Brief history
Romanian Academy Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence “Mihai Drăgănescu” (ICIA) was set up in 1994 as a centre of competence and active dissemination of knowledge in the domain of Artificial Intelligence. ICIA has a core of permanent research positions and a small number of consultant researchers. Besides them, a variable number of contract-based positions, especially students, participate in the R&D activities of ICIA. Every year, since its foundation, ICIA was evaluated as an excellency institution by the Romanian Academy. In 2001 ICIA won the competition for Centres of Excellency (in Information Science and Technology) organized by the Ministry of Education and Science. In 2002 it was rated the best research institute of the Romanian Academy (from 60 institutes and centres). In 2002 ICIA was granted the right to organize doctoral studies in the Romanian Academy system. In 2008 ICIA was accredited as a research institution and as a research and development, member of the research and development system of national interest, in conformity with HG no. 551/2007. The main research projects of ICIA are in the areas of natural language processing, machine learning and knowledge acquisition, computer-aided instruction and integrated modelling of information and geospatial technology. ICIA has been a member of European Network of Excellence in Human Language Technologies for more than 10 years. The activities of ICIA also include know-how dissemination, education in artificial intelligence, and the organisation of national and international conferences (see the ConsILR series 200-2015), summer schools (the EuroLAN series 1993-2015), and seminars. ICIA took part in over 40 international and national projects, and in the international technical and scientific competitions to which they participated with their own systems they ranked among the winners and the leading characters of most of them (WA-NACL 2003: Edmonton-Canada; WA-ACL 2005: Ann Arbor-USA; QA-CLEF 2006: Alicante-Spain WSD-ACL/SEMEVAL2007: Prague-Czech Republic, QA-CLEF 2007: Budapest-Hungary, ResPubliQA-CLEF 2009: Corfu-Greece, etc.). ICIA has cooperation relations with universities, research institutes and industrial partners from more than 30 countries from Europe and the United States.