The Department of Informatics within the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics organizes, annually since 1999, the international symposium SYNASC (https://synasc.ro/2021) in collaboration with the Institute of Symbolic Computing of the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria and the e-Austria Institute from Timisoara.
This year, researchers from 7 countries participated in the symposium held, in an online version, between December 10 and 24, who presented theoretical and applied results in the field of symbolic and numerical computation, mathematical logic, programming, theoretical foundations of computer science, computing distributed and artificial intelligence, image processing, cyber security and blockchain.
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 Carsten Schneider from Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, assisted locally by Mircea Marin, Western University of Timisoara. Since 2005, the selected and presented papers are included in a volume published by the IEEE Computer Society that is indexed in ISI Web of Science, SCOPUS and DBLP.
The program of each of the four 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: Johannes Bluemlein, Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron DESY, Germany; Christian Calude, University of Auckland, New Zealand; Dragos Teodor Gavrilut, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University and Cyber Threat Intelligence Lab – Bitdefender Romania; Tetsuo Ida, University of Tsukuba, Japan; Fear Kutsia, Johannes Kepler University, Austria; Peter Paul, Johannes Kepler University, Austria; Stephen 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: computational algebra methods applied in physics, current results in theoretical informatics related to incompleteness and undecidability, computational models for digital origami, results from the field automatic reasoning, including applications of symbolic computing systems in the automation of mathematical reasoning, critical aspects in the implementation of symbolic computing systems. In addition to these presentations, three tutorials were included in the program, mainly addressed to young researchers, supported by Laura Kovacs (Technical University of Vienna, Austria) – Automated Reasoning with Vampire, Ioana Cleopatra Pau (Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria) – Symbolic Techniques for Fuzzy Relations and Tetsuo Ida (University of Tsukuba, Japan) – Origami programming in E-origami system Eos. An industrial track was also organized, inviting Florin Mănăilă from IBM Germany (with the presentation of IBM Federated Learning).
In addition to the sessions dedicated to the main sections of the symposium, three workshops were held on related topics (iterative methods for determining fixed points, image processing techniques used in medicine and industry, computing inspired by nature). The workshops allowed the establishment of contacts and collaborations between researchers from the academic environment and researchers from the industrial environment.
Two special sessions were organized within the symposium: Special Session for PhD Students, Special session – Advances in Computational, Symbolic and Secure Algorithms for Permissioned and Permissionless Blockchains - ACSSA 2021
Co-located with SYNASC 2021 was the Working Formal Methods Symposium – FROM 2021 whose program included five thematically linked guest presentations.
Synasc 2021 benefited from the support of the partners: the Western University of Timișoara, the Western University Foundation, RISC – Johannes Kepler University of Linz, IeAT Timișoara and the support of some IT companies, among which we mention: IBM, ETA2U, Nokia, INTEL, Hella , Genisoft, Continental Automotive, Cmed, CyberBee Software and MemIQ as sponsors.
The event was dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Department of Informatics at the Western University of Timișoara.
Additional details can be found at http://synasc.ro/2021 or by contacting the organizers (prof. Dr. Viorel Negru, viorel.negru@e-uvt.ro).
