I’m from Sibiu, Romania. I majored in computer science at the Faculty of Engineering, “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu, where I finished top of my class in 2010. I also studied abroad in Regensburg (Germany), Wien (Austria) and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain) thanks to the Erasmus and Erasmus+ programs. I obtained my PhD in Computer Vision (title of the thesis “3D analysis of the normal and pathological coronary morphology”). I am working as a teaching assistant at the university for several laboratories.

I am currently working as a senior software engineer at Seeq.
I used to work as a full time programmer at Paradine Development where we developed software for the large scale industry.

One of my biggest hobbies is programming, for which I make room even after 8 hours of work. I started programming in 2002 while I was in high school. Since then I have been developing applications like small games (snake, simple platform games and level editors), problem solvers (sudoku solver, minsweeper solver), 3D software rendering (including optimizations), 3D games using directly OpenGL and DirectX  or wrappers and other libraries (including simple physical engines, terrain generators), simulators (intervention robot simulator, branch prediction simulator), platforms (image processing, prediction, compression), static and dynamic websites and web applications (with or without CMS). I will try to make open source most of my work and reference it in the Projects page. During the development of these projects, I learned the following programming languages: Pascal (during high school), Delphi, x86 Assembly, C, C++, C#, Java, Kotlin, Python, PHP, Javascript/Typescript. Along these, I also acquired knowledge of SQL, XML, HTML, CSS, JSON. I will not mention all the technologies I used for two reasons: 1. they are too many and 2. I am not a technology enthusiast. Technologies come and go, I witnessed many taking off and many die and my feeling is that we are still in a transitory period.
I prefer high level languages, but I have a soft spot for performance, be it through specialized data structures, parallel or distributed systems and also processor architectural optimizations like the use of SIMD, memory/cache aligning and super scalar optimizations. Often times I find myself wasting time balancing between code lizibility and performance.
I am an advocate for clean code and I believe in the principle “code as documentation”. No matter what tricks the programming language provides, if I cannot understand what the code does by looking at it, I consider it to be poorly written. I strongly believe that pair programming is more productive on the hard parts of software than most project managers feel.

Another hobby of mine, related to programming, is artificial intelligence. Some of the fields I’m interested in are Computer Vision, time series prediction, natural language processing, Machine Learning in general. I have implemented and used a lot of neural network types and evolutionary (mostly genetic) algorithms. I am impressed how much the field has recently advanced, but in the same time I am confident that we are not that near to developing Universal Artificial Intelligence. One of the proposed models for that is AIXI, which, in a rough sense, explains what brains do (with the exception that our brains are not optimal).

I like sport A LOT. I like the action not the show, so I tend to perform more than I like to watch. Some of the sports I practice are (in no particular order):

  • karate – owned a shotokan karate dojo along with a few friends, practiced and event taught there basic karate to students from ULBS.
  • football – I regularly play with small amateur local teams.
  • hiking – Romania has beautiful mountains and landscapes.
  • cycling – I go to work by bike and I like long runs around home. When I feel like cheating, I take out my motorcycle for a ride.
  • dancing
  • swimming
  • ice-skating
  • skiing
  • basketball
  • volleyball

I enjoy good talks and debates regardless of the topic. I quickly try to find reasoning fallacies and sophistical refutations and try to improve my own arguments. I prefer constructive criticism and support. I strongly dislike the “political professor” type, whose main game is to achieve a high status in the most visible manner.