Gabriela Tabacaru

This file contains a general description of the Journal. It includes information such as the aims of the Journal, a list of the Editorial Team members, the scientific board members etc.

1

Andy R. Eugene , Wayne T. Nicholson

Propranolol, a non-selective β-blocker, has been found to have a tremendous array of  indications. Recent evidence has suggested that propranolol may be effective in patients suffering  from post-traumatic stress disorder by suppressing activity in the amygdala and thereby inhibiting  emotional memory formation. Dosage requirements have been well established in the pediatric and  adult population, however, there has been no definitive geriatric dose recommended in the package  inserts made available to the public. The aim of this paper is to use pharmacokinetic simulations in  order to establish a pharmacokinetic profile dosage equivalent for the elderly as has been found in  young patients. After completing the Monte-Carlo simulations for the elderly and young patients, a  single 10mg dose in the elderly has shown comparable pharmacokinetic profiles as found in young  patients administered a 40mg single dose.

2

Utku Kose , Ahmet Arslan

The objective of this paper is to introduce an artificial intelligence based optimization  approach, which is inspired from Piaget's theory on cognitive development. The approach has been  designed according to essential processes that an individual may experience while learning  something new or improving his / her knowledge. These processes are associated with the Piaget's  ideas on an individual's cognitive development. The approach expressed in this paper is a simple  algorithm employing swarm intelligence oriented tasks in order to overcome single-objective  optimization problems. For evaluating effectiveness of this early version of the algorithm, test  operations have been done via some benchmark functions. The obtained results show that the  approach / algorithm can be an alternative to the literature in terms of single-objective optimization.
The authors have suggested the name: Cognitive Development Optimization Algorithm (CoDOA)  for the related intelligent optimization approach.

3

Jyotshna Dongardive , Siby Abraham

The paper proposes a neural network based approach to predict secondary structure of protein. It uses Multilayer Feed Forward Network (MLFN) with resilient back propagation as the learning algorithm. Point Accepted Mutation (PAM) is adopted as the encoding scheme and CB396 data set is used for the training and testing of the network. Overall accuracy of the network has been experimentally calculated with different window sizes for the sliding window scheme and by varying the number of units in the hidden layer. The best results were obtained with eleven as the window size and seven as the number of units in the hidden layer.

4

Maya Dimitrova

The paper presents a novel analysis focused on showing that education is possible through robotic enhancement of the Gestalt processing in children with autism, which is not comparable to alternative educational methods such as demonstration and instruction provided solely by human tutors. The paper underlines the conceptualization of cognitive processing of holistic representations traditionally named in psychology as Gestalt structures, emerging in the process of human-robot interaction in educational settings. Two cognitive processes are proposed in the present study - bounding and unfolding - and their role in Gestalt emergence is outlined. The proposed theoretical approach explains novel findings of autistic perception and gives guidelines for design of robot-assistants to the rehabilitation process.

5

Dmytro Zubov

In this paper, the self-organizing inductive methodology is applied for the non-anticipative analog forecasting of the heat/cold waves in the natural environment subsystem of the smart city. The prediction algorithm is described by two paradigms. First one (short range) uses quantum computing formalism. D-Wave adiabatic quantum computing Ising model is employed and evaluated for the forecasting of positive extremes of daily mean air temperature. Forecast models are designed with two to five qubits, which represent 2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-day historical data, respectively. Ising model's real-valued weights and dimensionless coefficients are calculated using daily mean air temperatures from 119 places around the world as well as sea level (Aburatsu, Japan). The proposed forecast quantum computing algorithm is simulated based on traditional computer architecture and combinatorial optimization of Ising model parameters for the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport dataset with 1-day lead-time on learning sample 1975-2010 yr. Analysis of the forecast accuracy (ratio of successful predictions to total number of predictions) on the validation sample 2011-2014 yr shows that Ising model with three qubits has 100% accuracy, which is significant as compared to other methods. However, number of identified heat waves is small (only one out of nineteen in this case). Second paradigm (long range) uses classical computation in the Microsoft Azure public cloud. Here, the forecast method identifies the dependencies between the current values of two meteorological variables and the future state of another variable. The method is applied to the prediction of heat/cold waves at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. The data include the above-stated datasets plus monthly mean Darwin and Tahiti sea level pressures, SOI, equatorial SOI, sea surface temperature, and multivariate ENSO index (131 datasets in total). Every dataset is split into two samples, for learning and validation, respectively. Initially, the sum of the values at two different locations (minus corresponding expectation values) is calculated with lead-time from 14 to 365 days on summation interval of length from 1 to 365 days. Objective function defines the distribution based on two input datasets with appropriate lead-time and summation interval, which have maximum (or minimum) sum compared with the rest of data four times at least (with a minimum time difference of at least 30 days) when extreme event occurs on the learning sample. Specific extreme events at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport were thus predicted on the validation sample, based on rules referring to events in earlier years. Some extremes are specifically predicted (up to 26.3% of all extremes). The methodology has 100% forecast accuracy with respect to the sign of predicted and actual values. Nowadays, the smart city project is developed at School of Engineering and Sciences (San Luis Potosi), Tecnológico de Monterrey. The early warning of heat/cold waves as well as technical aspect (remote control with Arduino Ethernet Shield and virtual power plant with solar energy are emphasized) are the focus of the Internet of Things project.

6

Roberto Paiano , Adriana Caione , Anna Lisa Guido , Angelo Martella , Andrea Pandurino

The enterprise management represents a heterogeneous aggregate of both resources and  assets that need to be coordinated and orchestrated in order to reach the goals related to the business  mission. Influences and forces that may influence this process, and also for that they should be  considered, are not concentrated in the business environment, but they are related to the entire
operational context of a company. For this reason, business processes must be the most versatile and  flexible with respect to the changes that occur within the whole operational context of a company.
Considering the supportive role that information systems play in favour of Business Process  Management - BPM, it is also essential to implement a constant, continuous and quick mechanism  for the information system alignment with respect to the evolution followed by business processes.
In particular, such mechanism must intervene on BPM systems in order to keep them aligned and  compliant with respect to both the context changes and the regulations. In order to facilitate this  alignment mechanism, companies are already referring to the support offered by specific solutions,  such as knowledge bases.  In this context, a possible solution might be the approach we propose, which is based on a  specific framework called Process Management System. Our methodology implements a knowledge  base support for business experts, which is not limited to the BPM operating phases, but includes  also the engineering and prototyping activities of the corresponding information system.  This paper aims to compare and evaluate a traditional BPM approach with respect to the
approach we propose. In effect, such analysis aims to emphasize the lack of traditional methodology  especially with respect to the alignment between business processes and information systems, along  with their compliance with context domain and regulations.

7

Ciprian Bogdan Chirila , Horia Ciocârlie , Lăcrămioara Stoicu-Tivadar

The development of interactive e-learning content requires special skills like programming  techniques, web integration, graphic design etc. Generally, online educators do not possess such  skills and their e-learning products tend to be static like presentation slides and textbooks. In this  paper we propose a new interactive model of generative learning objects as a compromise between
static, dull materials and dynamic, complex software e-learning materials developed by specialized  teams. We find that random numbers based automatic initialization learning objects increases  content diversity, interactivity thus enabling learners' engagement. The resulted learning object  model is at a limited level of complexity related to special e-learning software, intuitive and capable  of increasing learners' interactivity, engagement and motivation through dynamic content. The  approach was applied successfully on several computer programing disciplines.

8

Carlos Ignacio Sarmiento , V. B. Surya Prasath

We discuss a novel servo-motorized laser device and a research protocol for visual pathways diseases therapies. The proposed servo-mechanized laser device can be used for potential rehabilitation of patients with hemianopia, quadrantanopia, scotoma, and some types of cortical damages. The device uses a semi spherical structure where the visual stimulus will be shown inside, according to a previous stimuli therapy designed by an ophthalmologist or neurologist. The device uses a pair of servomotors (with torque=1.5kg), which controls the laser stimuli position for the internal therapy and another pair for external therapy. Using electronic tools such as microcontrollers along with miscellaneous electronic materials, combined with LabVIEW based interface, a control mechanism is developed for the new device. The proposed device is well suited to run various visual stimuli therapies. We outline the major design principles including the physical dimensions, laser device's kinematical analysis and the corresponding software development.

9

Andy R. Eugene

Trigeminal Neuralgia is a disorder that is characterized with electrical-type shocking pain in the face and jaw. This pain may either present as sharp unbearable pain unilateral or bilaterally. There is no definite etiology for this condition. There are various treatment methods that are currently being used to relieve the pain. One of the pharmacological treatments is Carbamazepine and the most prevalent surgical treatments include Gamma Knife Surgery (GKS), Microvascular Decompression (MVD) and Radiofrequency Lesioning (RFL). Although, MVD is the most used surgical method it is not an option for all the patients due to the intensity of the procedure. RFL is used when MVD is not suitable. In this paper we present the various treatments and Monte-Carlo based pharmacokinetic simulations of Carbamazepine in treatment of Trigeminal Neuralgia.

10

Mirella-Amelia Mioc , Stefan-Gheorghe Pentiuc

The general information about the World Wide Web are especially nowadays useful in all types of communications. The most used model for simulating the functioning of the web is through the hypergraph. The surfer model was chosen from the known algorithms used for web navigation in this simulation. The main objective of this paper is to analyze the Page Rank and its dependency of Markov Chain Length. In this paper some software implementation are presented and used. The experimental results demonstrate the differences between the Algorithm Page Rank and Experimental Page Rank.

11

Antoanela Naaji , Anca Mustea , Carmen Holotescu , Cosmin Herman

Over the last years, the growing ubiquity of Social Media, the emerging mobile technologies and the augmented reality become more deeply integrated into the teaching-learning process and also create new opportunities for reinventing the way in which educational actors both perceive and access learning. The major challenges in education that involve tremendous development and innovation are blended courses/ flipped classrooms integrating Social Media (SM), Open Educational Resources (OER) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) (Johnson et al., 2014). This paper focuses on evaluating the e-learning experiences of various actors in the Romanian educational system. There is a tendency to use virtual learning environments with increasing frequency in higher education, many participants experiencing both online and blended courses. Another issue approached in this paper concerns the relevance of the components of online/ blended courses. In this context, the paper analyzes the importance of these elements with respect to various fields, such as: exact sciences, social sciences, humanistic studies, medical sciences, etc. In conclusion, we identify the most relevant elements in the development of online/ blended courses for various domains. The results will emphasize the standards required for evaluating the quality of online and blended courses.