About me!

Dec 2020 – Present

The main goal of the SOLID-B5G project is to perform cutting-edge research and develop breakthrough beyond state-of-the-art solutions in orchestration, management and control (OMC) of resources, in the context of network slicing and edge computing based on massive internet of things (IoT) enabled radio access network (RAN) and core network (CN) for beyond fifth generation (B5G) Internet of vehicles (IoV) and maritime applications.

The technologies addressed in this project have potential applications mainly to public transportation, maritime services, environment, but also possible to other domains like asset monitoring, energy (smart grid), smart city, smart agriculture, healthcare services and environment. For example, 1) protection of critical infrastructures and services; 2) Energy distribution using network slicing for smart grid and Vehicle-to-Grid networks (V2G); and 3) climate change using IoT based data collection and ecosystems monitoring served by dedicated 5G slices.

The proposed partnership constitutes five leading research and industrial organizations in Romania and Norway and is enriched by two third-county partners in Spain and Canada, respectively. We will develop innovative research and development (R&D) solutions to foster the uptake of the newest 5G technologies and services in two envisaged use cases and enable upscaling and exploitation of beyond state-of-the-art 5G technologies from theory to reality.

Oct 2020 – Present

The main purpose of the project is to develop and implement a monitoring and prevention platform for precision agriculture, designed using the current 5G specifications and UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) for Smart City and Smart Neighbourhood use-cases. The role of the platform resides in the soil, air and crop monitoring for communities that want to implement urban farming and/or precision agriculture in or close to residential areas, for both safer food production and air quality improvement

Oct 2020 – Present

The strategic objective of VITAL-5G is to create an open, virtualized and flexible experimentation facility
comprised of an intelligent virtual platform, three distributed European 5G-testbeds and associated vertical infrastructure, to enable the testing and validation of Transport & Logistics (T&L) Network Applications (NetApps) in real-life conditions, utilizing 5G connectivity.

Aug 2020 – Present

The project targets the development of an innovative communications platform specifically for monitoring and protecting the ecosystem of the Danube Delta and the Tulcea county, with the help of sensory matrices and remote control elements, within a newly established research unit.

Feb 2020 – Present

Smart grids represent an electricity network that can intelligently integrate generators, consumers and energy storage in order to efficiently deliver electricity. There is a clear consensus that smart grids can provide many innovative services. Decision-making plays a vital role in these services. But the computational complexity of decision-makings could grow explosively with the size of smart grid infrastructure, the number of devices/users, or the amount of data; If this scalability issue was underestimated, smart grid services can end up with poor performance or limited function, making these services impractical to meet the needs of real-life or industrial-scale deployment. Hence, there is an urgent need to solve the research problem: to what extent the performance and function of smart grids can be maintained without having significant increase of the computational complexity when its scale is changed in terms of smart grid infrastructure size or the number of devices/users?
TESTBED2 is a major interdisciplinary project that combines wisdoms in three academic disciplines – Electronic & Electrical Engineering, Computing Sciences and Macroeconomics, to address the aforesaid problem. The main focus is on developing new techniques to improve the scalability of smart grid services, particularly considering the joint evolution of decarbonised power, heat and transport systems. Moreover, new experimental testbeds will be created to evaluate scalable smart grid solutions. Overall, the main objective of this project is to coordinate the action of 12 Universities (6 in EU, 3 in US, and 3 in China) and 5 enterprises (3 SMEs and 2 large enterprises) with complementary expertise to develop and test various promising strategies for ensuring the scalability of smart grid services, thereby facilitating successful deployment and full roll-out of smart grid technologies.

Oct 2019 – Present

Main aim of the project is to apply, a holistic approach for decreasing the GHG emissions derived from intensive livestock farming by optimizing the livestock production. In order to achieve this the consortium will monitor the animal feed, behaviour and characteristics as well as the stable environment. The data will be collected and analysed by a web based platform and it will provide recommendations to the livestock farming stakeholders (farmers, consultants etc.) in order to take management decision for reducing GHG emissions.

Oct 2019 – Present

The vCare project aims to provide a smart solution grounded on an intelligent ICT environment, which is highly adapted to personalised coaching activities in accordance with the clinical pathway of the patients and the context information. Starting from a clinical baseline, the Virtual Coach will be able to personalize and adapt goals according to the progress achieved in the impairments or disabilities recovery.

Sep 2018 – Present

The aim of SAFECARE is to provide solutions that will improve physical and cyber security in a seamless and cost-effective way. It will promote new technologies and novel approaches to enhance threat prevention, threat detection, incident response and mitigation of impacts. The project will also participate in increasing the compliance between security tools and European regulations about ethics and privacy for health services. Finally, project pilots will take place in the hospitals of Marseille, Turin and Amsterdam, involving security and health practitioners, in order to simulate attack scenarios in near-real conditions. These pilot sites will serve as reference examples to disseminate the results and find customers across Europe.

SealedGRID aims at bringing together experts from industry and academia from cross-sectorial research areas having complementary background with the long-term goal to design, analyse, and implement a scalable, highly trusted and interoperable Smart Grid security platform. The platform will combine, for the very first time, technologies like Blockchain, Distributed Hash Tables, Trusted Execution Environments, and OpenID Connect, while for its realization the SealedGRID consortium is committed to a fully-integrated and multi-disciplinary secondment programme combined with a set of networking, dissemination, and exploitation activities

Mar 2018 – Sep 2021

Contract no. 33PCCDI/2018, UEFISCDI RDI complex project

The project aims to develop the National RDI Strategy in the fields of security and space industry for the 2021-2027 strategic planning cycle related to the new European context of research coordination in the fields of security and space industry.

Contract no. 8Sol/2018, UEFISCDI Solutions project

SecureIoT project focuses on delivering predictive IoT security services, which span multiple IoT platforms and networks of smart objects and are based on security building blocks at both the edge and the core of IoT systems.
SecureIoT will provide implementations of security data collection, security monitoring and predictive security mechanisms to offer integrated services for risk assessment, compliance auditing against regulations and directives (e.g. GDPR, NIS, ePrivacy), as well as to support the IoT developers.

Foretelling and anticipation of security behaviour of IoT entities, is the main concept emphasised by SecureIoT. The provided services span security compliance auditing, automated risk assessment and mitigation, as well as support for IoT security-aware programming.

Mar 2018 – Sep 2020

The Project CloudBook will develop innovating ideas on Parallel Programming including the new labelling proposal that allows programmers to label functions at invocation. This splits the original code into small pieces of “Micro services” that can be deployed using different strategies. Labelling functions at invocation is the key for distributed computing. In addition CloudBook considers the entire cloud as a unified machine, represented as a graph of resources belonging to a “circle” (such as the social network concept of “circle”) .This is used to manage the resources. The deployment of micro-services must minimize certain function “cost of execution”, which takes into account CPU timings, traffic latencies, bandwidth consumptions, energy footprint and reliability.

As a general objective, the project proposes the development of a precision farming platform using M2M / IoT radio-telemetry systems and a Cloud platform for processing collected data. Based on this, modelling and management applications can be developed by telemonitoring the risks of plant disease and managing irrigation in agriculture.

Contract no. 5Sol/2017, UEFISCDI solutions project

Jan 2020

Demand for wireless services is increasing rapidly, and even more so with future 5G services in sight. To maintain Europe’s competitive edge, researchers are working on technologies that go far beyond the next generation of wireless and mobile communications. The EU-funded RECOMBINE project will integrate scientific and business model innovations for building a framework to fulfil the economic potential of future wireless networks. The aim is to provide efficient and flexible services such as enhanced mobile broadband access, ultra-reliable low-latency communications and massive machine-type communications. The project will pursue innovations for advancing in the areas of millimeter-wave technology, licensed spectrum access, antenna design, channel propagation and modelling, and network prediction and quality of experience supported by artificial intelligence.

The main objective of the project MOTOR5G is to motivate and skill competitive young researchers through involvement and engagement in a variety of research activities enabling them to work on real-life technical issues, across multiple European countries and organizations, and providing a strong networking opportunity through participation as speakers in conference and workshop events and through engagement with industry and other stakeholders (e.g. standardization).

Oct 2017 – Sep 2019

Sep 2018 – Dec 2018

The project brings an innovative solution for the problem of CCD (Colony collapse disorder) by introducing an Intelligent Hive Colony Monitoring System, in order to determine their health and detect anomalies.
The system will be composed of 3 main components:
–  monitoring interface of the collected parameters, with detection and alerting capabilities
– database storage and archiving system.
– aquirement procedure of the hive parameters with modular extension interfaces.
The proposed system allows the monitoring of bee colonies especially during winter, when it is hard and not recommended to physically intervene in the hive during prolonged periods. By monitoring the parameters of temperature and inner humidity, as well as the swarm of bees during the cold season, one can identify early when the process of increased consumption of food starts, and then prevent the colony death if it remains without food. The swarm position (which moves after the food) can also be important: it will indicate both the food consumption and the ventilation level of the hive.

Aug 2017 – Dec 2018

Contract no. 213PED/2017, UEFISCDI Demo Experimental Project

Oct 2016 – Sep 2018

The project aims at implementing an intelligent system based on a performant integrated wired and wireless communication architecture. The secure access will be implemented for clear categories of users, with multiple access levels, as well as for guest-type users, with prior identification and session logging. The system will use locally-defined policies and a centralized redundant database, allowing remote authentication through eduroam technology, performed by the user’s distant institution of affiliation.

Sep 2017 – Aug 2018

Sep 2016 – Dec 2017

Sep 2016 – Sep 2017

Aug 2012 – Dec 2016

The SaRaT-IWSN project proposes a new generation radio transceiver to be used into at the IWSN communication node, based on an open source hardware and software platform, but particularized in order to ensure the requirements presented above. The hardware platform is an USRP-type one and the entire radio transceiver is designed starting from the GNU-Radio software platform, according to the Software Defined Radio methods. This method of developing the communication nodes will ensure their scalability as well an easier reconfigurability of the entire network. At the end of the project some recommendations will be considered in order to reduce the costs of the transceivers in order to facilitate their future production and their usage in practical applications.

Oct 2016 – Nov 2016

Inco Net EaP Twinning Grant no. 609508

Nov 2013 – Oct 2016

eWALL will be an affordable, easy-to-install prefabricated wall that can be mounted on an existing wall and includes, into the background, all the ICT technology needed to enable a number of services for the senior citizen to cover the major ontologies of Active and Healthy Ageing.
The project will carry out high-risk and multi-disciplinary research and will have a large-scale demonstrator exercise for validating the concept with solid clinical evidence. This will include both technical-, user- and legal-evaluation, to measure with advanced tools and methodologies the impact on the QoL. The eWALL system will extend the state-of-the-art of Assistive Platforms and will significantly increase the independent living of seniors. The project will also perform socio-economic studies to deliver recommendations for the health sector that will result in mid- and long-term benefits for the sustainability of national health systems.

The general scientific objective of the project is to extensively evaluate the spectrum utilization and the spectrum availability in order to study the potentials for its re-usage by novel and innovative wireless services. In order to obtain relevance to the NATO’s policy towards defence against terrorism and countering other threats to security, the ORCA project will use the obtained results towards conducting a feasibility analysis of high performance, secure and “easy to use” secondary system platform able to automatically utilize the detected chunks of unused spectrum for providing services in emergency situation communications, as well as other security threatened situations.

Aug 2011 – Dec 2013

Oct 2008 – Dec 2011

The DETCOS project contains interdisciplinary frontier research aiming to develop new advanced
devices for the astroparticles physics, based on new technology. In the interaction of the cosmic particle with the atmosphere nuclei, cascades of millions of secondary particles are produced, phenomenon called Extensive Air Showers, EAS, including electrons, muons, gammas, hadrons and netrinos, covering a surface of hundreds of m2. So to measure the cosmic radiation, complex detection systemsare necessary, collecting information from many detectors installed on large area at the ground, in the underground or in the space. The project proposed to develop two detection systems for cosmic muons and neutrinos of very high energy.

A detector for the cosmic muons will be built, using a new technology for tracking the muons, based on scintillators and Si photocathodes, SiPM, realizing a compact detector, easier to be used in space experiments. The optical signal transmission will reduce the electronics and do not suffer for electromagnetic influence. The measurements of the cosmic background will be performed with more accuracy, activity included in the accepted FP7 project LAGUNA and in the proposed FP7 project ILIAS­next. A new SiPM detector has potential in many applications, especially for space research, due to low power consumption and low bias voltage operation.

Another system of detection is focussed on the investigation for the first time in Europe of the possibility to detect the radio waves produced by cosmic radiation in the salt layers in the salt mine Slanic Prahova. Such activity is a priority in the roadmap of astroparticles physics research for the period 2008­-2015 and it is included in the proposed FP7 project HEAPnet. The radio detection of cosmic rays in the salt mines supposes a radio characterization of the salt sites, which will improve the capability of mobile communication operators to deploy wireless networks for emergency or commercial reasons.

Oct 2008 – Nov 2011

Proiectul isi propune sa conceapa, sa proiecteze, sa realizeze si sa testeze o solutie de acces wireless hibrid, bazata pe convergenta unor tehnologii wireless de tip IP (WiFi, WiMax) si celulare compatibile IP (GPRS/UMTS) susceptibile de a permite implementarea unor solutii de tip Voice over IP (VoIP) sau de transfer de date si care sa permita totodata reducerea costurilor de acces.

Oct 2007 – Apr 2011

The Reconfigurable Interoperability of Wireless Communications System (RIWCoS) offers the network providers and their users a possibility to choose, with minimal investments, between alternative wireless access networks, in the benefit of robustness of users’ requested services. Moreover, this selection can be made based on the comparison between the availability of access resources and service requirements. Thus, any changes in resource availability due network instantaneous saturation or equipment crashes can be bypassed by terminals and network components that adapts dynamically to the new situation. Autonomic decision making and self-healing capabilities will greatly improve the security of data delivery services, an essential goal of NATO’s policy towards countering the information security.

The goal of the RIWCoS project is to develop an “easy to use” content delivery platform, compatible with IEEE 802.21 standards, able to exploit the synergy between various wireless access technologies.