Latest from AIRI
Fresh stories, research milestones, and press moments curated straight from the Strapi-powered newsroom.
AIRi@UTCN is pleased to announce that the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute - AIRi@UTCN and the Decision Support Systems Laboratory of the Energy Policy Unit at the National Technical University of Athens - DSS Lab, EPU-NTUA will co-organize the special session “AI for the Future Energy System.”
AIRi@UTCN is pleased to announce that the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute - AIRi@UTCN and the Decision Support Systems Laboratory of the Energy Policy Unit at the National Technical University of Athens - DSS Lab, EPU-NTUA will co-organize the special session “AI for the Future Energy System.”
AIRi@UTCN is pleased to welcome French artist Benoit Challand as a visiting researcher for a week-long research stay starting May 5 2026. The artist and researcher will engage with the AIRi@UTCN research community around the project “Crystallize”, an artistic and technological exploration of how emotions can be translated into data, images, and sculptural forms.
Bosch Cluj Plant and AIRi@UTCN are taking the first steps towards improving the integrated circuit testing process.
We were pleased to welcome the team from Transilvania IT Cluster to AIRi@UTCN, marking an important first step in preparing for two major projects that are about to start: RO AI Factory and TEDIHT 2.0. AIRi@UTCN and Transilvania IT Cluster are proud to be partners in both initiatives. Our meeting focused on identifying synergies, aligning priorities, and preparing the first activities of the projects - with a shared ambition: turning research and innovation into real impact for companies and society. bringing together research, industry, innovation, and the regional digital ecosystem.
Through the AI4INO project, AIRi@UTCN and 17 companies will work together to build AI made in Romania. With an investment of nearly €11.7 million, funded through the North-West Regional Programme 2021–2027, AIRi@UTCN will become a hub for applied AI research, technology development, testing, and validation.
Today, 1 September 2026, marks the official start of the RO AI Factory project - Romanian EuroHPC AI Factory at ICI Bucharest - funded by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking under the HORIZON-JU-EUROHPC-2025-AI call. For AIRi@UTCN this is an important milestone for the role of Cluj-Napoca and UTCN in advancing AI research, innovation and technology transfer. As a consortium partner, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca brings its expertise in artificial intelligence, research infrastructure, education and collaboration with industry to the development of the RO AI Factory ecosystem. The opportunities this initiative creates for: advanced AI research and experimentation, access to HPC and AI infrastructure, collaboration between academia and industry, support for start-ups and SMEs, development of AI skills and talent. Infrastructure creates possibilities. Collaboration turns them into impact. We look forward to contributing to RO AI Factory and to building, together with our partners, a strong Romanian AI ecosystem connected to Europe.
Happy to share that our paper, "UAVid++: Higher-Quality Labels and Expanded Semantic Taxonomy for Aerial Semantic Segmentation" has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (TGRS). UAVid++ is an improved and expanded version of the UAVid (https://uavid.nl/) dataset for aerial semantic segmentation. We manually corrected the labels in all the annotated frames and added three new classes (Water, Sky, and Roof), bringing the taxonomy from 8 to 11 categories. We re-trained and re-evaluated five state-of-the-art methods on the dataset variants. The corrected labels alone improve performance by up to +7.4% mIoU, and the new classes add another +4.1%. The benchmark also becomes more discriminative and changes how the SOTA methods rank. We also adapted a frozen DINO-pretrained ViT backbone with a lightweight trainable head, reaching 82.04% mIoU on UAVid++ (+2.7% over the best SOTA method), while outperforming the state of the art on multiple out-of-distribution datasets. The project page, code, and dataset and are all public if you'd like to explore or build on them: Project page: https://lnkd.in/d_vHxybs Code: https://lnkd.in/d3C9yuN2 Dataset: https://lnkd.in/dGWYtDei
Implementation of the 5G-SHARE project is now underway, with UTCN, UNSTPB, and Vodafone Romania deploying private 5G networks to support new digital applications for education and research. The Romanian partners are contributing to use cases spanning XR Learning, Post-Quantum Cryptography, 5G Sensing, and an AI-Augmented Academic Network.
AIRi@UTCN was honored to welcome Prof. Ladislau “Lotzi” Bölöni, a distinguished researcher in Artificial Intelligence and autonomous systems, and a proud alumnus of the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca.
AIRi@UTCN was recently presented at Shandong Jiaotong University in Jinan, Shandong Province, China. As the world is changing with unprecedented acceleration, we are actively exploring new research opportunities and academic partnerships with colleagues from China. One moment from the visit stayed with me. When students begin a master’s program there, they receive a desk at the university. I had the opportunity to enter one of these “offices for master students.” The room was full of students working with focus and discipline. I asked whether they spend eight hours a day in the office. The Chinese professor smiled and answered: “At least eight hours.” It was a simple answer, but a powerful reminder: research culture is built not only through infrastructure and international collaboration, but also through commitment, persistence, and daily work. Looking forward to building bridges between AIRi@UTCN and our partners in China, and to creating meaningful research opportunities for students and researchers on both sides.
AIRi@UTCN welcomed representatives of clusters and organisations from Emilia-Romagna as part of the Italy-North-West Romania bilateral economic mission held in Cluj-Napoca on 17-18 June 2026.
The Artificial Intelligence Research Institute - AIRi@UTCN congratulates Infineon Technologies for the official inauguration of its new research and development center in Cluj-Napoca.
AIRi@UTCN is pleased to announce our participation in the first in-person meeting of the 5G-SHARE project. Hosted by the Atlantic Technological University (ATU) Donegal in Letterkenny, Ireland, this two-day gathering marked a major milestone in our collaborative effort to shape the future of digital connectivity in academia.
AIRi@UTCN is pleased to announce that it will co-organize the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Advanced Scientific Computing - ICASC 2026, which will take place between 21-23 October 2026 in Cluj-Napoca.
AIRI@UTCN is pleased to announce the visit of Dr. Ilknur Dönmez from Istanbul Health and Technology University, who is joining the AIRi research community @ TUCN as a visiting professor through the Erasmus programme.
AIRI@UTCN is pleased to welcome Oumaima Majdoubi, PhD student at Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco, for a three-month research stay supported by the Eugen Ionescu Research Grant.
The visit took place in the context of the long-standing cooperation between TUCN and Tenaris, with the aim of further strengthening connections between the company and our university under the patronage of AIRi@UTCN.
AI Buildathon is a 48-hour sprint where mixed teams — developers, designers, product people, marketers, and more - build functional AI prototypes for real problems in Cluj: mobility, education, local businesses, urban life. It takes place at ClujHub, as part of Zilele Clujului, and is organized by the Romanian Tech Startups Association, in collaboration with ADR Nord-Vest, INNO, and the Institute for Artificial Intelligence at UTCN.
The first hackathon in Romania dedicated to the use of technology and artificial intelligence in performance sports.
AlloyGraph is an open-source platform that predicts mechanical properties of nickel-based superalloys, designs new alloy compositions, and answers natural language questions about superalloy data.
AIRi@UTCN was pleased to welcome the delegation of the Committee on European Affairs of the Chamber of Deputies, led by Deputy Ovidiu-Vasile Cîmpean, Vice-Chair of the Committee, during its working visit to Cluj-Napoca, held in the context of the public debate on the future EU budget for 2028–2034.
The Orange 5G Lab within AIRi announces two internship opportunities dedicated to students of the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Information Technology, Communications specialization.
AIRi is happy to announce the completion of this milestone: UTCN's Center of Immersive Technologies for Education, funded through eUT4ALL (e-PNRR: 1277457265) and hosted by AIRi, is now up and running! More updates to come! https://lnkd.in/d7_-yt4Y
Solar physics offers a uniquely rich and multi-scale environment for data science, combining high-resolution imaging, time-series analysis, and complex physical modelling. Modern missions, such as Solar Dynamics Observatory, continuously produce terabytes of data per day, including multi-wavelength images, Doppler velocity fields, and magnetic maps of the Sun. From a data science perspective, solar datasets are inherently high-dimensional, spatio-temporal, and physics-constrained, making them ideal for machine learning applications such as convolutional neural networks for image recognition, recurrent or transformer models for time-series forecasting, and unsupervised methods for pattern discovery. At the same time, they challenge purely data-driven approaches, as physical interpretability remains essential—for example, linking learned features to magnetic structures, energy transport, or wave dynamics.
One month before building completion, the vision is becoming reality. What once lived on drawings, plans, and discussions is now taking shape day by day. Every milestone reached reflects the dedication, coordination, and hard work of everyone involved. We are now in the final stretch, focused on delivering a space built with quality, purpose, and attention to detail.