Key Success Factors for Smart City Construction

The Smart City is not a new concept. In fact, the digital city appeared in the information era and the wireless city emerged in the Internet era, but the Smart City had not been clearly defined until the digital era. Unlike traditional informatization, a Smart City is not simply the combination of informatization in all industries. Not only is a smart city a top-leadership project, it reshapes the digital capabilities of all industries in a city, while also addressing systematic challenges. This paper presents Huawei perspective on Smart City development, including the conceptual framework, governance, type, connectivity, structural enablers. The paper also describes the strategic vision and a Smart City construction path, from the strategic planning, solution design and implementation.

Industry X: Products for the Future

The authors of this paper are introducing a new concept for definition of the future of Industry 4.0 and are presenting details and characteristics of the concept Industry X regarding the current global digitalization of Automotive Industry. Starting from the Mechanical Age (Industry 1.0) and until the Digital Age (Industry 4.0) which is already ongoing, the authors are identifying and defining the shape of the nearby future through the so called “Quantum Age” or the next step in the Industrial Revolution: Industry X.

Development of a smart clothing product using an Arduino platform

This paper presents a "smart" clothing product implemented as a jacket that contains sensors, a processing unit for display and interaction. The system has the ability to remotely read the data provided by the sensors, ensuring the monitoring of several parameters of the wearer. The following characteristics have been considered: body temperature and humidity, atmospheric temperature, pressure and altitude, the heart beat and number of steps converted into the number of calories consumed and traveled distance. The data is acquired and processed by an Arduino AT Mega 2560, via the I2C bus, digital ports and analog to digital converters, depending on the type of sensors. The processed information is printed on a 128x64 pixel display. To be able to view more pages of information, one can interact with the 4-key keyboard that has been connected to the digital input ports or through a proximity sensor, which will function as a gesture sensor. The processed information can also be accessed from a web server, built on the ESP8266 Wi-Fi module, connected to Arduino's TX/RX lines. A mobile phone or another device can connect to the Access Point and open a web page which displays the values of all sensors, as well as other information. The embedded system was inserted on a jacket and wired according to the sensors and modules usage.

Online assessment solution without in-person proctoring

Online assessment became an important part of the assessment of students after March 2020 in the COVID-Time. Traditional face-to-face evaluations were no more possible, therefore the use of solutions like Google Suite Educational became mandatory. In this paper we explore the strengths and weaknesses of some applications for student evaluation. Also, we will present a Web-based evaluation software that we have developed and which allows to schedule questions at random with a given time for students to answer the question and without the possibility to come back to a previous question.

Design Methodology and Tools in Factory of the Future

This paper presents a design method and tool developed to support the skill forming activities in the DigiFoF network (https://www.digifof.eu/). The focus is on training of manufacturing system design skills both as HEI education and vocational training, but preliminary design of new manufacturing systems is also supported (e.g in the development of small business process scenarios). We proposed a model-based methodology for solving of the manufacturing system design problems The methodology and the supporting tool are centred around a less abstract Domain-Specific Modelling Language (DSML). The language is easy to learn due to its few components. A modelling and simulation environment named Digital Production Planner Tool (DPPT) was generated from the metamodel of the DSML. The degree of abstraction used by this tool corresponds well to the intended use in training and preliminary design. Our method incorporates by design the possibility to impose constraints at the modelling language level to limit the modelling space to feasible/possible solutions. The resulting tool enforces these constraints in the use and supports the development of feasible designs even by inexperienced designers. The access to the conceptual model allows the translation of the model to other modelling language like Petri net. This extends the support for the design methodology. The whitepaper presents a use case for the developed method and tool: the design of a chocolate manufacturing line.

Using drone technology for preserving the economic sustainability of the agricultural holdings

In the present era, precision agriculture, through the set of innovative technologies that it uses, allows to effectively manage the terrain, machinery, and input acquisition, considering the specific natural variation of the environmental conditions. One of such innovations is the unmanned aerial vehicle (drone) technology which has gained popularity and has been widely used in adopting efficient strategies for preserving the economic sustainability of the agricultural holdings. The need for an efficient management, the complex climatic, technological, economic, and biological changes that have recently occurred at the level of agro-systems impose a continuous and accurate knowledge of the growing production resources and the vegetation state in cultures. In this context, the article investigates a series of particularities regarding the use of geospatial and informational technology in the process of taking, storing, analysing, and interpreting them to optimize inputs, considering the state of the crops and the degree of soil supply in each relatively homogeneous area of the terrain..

Filtering Random Valued Impulse Noise from Grayscale Images through Support Vector Machine and Markov Chain

This paper presents a context-based filter to denoise grayscale images affected by random valued impulse noise. A support vector machine classifier is used for noise detection and two Markov filter variants are evaluated for their denoising capacity. The classifier needs to be trained on a set of training images. The experiments performed on another set of test images have shown that the support vector machine with the radial basis function kernel combined with the Markov+ filter is the best configuration, providing the highest noise detection accuracy. Our filter was compared with existing denoising methods, it being better on some images and comparable with them on others.

Searching, Learning, Gaming - Engaging students with Europeana’s digital archives

Mass digitisation of the collections held by cultural institutions -galleries, libraries, museums, archives, have made available a huge amount of historical, cultural, informational resources in digital format, which are more and more used in educational activities. This paper describes some innovative non- formal educational activities developed around the Europeana1914-1918 archive between 2014-2018, where searching in big digital archives, gaming and improving the digital skills were key aspects.

Study of the influence of the exhaust line ultrasounds over the performance of the Blind Spot Warning System

During the previous years, the vehicle manufacturers have tried to equip their vehicles with as much technology as possible, making the driving experience for people easier than ever. Most of the modern vehicles come today with ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) either for driving (E.g. Cruise Control, Blind Spot Warning) or Parking (E.g. Rear Ultrasonic Sensors, Rear View Camera). Since the vehicle come equipped with more technology, a major task in developing vehicle remains the integration of these ADAS system in the vehicle context with the other components. Since most of the components cope with each other on the vehicle level, some technologies are more affected by other components – such as the case of an ultrasound vehicle scanning system (Blind Spot Warning) and the Exhaust line that emits ultrasounds from the exhaust muffler. The aim of this paper is to study the influence of the exhaust line ultrasounds (ultrasounds that are emitted by the engine cycle and filtered in the exhaust line of the vehicle) over the detection performance of the Blind Spot Warning Ultrasound system. Since vehicles are sold with a wide variety of powertrains, the solution presented took into account also these differences between powertrains equipped. In order to test the solution, mock-ups of the vehicle were made in order to proof the robustness of the method.

Reading in Research and Information Centres. Case Study of LBUS

The paper focuses of to open the minds of pupils and turn them to reading, teacher librarians must prepare pupils, bring them face to face with reading, situations, themes from each reading instance, so that they can analyze, describe, freely express themselves, using the right words to convey their thoughts, feelings, emotions, and compare the information they came across while reading with their own experiences, the situations they’ve lived through, thus anchoring them in daily reality.