Browsing by Type "Conference paper"

Usability is an important aspect of IT applications being a priority requirement in online public services. This paper presents the evaluation of the usability of the national house of public pensions portal. The portal evaluation involved four experts who tested the portal based on the usability inspection method. The results of the evaluation highlighted some important usability problems that need to be fixed in order to ease the use of the portal by older people.

The paper presents a general approach for change detection in vibration signals with application in machine health monitoring using advanced signal processing techniques. These techniques mainly include change detection (CD) algorithms, independent component analysis, time-frequency analysis, energy concentration evaluation, as auxiliary tools for feature extraction and analysis of vibration signals. They operate in a reduced dimension space, highlight and enhance the changes in signals. Finally, the paper presents a case study in health status monitoring of an industrial pump.

The paper presents research on the concept of intelligent government in the context of the use of IoT technologies and wireless sensor networks. Smart governance targets the future of public services and focuses on using new technologies to streamline decision-making and management processes. The extending of modern ICT capacities and the increasing need for information services systems widespread impose the need to find solutions to the interoperability problems at the technical, informational and organizational level. Our research has focused on interoperability issues and on finding solutions to the challenges process of moving from eGovernment to smart governance. Finally, the paper presents a general framework architecture for smart governance, based on new IoT, fog and Cloud technologies. It is proposed to redesign the ICT infrastructure by virtualizing network resources and data and using advanced data analysis methods to enable better collaboration between government, government institutions, the business environment and citizens.

Time-frequency image processing is considered in the context of change detection and diagnosis purposes based on signal processing paradigm. A method for selection and extraction of features from time-frequency is considered and evaluated. New images are obtained by applying a criterion based on the contours generated by the main components of the analyzed time-frequency image. The transformed images are less complex, and could be white and black only. Features based on statistical moments are considered, selected and used to define discriminant functions, in order to improve the results of the classification. The features include the number of the contours, the average area defined by the contours, the variance of the areas and the Renyi entropies. As case study, signals coming from vibration generated by faults in bearings are considered.

Evaluation and analysis in health care is a complex task that may involve handling uncertainties and trade-offs between multiple, often conflicting criteria. In the present paper, a multi-criteria weighting approach is proposed for evaluation and analysis of Quality of Life (QoL) criteria. Based on the evaluations of a group of experts and using a Rough Analytical Hierarchy Process (RAHP) weighting method, the QoL criteria weights are determined. The expert evaluation’s uncertainty is modeled with the rough sets theory. The proposed approach is validated by a case study that performs an analysis of WHOQOL-BREF questionnaire criteria. In the case study, weights are calculated for physical health, psychological, social relations and environment criteria. A comparison between the RAHP weights obtained and the AHP weights is achieved. The result of the analysis shows that the order of importance of criteria from the most important to the least important is the following: physical health, psychological, social relations and environment.

A well-known problem for which it is difficult to improve the textbook algorithm is computing the graph diameter. We present two versions of a simple algorithm (one being Monte Carlo and the other deterministic) that for every fixed h and unweighted undirected graph G with n vertices and m edges, either correctly concludes that diam(G) < hn or outputs diam(G), in time O(m + n^{1+o(1)}). The algorithm combines a simple randomized strategy for this problem (Damaschke, IWOCA'16) with a popular framework for computing graph distances that is based on range trees (Cabello and Knauer, Computational Geometry'09). We also prove that under the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH), we cannot compute the diameter of a given n-vertex graph in truly subquadratic time, even if the diameter is an Θ(n/ log n).

As part of the EU Cybersecurity strategy the European Commission proposed the EU Network and Information Security Directive. The NIS (Network Information Security) Directive (see EU 2016/1148) is the first piece of EU-wide cybersecurity legislation. The goal is to enhance cybersecurity across the EU. Romania has some legislation about information security and cybersecurity such as Decision no. 271/2013 for the approval of the Cyber Security Strategy of Romania and the National Action Plan on the Implementation of the National Cyber Security System published at 25 March 2013. In this context, the NIS Directive successfully complements the legislative framework in the field of cyber security. The Information Security Manager training program represents a part of strategy to implement NIS Directive in Romanian institutions, because it is very important to institutions has a qualified human resource to implement this Directive. In this context, National Institute for Research and Development in Informatics (ICI - Bucharest) develops, through Lifelong Learning Centre, the CISO program focused on specialization in information security. The Information Security Manager training program addresses people who design, develop and manage the security of organizational information and who have experience in areas such as Information Security Governance, Information Risk Management, Development of the information security program, Information security program management and Incident management. The competencies obtained after graduating from the training program are: • Establishment of strategy and management in the field of information security, harmonized with the strategy of the organization, • Planning, designing, implementing and evaluating the information security management system based on risks and requirements • Designing the organization's security measures in accordance with the risk analysis of information security • Integrate information security requirements at the organization level set out in third-party contracts and activities and so on. The program consists of 6 training modules, with a duration of about 40 hours, with a weekly distribution, but accessible according to the student's needs. Each module contains a theoretical, interactive module that uses game-based self-learning methods, interactive phrases puzzles, and an application part with problem-solving methods based on scenarios the student needs to solve. These training modules are: • Module I – Information security – basic concepts • Module II – Information security Management system (ISMS. Designing • Module III – Risk Management • Module IV – Designing security measures for implementing the ISMS • Module V - Information security Management system. Implementing • Module VI - Monitoring, evaluation, improvement of ISMS. In the future we intend to certify this course at national level and to align with the national occupational standards on information security management system.

The INTELLIT project develops a virtual online museum of the Romanian literature. The sources of data made available and provided by the Romanian Academy, such as: General Dictionary of Romanian Literature, Timeline of the Romanian Literary Life and the canonical works of Romanian writers are digitized and indexed using smart text analytics. One of the challenges with this process is dealing with diacritics and textual accents. Here, we present an in-depth analysis of possible solutions and describe our implementation for detecting various Unicode text processing. We present the solution identified as an accessible way to remove specific Unicode text code points in order to greatly improve our search and filtering capabilities while still preserving the original source (at the database level).

The INTELLIT project develops a virtual online museum of the Romanian literature. The sources of data made available and provided by the Romanian Academy, such as: General Dictionary of Romanian Literature, Timeline of the Romanian Literary Life and the canonical works of Romanian writers are digitized and indexed using smart text analytics. One of the challenges with this process is dealing with diacritics and textual accents. Here, we present an in-depth analysis of possible solutions and describe our implementation for detecting various Unicode text processing. We present the solution identified as an accessible way to remove specific Unicode text code points in order to greatly improve our search and filtering capabilities while still preserving the original source (at the database level).

The periodic QZ (pQZ) algorithm is the key solver in many applications, including periodic systems, cyclicmatrices and matrix pencils, and solution of skew-Hamiltonian/Hamiltonian eigenvalue problems, which, inturn, is basic in optimal and robust control, and characterization of dynamical systems. This algorithm operateson a formal product of matrices. For numerical reasons, the standard pQZ algorithm uses an implicit approachduring the iterative process. The shifts needed to increase the convergence rate are implicitly defined andapplied via an embedding, which essentially allows to reduce the processing to transformations of the data byGivens rotations. But the implicit approach may not converge for some periodic eigenvalue problems. A new,semi-implicit approach is proposed to avoid convergence failures and reduce the number of iterations. Thisapproach uses shifts computed explicitly, but without evaluating the matrix product. The shifts are appliedvia a suitable embedding. The combination of the implicit and semi-implicit schemes proved beneficial forimproving the behavior of the pQZ algorithm. The numerical results for several extensive tests have shown noconvergence failures and a reduced number of iterations.

Recent years witnessed an explosive increase of power consumption in data centers. This increase raised serious concerns due to its high economic and environmental impact. The most important power consumers in data centers are IT hardware and cooling systems. For modern data centers, it is important to select the appropriate power models for improving energy efficiency. This paper provides an overview of recent processor power models, more commonly used for data centers and an analysis of the performance and power consumption for different systems with various types of processors and workloads. In order to perform this analysis, a database was built starting from a data collection from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). The data collection was developed with the Server Efficiency Rating Tool (SERT) methodology. SERT has been recognized for several years as one of the best methods for characterizing server efficiency. For the analysis of systems performance and power consumption with various types of processors, the Pearson correlation is then calculated. Processor power models help data centers managers to identify opportunities for power consumption optimization. Their use increases the efficiency of power consumption management and control at a data center level.

An essential component of the National security consists of the protection of its critical infrastructures (CIs), whether they are physical or virtual, as any disruption of their services could have a serious impact on economic well-being, public health or safety, or any combination of these. Any shutdown or delay may determine financial losses and major risks to people and the environment. All modern CIs are controlled by Industrial Control Systems (ICS) being dependent on their correct and continuous undisturbed functioning. Modern ICSs are inherently much less secure and exposed to the majority of cyber-attacks that are becoming more advanced and sophisticated. Consequently, efficient tools for the protection of hardware and software components of ICSs are required. One such class consists of intrusion prevention and detection systems (IPDS). Contemporary IPDSs use machine learning algorithms to detect threats manifested as anomalous behavior of a particular system. To provide robust detection systems with sufficient layers of protection, these must be combined with other methods and extensively tested with good datasets and using appropriate testbeds. Recent research suggests that conventional intrusion detection approaches are unable to cope with the complexity and ever-changing nature of industrial intrusion attacks. Moreover, deep learning methods are achieving state-of-the-art results across a range of difficult problem domains. The objective of our paper is to identify and discuss machine learning-based intrusion detection and protection methods and their implementation in industrial control intrusion detection systems, able to contribute to ensuring national security.

Named entity recognition (NER) is one of the most common Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. As nowadays large quantities of unstructured data are produced, the organizations have begun to be more interested in NER solutions. In the first part of this article, we describe the evolution of NER, and we discuss the most common NER approaches. Later, we address the state-of-the-art NER machine learning solutions. We focus both on open-source and commercial solutions. The most important solutions are identified and compared based on a methodology proposed by the authors. Since the authors are involved in using NER on cybersecurity-related text, the study focuses mainly on NER aspects related to cybersecurity domain. Nevertheless, this survey has a general nature, and therefore, our conclusions can be useful as well for those interested in using NER solutions in other domains.

This paper proposes a tool, called SAFEOrg, which can be used with success to conduct a cybersecurity assessment for an organization. SAFEOrg structures the assessment following the recommendations of a leading industry standard, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework.

The vINCI technology has a modular construction therefore the acceptability of each device will be assessed and further technological adaptation and modification will be performed based on older peoples feedback in a step by step manner. To avoid biased feedback and outcome due to previous usage of vINCI devices, different samples of seniors will be selected for each stage of the vINCI testing and validation. The vINCI modular technology comprises of different devices such as intelligent tablet (IT), smart watch (SW), smart insole (SI) and smart camera (SC). At this stage of the study we are testing the acceptability of a digital Quality of Life Questionnaire and we want to determine what information offers each type of tracking devices. The results of the study will allow us to determine at what stage of evolution of subjects over the age of 65 it will be necessary to introduce each of the four devices in order to obtain enough data or information to make decisions that prevent the aggravation of some diseases, or various accidents at home or during persons walking.

Accepting ICT-based online public services is an important topic of research. The paper addresses models of adoption and acceptance of new technologies with reference to the seniors. These models are compared in terms of acceptability factors. An analysis of the challenges and obstacles regarding the acceptance of technologies by elderly people is presented. In addition, as a case study on the technologies, the acceptance of the mobile phone by the older people and the Senior Technology Acceptance and Adoption Model are presented. Finally, a group of determinants related to the acceptance by elderly people of mobile phone is extracted.

In recent years, healthcare and safety monitoring for older adults has become a worldwide concern. As older adults want to age at home, sensor technology has the potential to support their choice by monitoring health status, detecting emergency situations and notifying caregivers in case of emergency situations. Moreover, using new technologies such as the Kinect sensor could bring new ways to build in-home intelligent systems, having already demonstrated performance and accuracy when monitoring older adults. The purpose of this paper is to present an application that allows healthcare providers to take care remotely of older adults by providing live monitoring of the patients. Using a Kinect sensor, the application evaluates the active life of the tracked person, determines the hydration status and notifies the caregiver if the patient is calling for help or needs an ambulance.

In these days the scientific community is times bigger comparing with the previous centuries. The need of powerful tools to aggregate and analyse the information about articles, books and other publications becomes greater with each published paper. In this paper we describe a solution for understanding and leveraging this data. The platform integrates the following requirements: data aggregation, data analysis (visualizations, dashboards, graphs), complex and simple searches, and support for data export. The platform brings value to its users due to various reasons such as quick identification of relevant data and in depth analysis on the provided input. Another key feature is the granularity, application being easily configurable for rigorous use cases: just one author, a group of authors or an entire scientific field.

The global population is ageing at a sharp pace. Elderly is particularly associated with an increased need for social and medical assistance, home care and nursing houses. The existence of complete and correct information is critical to assessing the health condition of seniors, improving well-being and health-related quality of life. Health monitoring systems in smart environments become a viable alternative to traditional healthcare solutions. This paper aims to highlight the opportunities brought by an Internet of Things-enabled smart environment, cloud computing and virtual machines for a proper management of healthcare data. The ongoing project RO-SmartAgeing is presented as a case study for how these technologies can be rightsized in order to increase efficiency and the response time in the remote monitoring of a senior.

A new distance between strings, termed rank distance, was introduced by Dinu (Fundamenta Informaticae, 2003). Since then, the properties of rank distance were studied in several papers. In this article, we continue the study of rank distance. More precisely we tackle three problems that concern the distance between strings. 1.The first problem that we study is String with Fixed Rank Distance (SFRD): given a set of strings S and an integer d decide if there exists a string that is at distance d from every string in S. For this problem we provide a polynomial time exact algorithm.2.The second problem that we study is named is the Closest String Problem under Rank Distance (CSRD). The input consists of a set of strings S, asks to find the minimum integer d and a string that is at distance at most d from all strings in S. Since this problem is NP-hard (Dinu and Popa, CPM 2012) it is likely that no polynomial time algorithm exists. Thus, we propose three different approaches: a heuristic approach and two integer linear programming formulations, one of them using geometric interpretation of the problem.3.Finally, we approach the Farthest String Problem via Rank Distance (FSRD) that asks to find two strings with the same frequency of characters (i.e. the same Parikh vector) that have the largest possible rank distance. We provide a polynomial time exact algorithm for this problem.