Technical management, software projects, consulting, and professional training.
My professional activity was not strictly confined to university and research. I started my career with three years of “production practice”, working in a factory. Another important part of my career was linked to industry, this time in Italy, where I worked as an analyst, software architect, technical director, general manager, consultant, and trainer. In all these roles, I tried to maintain the same engineering orientation that I had cultivated in the academic environment: clarity of models, rigor in design, and the connection between the technical solution and the real need of the beneficiary.
The industrial projects I participated in covered very diverse fields: telecommunications, economic management, distributed systems, Web applications, databases, vehicle monitoring, real estate services, security systems, and, at the intersection with research, healthcare software applications. This experience allowed me to verify in practice many of the ideas previously formulated in the area of software engineering and adapt them to the concrete constraints of the real world: deadlines, budgets, teams, clients, and already existing systems.
My activity in industry developed mostly after leaving Romania, over a period stretching approximately from 1989 to the present day, without the connection to the university environment and research being definitively broken. On the contrary, the three spheres — university, research, and industry — influenced each other.
This succession of roles shows a gradual shift from a predominantly technical activity towards increasingly complex roles, combining analysis, software architecture, team leadership, client relations, and professional training.
In several companies I had technical or managerial leadership responsibilities: defining solutions, organizing teams, dialoguing with beneficiaries, coordinating development, and choosing appropriate technologies.
I worked on very different information systems, from management applications and databases to distributed systems, Web applications, telecommunications, vehicle monitoring, and IT solutions for the medical field.
In parallel with product and project development, I carried out an intense professional training activity for companies, teaching advanced courses in software engineering, Java, C++, distributed architectures, Web, and object-oriented modeling.
In industry, I did not have a single professional profile. Depending on the context, I worked as a systems analyst, software architect, programmer, consultant, technical director, general manager, or training manager. This variety was not accidental: it reflects the fact that designing a serious information system requires a simultaneous understanding of the architecture, the development process, the team, and the application domain.
My management experience forced me to view software not just as a technical object, but also as a product, a service, and an investment. For this reason, in many projects I insisted not only on implementation, but also on development methodology, on the relationship between specification and solution, on reuse, and on system maintenance over time.
The diversity of projects I participated in is important not only biographically, but also professionally: it shows how software engineering methods can be transferred between very different domains.
Another group of applications targeted real-time or critical systems: a lighting system for an underground parking lot, and an anti-intrusion and anti-fire system for a controlled-access area. Even in these projects, my constant concern remained the same: system architecture, reliability, and development discipline.
An important component of my industrial activity was professional training. In companies and institutions, I taught courses that transferred the experience accumulated in university and research into the practical environment. This activity was not separated from projects, but often accompanied them naturally: new technologies and new architectures required properly trained teams.
Among the beneficiaries of these training activities were major companies and institutions in Italy, such as Datamat, Italcable, ENEA, Banca d'Italia, CNR Italia, Olivetti Ricerca, Digital-Italia, Telecom, Telesoft, Smarten, and Ministero di Grazia e Giustizia.
In the future, this section will be expanded with pages dedicated to representative projects and companies, as well as details about the relationship between industrial activity and my research in software engineering, distributed systems, and medical informatics.
