ABSTRACT:
A comprehensive knowledge of a company’s organizational mechanisms is a fundamental prerequisite for good management practices and effective governance, especially in the banking industry where efficiency and effectiveness have recently been becoming more and more important. This paper describes the results of a practical experience of business process improvement and change. The business modeling approach, carried out through an agent-based model, has been applied to an operational process with the aim to reduce the overlapping of the operational phases and to improve the time-efficiency. Simulation outcomes and results are discussed.

(*) The views expressed here are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Bank of Italy.

ABSTRACT:
Smartphones have become commonplace in today’s society. There seems to be a mobile application for every conceivable use, expect one. Smartphones have been conspicuously absent in higher education. This research examines the use of mobile applications (apps) in the higher education setting. In addition, it evaluates the potential for including smartphone application development in undergraduate computer science curriculum. This paper will present a variety of smartphone apps that were developed by undergraduate researchers for use for use by students and faculty in a university environment, and apps developed to enhance the educational experience in the classroom. We also study the efficacy of the inclusion of smartphone app development in the computer science curriculum and modes for its inclusion.

ABSTRACT:
The authors of the article analyze the concept “electronic environment”. Having studied a range of academic literature sources and other sources, the authors of the article have drawn a conclusion that the academic writings do not provide a definition of “electronic environment”. Furthermore, the various opinions among specialists regarding this concept often differ. Meanwhile, there are several explanations of the term “cyberspace” overlapping the concept of “electronic environment”, and these terms are often believed to be synonyms. To understand what the term “electronic environment” means and to properly and correctly employ this concept in entrepreneurship, the authors have performed a lexicographic analysis of this concept by comparing reciprocal concepts. As a result of the research, the authors propose their view on what, in their opinion, “electronic environment” is and what its connection to the concept “cyberspace” is. The topicality of the article lies in the fact that often entrepreneurs and specialists of public and other institutions, when using these terms, imply completely different concepts. It can lead to misunderstanding and misinterpreting the information, as well as to encumbering the understanding of tasks, problems, etc.

ABSTRACT:
From the suppliers' perspective it is best to provide the user of a plant with a mobile solution in the form of perfectly matching Apps for the rolled-out manufacturing execution system. Due to the extremely short innovation cycle in the mobile phone development and not least because of the first iPhone generation launch in 2007 the mobile phone market completely changed over the past four years. Today, a large percentage of the sold devices can be classified as smart phones. The paper describes an easy and reliable way to develop OS independent mobile solutions for all common smartphones based on standard technologies.

ABSTRACT:
Vertex coloring of a graph is the assignment of labels to the vertices of the graph so that adjacent vertices have different labels. In the case of polyhedral graphs, the chromatic number is 2, 3, or 4. Edge coloring problem and face coloring problem can be converted to vertex coloring problem for appropriate polyhedral graphs. We have been developed an interactive learning system of polyhedra, based on graph operations and simulated elasticity potential method, mainly for educational purpose. In this paper, we introduce a learning subsystem of vertex coloring, edge coloring and face coloring, based on minimum spanning tree and degenerated polyhedron, which is introduced in this paper.

ABSTRACT:
Guaranteed selected quality of telecommunication service and wide area coverage are typical requirements of the ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems) applications. Extensive range of wireless data services with reasonable coverage is provided by public wireless services operators, however, mostly no guaranteed relevant range of quality and security is available. ITS services require cost-effectively solution which can be resolved by combination of the “core” public solution with the other public as well as private services where and when it is needed. Such approach requires implementation of the relevant flexible system architecture supported by the efficient decision processes. ITS specific service security requirements would not underestimated, as well. Special situation is identified in case of the C2I (Car to Infrastructure) and C2C (Car to Car) communication namely if the vehicle on board unit is interconnected with the vehicle CAN (Controlled Area Network) based network. Such configurations significantly increase potential of dangerous intruders´ attacks. Probability of the critical hazards appearances grows if the ITS data are accessible in the wide area networks. That is also the main reason why relevant telecommunications security support is understood as one of the crucial part of the ITS telecommunications solution.

ABSTRACT:
The aim of this article is to clarify basic principles of responsible lending in lending agreements between banks and individuals in Latvia, as well as in the existing legislation in the Baltic States that regulates this process. In order to obtain research results, the authors performed qualitative analysis of scientific literature on the issues of responsible lending; legislation that regulates mortgage lending in the Baltic States; successful experience of banks in other countries; information available on home pages of banks about commercial bank loan volumes for mortgage loans with different types of real estate asset backing; information included in loan agreements of four commercial banks in Latvia and its compliance with the laws and regulations. Loan borrower evaluation stages for review of a new loan application were developed. On the basis of loan agreement analysis, the authors elaborated a formula of monthly loan payments for bank customers who experience unfavourable financial conditions. As a result of the research, the authors came to a conclusion that in Latvia and Estonia there is no legislation that directly regulates mortgage loans. During the research the authors also faced some restrictions, as not all banks in Latvia, which continue lending activities, are willing to give information included in loan agreements.

ABSTRACT:
The objective of this research was to evaluate the effect of fungicides on the association with Glomus intraradices and soil contamination on three genotypes of beans (Phaseolus vulgaris L.), one of oat (Avena sativa L.), and another one of wheat (Triticum aestivum L.). The study was done under greenhouse conditions at the Montecillo Campus of the Postgraduate College, Mexico. Two soils were used, one irrigated with sewage water and the other one with clean water from a well. Half of the plants were inoculated with Glomus intraradices. Metacaptan was used as a fungicide applied to half of the seeds. The pH of the soil was alkaline. Electric conductivity, and organic matter, nitric and ammoniac nitrogen, phosphorous, copper and nickel quantities were higher on the soils irrigated with sewage water. The soil contamination did not affect significantly plant responses in this study. It is concluded that endomycorrhiza inoculation (Glomus intraradices) gave better growth and yield, especially in beans. The application of fungicides improved plant growth.

ABSTRACT:
Development of wireless sensor network equipped with GPS for post-seismic building-wise damage identification is presented in this paper. This system is called GPS on Every Roof. Sensor node equipped with GPS antenna and receiver is installed on the top of the roof of each and every building. The position of this sensor node is measured before and after earthquake. The final goal of this system is to i) identify the displacement of the roof of each house and ii) collect the information of displacement of the roof of the houses through wireless communication. Superposing this information on GIS, building-wise damage distribution due to earthquake can be obtained. The system overview, hardware and some of the key components of the system such as on-board GPS relative positioning algorithm to achieve the accuracy in the order of several centimeters are described in detail. Also, the results from a field experiment using a wireless sensor network with 39 sensor nodes are presented.

ABSTRACT:
Civil Infrastructure assets require continuous renewal actions to sustain their operability and safety. Allocating limited renewal funds amongst numerous building components, however, represents a large-scale optimization problem and earlier efforts utilized genetic algorithms (GAs) to optimize medium size problems yet exhibit steep performance degradation as problem size increases. In this research, after experimenting with various approaches of segmenting a large problem into multiple smaller sub-problems, clustered segmentation proved to be the most promising. The paper discusses the underlying life cycle analysis model, the various segmentation methods, and the optimization results using the improved GAs + clustered segmentation, which proved to be able to optimize asset renewals for 50,000 components with no noticeable performance degradation. The proposed method is simple and logical, and can be used on variety of asset types to improve infrastructure fund allocation. Future extension of this research is then highlighted.

ABSTRACT:
Having artificially intelligent machines that think, learn, reason, experience, and can function autonomously, without supervision, is one of the most intriguing goals in all of Computer Science. As the types of problems we would like machines to solve get more complex, it is becoming a necessary goal as well. One of the many problems associated with this goal is that what learning and reasoning are have so many possible meanings that the solution can easily get lost in the sea of opinions and options. The goal of this paper is to establish some foundational principles, theory, and concepts that we feel are the backbone of real, autonomous Artificial Intelligence. With this fully autonomous, learning, reasoning, artificially intelligent system (an artificial brain), comes the need to possess constructs in its hardware and software that mimic processes and subsystems that exist within the human brain, including intuitive and emotional memory concepts. Presented here is a discussion of the psychological constructs of artificial intelligence and how they might play out in an artificial mind.

ABSTRACT:
It is very difficult to find the minimum route to travel in amusement park navigation. A searching system for visitors would be useful. Therefore, we constructed a system to find the route with the minimum total traveling time. Facility visitors can employ this system on a smart phone. The system is composed of Java and a Java Servlet. We conclude that our system is useful and can greatly shorten travel time within a typical amusement park.

ABSTRACT:
The Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) Mobile Autonomous Robotics Technology Initiative (MARTI) program has enabled the development of fully-autonomous passenger-sized commercial vehicles and military tactical vehicles, as well as the development of cooperative vehicle behaviors, such as cooperative sensor sharing and cooperative convoy operations. The program has also developed behaviors to interface intelligent vehicles with intelligent road-side devices. The development of intelligent vehicle behaviors cannot be approached as stand-alone phenomena; rather, they must be understood within a context of the broader traffic system dynamics. The study of other complex systems has shown that system-level behaviors emerge as a result of the spatio-temporal dynamics within a system’s constituent parts. The design of such systems must therefore account for both the system-level emergent behavior, as well as behaviors of individuals within the system. It has also become clear over the past several years, for both of these domains, that human trust in the behavior of individual vehicles is paramount to broader technology adoption. This paper examines the interplay between individual vehicle capabilities, vehicle connectivity, and emergent system behaviors, and presents some considerations for a distributed control paradigm in a multi-vehicle system.

ABSTRACT:
It would be useful to write one description of software behavior to serve both requirements and design. Having one description could reduce effort by eliminating the work of developing two descriptions and of keeping them consistent and relevant throughout development, evolution, and sustainment. It would also eliminate the inconsistency inherent in having two descriptions, a fertile source of error. A question paramount to software engineers is, Could one description of behavior for a real system serve both requirements and design? This paper answers that question by describing one such description of the software behavior of a real system.