The institute was founded in 1994 (through Governmental Decree 743/24.12.1993) under the name of “Center for Advanced Research in Automatic Learning, Processing of Natural Language and Conceptual Modelling”, and with Governmental Decree nr. 695/3.07.2002 the name has been changed in Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (ICIA).
Starting with the year 1994, ICIA has been evaluated each year as the unit for research excellence by the committee of evaluation in the Romanian Academy.
The research personnel includes 11 main researchers, 7 of them are professors (Mihai Draganescu, Gheorghe Tecuci, Dan Tufis, Stefan Trausan-Matu, Corneliu Burileanu, Adriana Vlad and Dragos Burileanu, the first three are also members of the Romanian Academy), and two are associate professors (Angela Ionita and Cristina Niculescu).
Thanks to the multidisciplinary character of the domain (Artificial Intelligence), the institution has highly skilled specialists in computer since, mathematics, linguistics, philosophy and economics. The most important group in ICIA makes research and development in the processing (multilanguage) of natural speech (written and spoken) and in automated learning.
In the 10 years of existence ICIA has been involved in 31 international projects (20 of them European projects) with 60 partners from Europe and US.
International bilateral projects:
FLUENT2 (1993-1994: A Foreign Language Tutoring System; cooperation with University George Mason and MIT),
PAILab (1993-1994: An Integrated environment for teaching AI; cooperation with IDSIA, Lugano),
ELU (A unification framework for machine translation; cooperation with ISSCO, Geneva),
The Romanian Internet Academy (1995 – 2000: internet education for people in the humanities; project financed by Andrew Mellon Foundation and Institute for Communication and Advanced Information Technology of George Mason University),
Using Multistrategy Learning as a Framework for Building Knowledge-Based Systems (1995 – 1997; cooperation with University George Mason),
CABDRF (1996-1998: Automatic Construction of a Bilingual Romanian-French Lexicon; cooperation with LIMSI/CNRS finantat de AUPELF-UREF),
DICO-EAST (2001-2003: Building a distribution platform for explanatory dictionaries; cooperation with University from Geneva and Bulgarian Academy of Science, within the program SCOPES financed by Swiss National Science Foundation),
ROCOCO (2004-2005: Acquiring Reading Skills in ROmanian through COmparable COrpora; cooperation with Universitatea din Leeds, financed by British Academy),
KATEDRAST (2001-2004: exploring principles and foundations of science; cooperation with Universitatea George Mason si Physics Laboratory of Noetic Institute, Orinda, California),
SkyNurse (2004-2005: Distance learning through satellite, Romanian-Italian project),
Inf3C (2004-2005: Representation et gestion des Connaissances et Competences; cooperation with Nantes University, France).
European projects, networks of excellence:
ILPNET (1994-1997: INCO Network of Excellence in Inductive Logic Programming),
Tempus JEP 9149/95
ILPNET II (1998-2000: Copernicus Network of Excellence in Inductive Logic Programming),
ELSNET (1994-1995: ESPRIT Network of Excellence in Language and Speech),
ELSNET-Goes-EAST (1995-1997: Copernicus Network of Excellence in Language and Speech),
TELRI (1995-1997: Trans European Language Resource Infrastructure, Network of Excellence),
TELRI II (1997-2001: Trans European Language Resource Infrastructure, Network of Excellence),
ELAN (1999-2001: MLIS European Language Activity Network).
Other European projects:
PEKADS (1994-1996: Integrated Knowledge Modeling Environment for the operationalization of CommonKADS designs; project Copernicus)
MULTEXT - East (1995–1997: Multilingual Text Corpora; project Copernicus)
AMASE (1998-1999: Agent-based Mobile Access to Information Services, project ACTS)
CONCEDE (1998–2000: Consortium for Central European Dictionary Encoding; project Copernicus)
LARFLAST (1998–2000: LeARning Foreign LAnguage Scientific Terminology; project Copernicus)
IKF-R (2001-2003: Information and Knowledge Fusion-Romania; project Eureka)
BALKANET (2001-2004: Multilingual Lexical Ontology for Balkan Languages; project PC5)
FF-POIROT (2002-2005: Financial Fraud Prevention-Oriented Information Resources using Ontology Technology; project PC5).
EUROCITIZEN (2002-2005: multi-user on-line game of knowledge, to promote, European intercultural education, cross-national cooperation, and enhance European awareness among citizens of Europe; ICIA is subcontractor in this project PC5).
European projects currently in implementation:
PROLEARN (2004-2006: network of excellence on technology enhanced professional learning)
KNOWLEDGE-WEB (2004-2006: network of excellence on furthering the semantic web)
ROMNET-ERA (2004-2006: support action on networking quality research centers in Romania)
ICIA owns and manages the main resource of computation resources for Romanian language (parallel monolinguistic and multilinguistic corpus, in XML format – with morpho-lexical deambiguous, lematized and alligned, explaining and translation dictionaries, lists of frequencies, lexical multilinguistic ontology etc.) created within the european projects (TELRI, ILP, ELAN, MULTEXT-EAST, CONCEDE, LARFLAST, BALKANET, FF-POIROT etc.).
Recent confirmations of the results obtained by the ICIA researchers were received in international competitions of aligning text at word level for Romanian-English (Edmonton, Canada, 2003, within the Conference of the North American Association of Computational Linguistics (NAACL2003) and in Ann-Arbor, Michigan, SUA, 2005, Conference of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL2005). In these competitions, both won by ICIA, we have competed along the world best research groups.
The publications of the researchers from ICIA are overwhelming, over 800 titles appeared in big publishing houses (Academic Press, Kluwer Academic Pbs., North Holland, Springer Verlag, AAAI Press/The MIT Press, Academia Româna), in scientific magazines (AI Magazine, IEEE, Computers and Humanities, Intelligent Systems and Interfaces, Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Journal on Science and Technology of Information etc.) or conference volumes (IJCAI, COLING, ECAI, ACL, EACL, LREC, ICEIS etc.). The main researchers from ICIA are members in committees of over 20 international magazines, are frequent members in Committees for programs/organization/reviews of important conferences in Europe and US, hold lectures as guests in the most prestigious universities in the world.
As a sign of appreciation three researchers from ICIA (Prof. Corneliu Burileanu, Prof. Gh. Tecuci, Prof. Dan Tufis) were rewarded with the scientifically highest prize in Romania (the rewards of the Romanian Academy).
ICIA has organized and co-organized of important international conferences, workshops and summer schools.
The institution intends to develop a good collaboration internally and internationally in the field of “Information and Communication Technology”, Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence as well as in the European Technology Platforms such as ARTEMIS and NESSI.
