ABSTRACT:
The relationships between Education/Training and Information Technologies at Farmingdale State College are accelerating, with the newest partnership involving the new CloudSuite Industrial Product, CSI, form Infor, USA, Inc. In this arrangement we have a dedicated Intern, Sayem Shahrier, a student at Farmingdale State College who assists with use of the CSI product in the classroom. According to this Intern, the implementation of the Infor CSI tool has been a great real life and hands-on experience. Students in the Education Alliance Program finally received a taste of how an ERP system works. Whether a company is big or small, it should be capable to manage and keep track of all their products and customers in real time. From local companies throughout Long Island all the way up to global mass markets have utilized the Infor CSI tool and have taken customer data to further maximize not only on profits but improve on operational excellence, customer intimacy, and the manufacturing process.

Using this innovative tool and this partnership synergy, makes our students best prepared for industry entry and successes. This partnership brings together researchers and practitioners to support the bridging process between Education/Training and Information Technologies.

ABSTRACT:
Virtual Reality (VR) is increasingly being recognized for its educational potential and as an effective way to convey new knowledge to people, it supports interactive and collaborative activities. Affordable VR powered by mobile technologies is opening a new world of opportunities that can transform the ways in which we learn and engage with others. This paper reports our study regarding the application of VR in stimulating interdisciplinary communication. It investigates the promises of VR in interdisciplinary education and research. The main contributions of this study are (i) literature review of theories of learning underlying the justification of the use of VR systems in education, (ii) taxonomy of the various types and implementations of VR systems and their application in supporting education and research, (iii) evaluation of educational applications of VR from a broad range of disciplines, (iv) investigation of how the learning process and learning outcomes are affected by VR systems, and (v) comparative analysis of VR and traditional methods of teaching in terms of quality of learning. This study seeks to inspire and inform interdisciplinary researchers and learners about the ways in which VR might support them and also VR software developers to push the limits of their craft.

ABSTRACT:
Creation of support network for SMEs, including start - ups and scale - ups »SUPPORT NETWORK FOR 3S« with partner institutions can be a useful model and tool to faciliate inovative entreprenurial spirit in different economic environments.

The initiative stems from the European Commission's needs and guidelines to strengthen partnerships between "policymakers" and other national financial promotional institutions to support entrepreneurship, as countries from individual geographically and strategically linked European regions need to connect in finding synergy effects in supporting SMEs, start up ecosystems and support innovation systems for fast-growing companies.

Slovene Enterprise Fund (SEF) is a public financial fund and a national promotional financial intermediary, which offers favourable financial incentives for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), start-up and scale ups - hight tech fast growing innovative companies (3S) in Slovenia to help them develop and grow. SEF offers a wide range of financial incentives for each development phase in the life cycle of the company, such as grants for startups, seed capital, venture capital, microcredits and guarantees for bank loans.

SEF also presents a strong element in Support network for 3S in Slovenia and has created a successful partnerships with other partners such as policy makers, financial partners, support organisations and services and research and education organizations.

But for the future success of different EU regions it is crucial to create a support network not only on the national level but also a support network on the inter - regional level. This kind of network should represent the cooperation and partnership among the partner support institutions and this partnership should also influence the cooperation among companies (3S - SMEs, startups and scaleups) from the connected region.

ABSTRACT:
This paper analyzes the United Nations (UN)’s e-government de-velopment index (EGDI) and the Transparency International (TI)’s corruption perception index (CPI) of South American countries and identifies weather or not a Pearson "r" correlation exists between these two indexes. To do so, we have analyzed indexes from the years 2003, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016. Our findings show that a high positive annual correla-tion does exist, and the respective conclusions and recommenda-tions are drawn from the findings. They showed a general corre-lation average of 0.701 (high correlation) between the EGDI and CPI indexes studied, therefore it would stand to reason that e-government development does indeed contribute to the factors that could reduce corruption in South America. Making this anal-ysis not a causality study.

ABSTRACT:
The U.S. power grid is a complex system of systems that requires a secure, reliable and trustworthy global supply chain. This is especially true for the grid’s increasing number of networked energy delivery system (EDS) and industrial control systems (ICS) and associated vendors, distributers, integrators and end users. Grid modernization has increased the use of “smart” energy devices that network, digitize, automate and increasingly converge the cyber-physical energy supply chain. In this Energy Internet of Things (EIoT) environment there is an increasing number of both critical cyber assets as well as data speed and size requirements, creating new cyber supply chain security and NERC CIP compliance challenges for utilities, regulators and vendors. On July 21, 2016, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued Order No. 829 directing the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) to address cyber security supply chain risk management for ICS hardware, software, and computing and networking services associated with Bulk Electric System (BES) operations. In realization of these goals, improvements are needed in in the process and technology to better identify, monitor, audit, realize compliance goals and secure EIoT environments. This paper explores how blockchain technology presents a disruptive solution to facilitate NERC CIP compliance and increase the security of the BES supply chain through a cryptographically signed distributed ledger that provides increased data provenance, attribution and auditability.

ABSTRACT:
The development of Flexible Organic Battery Technology applied in Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED), using an flexible optically transparent substrate material and organic semiconductor materials, has been widely utilized by the electronic industry when producing new technological products. The Organic Battery are the base Polyaniline, PANI, Lithium Perchlorate, LiClO4, and Polymethylmethacrylate, PMMA, were deposited in Indium Tin Oxide, ITO, and characterized by UV-Visible Spectroscopy (UV-Vis), Electrical Parameters (EP) and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). In addition, the thin film obtained by the deposition of PANI, prepared in perchloric acid solution, was identified through PANI-X1. The result obtained by UV-Vis has demonstrated that the PVDC/ITO/PANI-X1 layer does not have displacement of absorption for wavelengths greaters after spin-coating and electrodeposition. Also, both electrodes have been united by an electrolyte solution prepared with Lithium Perchlorate, LiClO4, and Polymethylmethacrylate, PMMA. Thus, the result obtained through electrical measurements has demonstrated that the flexible organic battery presented the characteristic curve of standard battery after spin-coating and electrodeposition. Accordingly, the results obtained with optical and electrical characterization have revealed that the flexible organic battery demonstrated some change in optical absorption, when subjected to a many of charge and electric discharge. Moreover, the inclusion of the PANI-X1 layer reduced the effects of degradation that this charge and electric discharge caused. Studies on Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) have found out that the surface of PANI-X1 layers can be strongly conditioned by the surface morphology of the dielectric.

ABSTRACT:
Information gathering system is focused to manage service status in public transportation. Smartphones are first candi- date devices for this purpose because they have an internet connection through a cellular network. Participatory sensing methods, where many common people collaborate to collect information on their own smartphone, have been focused on information gathering. A sensing system requests participants to collect demanded information. On the contrary, they may not be enough to collect information continuously because ordinary people may not exist in a service area.

This paper proposes a collaborative mechanism with BLE devices with sensors and smartphones to realize the information gathering system. The proposed mechanism employs Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices as a beacon device that triggers our special application for smartphones. BLE devices also store demanded information with sensors. The special application can be automatically launched when a beacon message arrives on the smartphone and can obtain the demanded information from the BLE device. The benefit of the proposed system is a hands-free operation of the smartphone application because the information gathering process is performed in a background process. Experimental results demonstrate that the developed application can measure its position with a GPS receiver and can upload the obtained location to the cloud automatically.

ABSTRACT:
We evaluated an educational intervention using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to develop competences in the areas of 1. Pedagogy, 2. Communication, 3. Management and 4. Research, in 65 professors of the Faculty of Medicine of a Public University. Design: Quasi-experimental study according to the Research-Action methodology. Two intervention phases were carried out: Mixed training for teachers for 4 months and then the creation of functional virtual classrooms as a final product. The teaching competences, the quality of the virtual classrooms and the perception of the teachers about the limitations found were evaluated.

It was achieved that 72% and 78% of teachers became competent at an integrative level in Pedagogy and Communication. 85% and 68% were proficient in an explorer level in Management and Research. Even so, only 25% of teachers created and implemented functional virtual classrooms. Important limitations regarding technological conditions and university policies were explored. It is a need of the majority that said work be recognized to integrate them into their teaching activity.

ABSTRACT:
It is a challenge to define the Internet of Things (IoT) due to its technical and conceptual complexity. The IoT system allows you to transfer data on the Internet, including personal data. In this ecosystem there is an emerging phenomenon, basically a technical system, named blockchain. There are public blockchain and private blockchain, but we know that it could also be a combined blockchain (consortium blockchain). Apart from the highly technical solution, hence, we cannot dismiss the legal obligations, where they are applicable, like in Europe, according to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It is important to highlight the differences between privacy and data protection: they are not the same. We cannot dismiss that personal data is a value and it needs adequate protection. The focal point is to highlight if the privacy and data protection law (especially the GDPR) could be applied to the blockchain considering its technical structure. Consequently, it is important to emphasize that the security measures are not enough to comply with privacy and data protection existing laws. Artificial Intelligence systems may facilitate every single step in the processing of personal data.

ABSTRACT:
The Rural School Transport has particularities such as the complexity of the routes, the students’ dispersion in the geographic areas, the practical costs and the lack of capable professionals to work with geographical data. For this reason, the solution of the rural school transport routing problem requires an application of specific methodologies.

The School of Engineering at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil (UFMG) developed a tool entitled TRANSCOLAR to calculate school bus routing. The implanted methodology allows the georeferencing of every existing school, student and route, thereby enabling the optimization of these routes and providing better-qualified transport at a lower cost to the population.

The assumption was that the model should be intuitively handled, so the platform was designed for web-format use, personalized for rural school transport, in which the commands are easily utilized, dismissing a geoprocessing specialist for its application.

In the present article, the proposed model is compared to traditional routing softwares: TransCAD and ArcGIS. The city of Santa Leopoldina/ES, in Brazil was chosen as a case study. The objective of this article is to evaluate the benefits added to the new proposed methodology.

ABSTRACT:
In the 19th century Alexander von Humboldt explored the nature and was conceived a new vision of nature that still influences the way we understand the new world. Humboldt believed in the importance of accurate measurements and precise description of observations. His vision of nature included not only facts but also emotions.

Nowadays smart solutions will be developed by using computer technology, which will influence our relationship to nature, our handling of the complexity and diversity of nature itself and the technological influences on the society. Could we avoid a new form of “Colonialism”, when a network of super computers will create a smarter world?