Hria

Project under implementation · POCIDIF 2021-2027

HRIA, Romanian Artificial Intelligence Hub

The largest artificial intelligence research program in Romania, 336 million lei, seven universities and eight companies. Soft Tehnica is one of them.

HRIA was designed to solve a structural problem: in Romania there are very good artificial intelligence researchers, but they are scattered, without the computing infrastructure and critical mass needed to matter at European level. The Hub brings these people, these laboratories and this computing power together in a single ecosystem, with nine research directions ranging from trustworthy artificial intelligence and autonomous systems to applications in healthcare, cybersecurity, smart cities and the environment.

Soft Tehnica was selected in the consortium following a call for proposals and is developing SignAll, a platform that automatically translates between natural language and sign language. The system recognizes signs made by a person with hearing or speech impairments and transforms them into natural language, while in the opposite direction it generates signs from speech or text, using artificial intelligence algorithms. For the Romanian language, such a tool does not exist. The platform will be available as a web version and as a mobile application, and the topic falls within the research direction dedicated to intelligent human-computer interfaces.

For Soft Tehnica, SignAll continues the path opened by HOLOTRAIN, where the team worked for the first time with photorealistic holograms, motion capture and machine learning. The same skills, now applied to an accessibility problem that affects tens of thousands of people.

Expected results at the consortium level

• Original artificial intelligence technologies, models, methods and algorithms, with over 70 technologies, demonstrators and scientific-technical reports.
• Over 360 scientific publications and over 34 patent applications filed.
• Over 21 prototypes, pilot projects, services and applications developed by the company partners, including the SignAll platform.
• Approximately 70 full-time equivalent researchers annually in the supported centers and approximately 38 new jobs in research.
• Over 18 international institutional collaboration agreements and over 14 project proposals submitted under Horizon Europe and other international competitions.