UTM’s Faculty of Electronics and Telecommunications brought students from Moldova and Romania together for the first interuniversity hackathon of its kind: a 30-hour challenge powered by an AI model developed at UTM and run on the university’s own HPC infrastructure.
Over 30 hours, 12 teams from the Technical University of Moldova and two teams from the National University of Science and Technology POLITEHNICA Bucharest worked through real crisis scenarios in telecom and digital security. What made the competition stand out was the tool at its center: an artificial intelligence model created by UTM researchers and hosted on the university’s high-performance computing infrastructure.
This changed the nature of the challenge. Students were not simply asked to work with an existing external platform. They had to explore, test and make practical use of a resource built inside their own academic environment, turning a university research outcome into a working tool for problem-solving.
The teams faced three scenarios inspired by some of the most serious risks in the field: a national network outage, overload of critical services and the protection of communications during emergencies. These are the kinds of situations telecom operators in Moldova and Romania may have to manage in real life. Participants had to assess incidents, come up with fast responses and build technical solutions under time pressure, much like engineers working in an actual crisis.
The participation of the Romanian teams, who travelled specifically for the event, gave the hackathon a strong regional dimension and positioned UTM as an increasingly active ICT hub. It was the first organized 30-hour competition bringing together teams from both countries around crisis scenarios in telecommunications and digital security.
In just 30 hours, the teams developed redundancy solutions, crisis response protocols and AI-supported applications for network monitoring, among other technical results. After the jury evaluated the projects, the final ranking was:
- First place: Daniela Guțu, Dmitrii Palamarciuc, Arina Moisei and Mihai Spinu (UTM – FET)
- Second place: Răzvan Mihăescu, Laurențiu Stavar, Teodor Matei and Ana Ciurea (UPB)
- Third place: Alex Deonise, Alex Tudor, Alexandra Ion and Vlad Juja (UPB)
- Fourth place: Andreea Pavalachi, Alexandru Ciobanu, Ștefan Cojocari and Dan Bandalac (UTM – FET)
The hackathon organized by FET showed what happens when research, education and real industry challenges meet in the same room. For 30 hours, UTM became a research lab, a training ground and a practical partner for the tech sector, while strengthening its role as a key center for training telecommunications engineers in the Republic of Moldova.
