and MemIQ as sponsors.
Additional details can be found at http://synasc.ro/2020 or by contacting the organizers (Prof. Dr. Viorel Negru, viorel.negru@e-uvt.ro).
