History

In 1963, the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest was expanding with a new specialization: Automatic Control, whose development as a Department within the Faculty of Energy was guaranteed by the Department of Automation founded in the same year by professor Cornelius Penescu, corresponding member of the Academy. The personality of professor Penescu imposed a line of exceptional value in the development of the automatic control school, so that three years later the Faculty of Automatic Control was founded. In 1967, the Department of Automatic Control is divided into two Departments: Department of Automatic Control I and Department of Automatic Control II, and in 1969 the Computer Science Department is established. Currently, these Departments can be found under the names: Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, Automatic Control and Industrial Informatics, and Computer Science, respectively.

The establishment of the Computer Science Department at the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest in the late Spring of 1969 was an important event in the life of the institute, welcomed by teachers and students of all faculties. The numerical electronics and the applications of digital integrated circuits had already begun to assert itself strongly enough, even in our country, at that time.

In 1970, a year after the creation of the Department, the first class graduated in Computer Science, that was prepared following a curriculum that came into force in 1967, together with the establishment of the Computer Science Department. The curriculum has been changed since then, first in 1977, when it was separated into two directions, “hard” and “soft”. The first promotions of “hardware” and “software” specialists completed their studies in 1979. The 1990 plan included a new formula for specialization in the Computer Science and Engineering domain according to the “Bologna” model. This plan offered four-year Bachelor programmes in Computer Science with four specializations, and in Information Technology.

Since the beginning of its operation, due to the design and implementation initiatives of the Department personnel, the teaching and research activities approached outstanding areas of the time, such as computer-aided design, design and experimental realization of microcomputers, compilers design, and databases. In some of these areas, new teaching disciplines were introduced for the first time in our country.

The Faculty management was under the leadership, as deans, of professors:

• Corneliu Penescu (1967-1968)
• Sergiu Calin (1968-1976)
• Simion Florea (1976-1984)
• Ion Dumitrache (1984-1990)
• Theodor Danila (1990-1996)
• Nicolae Cupcea (1996-2004)
• Dumitru Popescu (2004-2012)
• Adina Magda Florea (2012-2020)
• The current dean is Associate Professor Mihnea Moinescu.

In its forty years of history, the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Science has been a representative institute of education within the University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest and within the country in the science and engineering, and computer systems areas, through its outstanding quality teaching staff and students,  as well as graduates.

Currently, The Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers enjoys the same reputation and has strong links at academic and scientific research levels with many schools in the country and abroad in the domains of automatic control, computer science, and engineering.