Good bye my friend
I am shocked! No words can explain our sadness, loss and pain ...
I had known Florin since 1996 when he was a Ph.D. student at Leuven. As his mentor (Prof. Hugo de Man) once mentioned, “the breakthrough in automated design of multi-dimensional signal processing systems, they achieved at IMEC, was mainly attributed to “profound knowledge in mathematics of Florin Balasa”. Knowing the huge impact IMEC made to design automation worldwide, this is the highest evaluation of Ph.D. work I ever heard. Dr. Florin Balasa was well recognized among researchers involved in design automation of digital systems, memory optimization and high-level synthesis. He had achieved excellent results in multi-dimensional system modeling, background memory allocation, memory optimization, formal verification, and therefore is referred almost by any work published recently on design automation of signal processing systems, memory management, modeling, system design and verification. Just to name a few.
While working in this field I had frequently witnessed Dr. Balasa reporting his results at a number of conferences like DAC, ICCAD, ICASSP, DATE, ASPDAC, etc. He also visited Fukuoka University in 2003 and gave a talk for our faculty members. His presentation attracted a large audience with live interest from industry and academia. Additionally to his amazing work and impressive knowledge, Florin had an ability to clearly present his ideas, to be understandable by both experts and beginners. He was also very intelligent and modest person with a good and charming sense of humor. We eventually became good friends meeting almost every year (the last one was in Montreal, Canada, at ISCAS 2016). We had plans meeting again in Baltimore this May but ...
Me and my wife will always remember you Florin! Good Bye Friend! We will miss you forever. Rest In Peace.