Nowadays, there is no application area in which Artificial Intelligence oriented solutions are not employed. It is possible to see its use in even daily life and the solution scope of this scientific field of the future is growing day by day. Because of its great advantages in analyzing the physical world and solving real-world problems, Artificial Intelligence techniques are often employed in different research problems that cannot be solved with traditional computational approaches. In this context, using intelligent systems to understand human features is one of the most popular research interest for recent years. In the sense of the explanations so far, the objective of this study is to introduce a research in which a system that is able to extract emotions from individuals' facial expressions was designed and developed. In detail, the system considered here a Cascade Feedforward Artificial Neural Network model trained by a recent optimization algorithm called as Vortex Optimization Algorithm. The developed system has been applied to different sets of photos from the literature and positive results were obtained at the final for each different set considered.

Auscultation, which means listening to heart sounds, is one of the most basic medical methods used by physicians to diagnose heart diseases. These voices provide considerable information about the pathological cardiac condition of arrhythmia, valve disorders, heart failure and other heart conditions. This is why cardiac sounds have a great prominence in the early diagnosis of cardiovascular disease. Heart sounds mainly have two main components, S1 and S2. These components need to be well identified to diagnose heart conditions easily and accurately. In this case, the segmentation of heart sounds comes into play and naturally a lot of work has been done in this regard. The first step in the automatic analysis of heart sounds is the segmentation of heart sound signals. Correct detection of heart sounds components is crucial for correct identification of systolic or diastolic regions. Thus, the pathological conditions in these regions can be clearly demonstrated. In previous studies, frequency domain studies such as Shannon energy and Hilbert transformation method were generally performed for segmentation of heart sounds. These methods involve quite long and exhausting stages. For this reason, in this study, a re-sampled energy method which can easily segment heart sounds in the time domain has been developed. The results obtained from the experiments show that the proposed method segments S1 and S2 sounds very efficiently.

Caffeine is a pharmacologically active component of many foods, beverages, dietary supplements, and drugs. Coffee and tea are among the best-known beverages in the world. Most people on a global scale consume coffee daily because of their caffeine-rich content. In addition to the benefits it exerts on the human body, it also has some negative aspects: some medical conditions require a restricted caffeine diet, some drugs cannot perform their pharmacological action in the presence of caffeine, it producing addiction. To overcome these aspects, people can replace normal coffee with decaffeinated coffee or black tea. The present study has as main objective the study of the caffeine content of different brands of coffee and black tea on the Romanian market. For the study, analyzes were made on different traditional brands and the data obtained were then compared with those obtained for decaffeinated coffee and black tea. It was found that the highest content of coffee was P1 (0.89%), followed by sample P2 (0.46%) and sample P3 (0.22%). For decaffeinated coffee, the smallest quantity is found in sample P5 (0.01%), P4 having a higher content (0.21%). It can be said that black tea is a good substitute for coffee because the caffeine's found values are closer to those present in classic coffee, having a percentage of 0.18%.

In this paper, we take a look at how the language of Online classes (MOOCs) differs from those of real classes. Three corpora were created for this analysis; MOOC corpus, Lecture Capture corpus, and Philosophy Lecture Capture. Three factors were used in the study: Formality, Sentiment analysis, vocabulary analysis. Formality score was used to understand how formal the text is. Sentiment categorization of words was used to realize the positivity of the words used in the classes and finally, top words used in corpora were analyzed to understand the usage. It was realized that the formality measure of real classes is slightly lower than online classes and professors use more positive words in real classes than online classes and the vocabulary usage is heavily under the influence of subject.

Starting 2008 there was developed a new concept regarding eLearning — Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC). Its rapid growth is also reflected in research and development activities. In the current paper, we have attempted to analyze this academic interest between 2008 and 2016. A number of 3264 articles were collected from ISI Web of Science. The authors assess the attractiveness of MOOCs as an academic topic of discussion in terms of most cited papers, most cited authors, the co-citation networks (papers and countries). We applied bibliometric methods on collected publications by using CiteSpace as a tool for analyzing and visualizing the results.

Linguistic competence and teaching performance among English teachers in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classrooms have been at the center of linguists' discussion, both theoretical and applied in the 21st century. This study attempts to examine the importance of balancing linguistic competence and teaching performance in learning and teaching of English classrooms. Moreover, this study aims at exploring the different ways of linguistic competence and teaching performance defined by linguists. It also investigates how differing interpretations of these two concepts influence learning and teaching in foreign language classrooms. Following the idea above, an online survey was conducted to discover the EFL teachers' beliefs about linguistic competence and teaching performance in EFL teaching practices. The result indicated that most of them have a clear idea toward the concept of linguistic competencies and teaching performance and believed that it is important for EFL teachers to have a good command of linguistic competence in order to help them perform better in their teaching practices/performances. Therefore, linguistic competencies and teaching performance should be placed equally.

Quick Response Code has been widely used in the automatic identification fields (Liu, Ju, & Mingjun, 2008). The present work illustrates an image processing system able to discover, split and decodes the most common 2D symbol used in bar code applications. The different symbol is processed by manipulating their similarities, to achieve an integrated computational structure (Ouaviani, Pavan, Bottazzi, Brunelli, Caselli, & Guerrero, 1999). There is not enough novel approach which could be effective for data transferring to alter various sizes, a little noisy or damaged and various lighting conditions of bar code image. We proposed a faster QR code which has more storage and can scan faster. The new QR code generation takes twice the time than normal QR code but it can also store double QR code data. It's scanning is as faster as other QR code scanning technique. we deducted the level of color percentage despite positions of color bits in that module, which increased its scanning speed and reduced noise error rate to less than 10 percent.

Recognizing a face is a routine task for human perception system, whereas building a similar computational model for Face recognition with 100% accuracy is quite challenging. This work is rich in terms of theory, literature, and experimentation with a novel approach towards face similarity technology. The paper concentrates on the design of an N-Way DBN Classifier and Similarity Metric DBN Auto-encoder for recognizing facial similarity (or Face Verification). PCA feature extraction process is combined with DBN to enhance the performance of the two proposed models. The models work under both Image Unrestricted and Image Restricted settings on the small LFW dataset. Many improvements and refinements needed to improve the models. With advancement in feature extraction stage, the proposed approaches might achieve competitive verification performance.

Data mining is a generous field for researchers due to its various approaches on knowledge discovery in enormous volumes of data that are stored in different formats. At present, data are widely used all over the world, covering areas such as: education, industry, medicine, banking, inssurance companies, research laboratories, business, military domain etc. The major gain from applying data mining techniques is the discovery of unknown patterns and relations between data which can further help in the decision-making processes. There are two forms of data analysis used to extract models by describing important classes or to predict future data trends: classification and prediction. In this paper, the authors present a comparative study of classification algorithms (i.e. Decision Tree, Naïve Bayes and Random Forest) that are currently applied to demographic data referring to death statistics using KNIME Analytics Platform. Our study was based on statistical data provided by the National Bureau of Statistics of the Republic of Moldova corresponding to years 2011 and 2012, data related to deaths and various classification attributes, such as causes of death, areas, sex, years and age groups. A detailed proposal on the possibilities to increase the models' accuracy was also provided in the paper. Our findings indicated that the highest accuracy was achieved by the Decision Tree model (over 90%).

Teenagers are age-prone to new problems that arise in day life. In the face of problems in Buddhism, adolescents are taught to be independent from early adolescence to dealing with various problems in their lives. The adolescent in the Buddhist teenagers' has the independence ability taught in the Buddhist theory that "make yourself a protector for yourself", so that the individual is required to use his mind in conquering himself." Self-regulation is component of critical thinking skills as the ability to control ourself to solve the problem where in behaving need consideration using thought for making decision. Critical thinking skills is a thought process that includes the ability to interpret, analyze information, evaluate the problem, conclude for decision-making, and ends with self-regulation. This study aims to identify qualitatively the representative of self-regulatory in critical thinking skills on the Buddhist adolescents in solving the problem. In the results of this study, the representation of self-regulatory of the Buddhist teenagers' critical thinking in solving problems uses independence and thinking systematically without instruction to solve the problems. This research is supporting theory about critical thinking that includes aspects of self-regulation and improvement of self-regulatory can be started by group exercise.

The paper aims to present the methodology of the platform "Ethnolinguistic audio-visual atlas of the cultural food heritage of BacÓ‘u County — eCULTFOOD Atlas", the main product of the project The Digitization of the Cultural Food Heritage. The Region of Bacău — eCULTFOOD (PNIII-P2-2.1-BG-2016-0390). The platform eCULTFOOD Atlas is a comprehensive database containing the results of field research and scientific documentation on local cultural food traditions. It includes a representative corpus of audio-visual documents recording the traditional food cultural heritage based on surveys involving the older generation from the rural county of BacÓ‘u, Romania. The eCULTFOOD Atlas meets the aspirations of EU policies that regard the digitization of cultural resources as a key factor that would contribute to improving accessibility and undivided flow of information in a knowledge economy. Once transposed into electronic format, the cultural food heritage of BacÓ‘u County may become a resource for a broad spectrum of activities impacting sectors such as education, economy and tourism.

Keywords:  

1. The project PN-III-P2-2.1-BG-2016-0390 The Digitization of the Cultural Food Heritage. The Region of Bacău — eCULTFOOD

Today's lifestyle puts an increasing accent on internet resources. In order to increase its efficiency, the educational process should also include internet resources. This work presents different internet resources (online courses and tutorials, social media, online games) and analyses their efficiency in training students.

The approach of Smart City is getting more and more important for both academics and policy makers. Despite this, there is still confusion on what a Smart City is and several similar terms are often used interchangeably. This paper aims at clarifying the meaning of the word "smart" in the context of cities development and to identify the main dimensions and elements characterizing a smart city. Furthermore, performance measures of a smart city will be identified. The aim of the article is to analyze and evaluate the degree of implementation of the Smart City concept in selected cities in Poland. The article will also cover the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to improve selected areas of the city. The article also analyses the main barriers that make it difficult to invest in Smart City. In the following publication, the main research method was a questionnaire, which was sent to the 57 cities-capitals of the Lublin and Mazovian Voivodships. The paper also presents the prospects for the development of Smart City initiative in Poland. The research has shown that the level of implementation of Smart City Initiative is low. The main barrier to such investment is the lack of adequate funds and insufficient human resources and knowledge.

Education is at the heart of sustainable development and is the key to the professional success of young people. In modern living conditions, the student needs a wide range of key competences to adapt successfully to the rapidly changing environment, and the rapid pace of development necessitates innovative approaches to teaching in the university environment.

The objective of the study is to examine interactive psychoeducational intervention technologies for language disorders. There were selected and analyzed studies centered on using interactive technologies in speech therapy published between 2007 and 2017. A total of 32 studies met the selection criteria. The analysis revealed a different rank regarding the use of psychoeducational intervention interactive technologies for language disorders. Most studies are based on interventions focused on web technologies according to the main delivery mode and display user interface in terms of communication tools.

In the technology-dense environment of the "Millennial generation", the use of ICT for educational purposes is ineviTable. Students use multiple devices for communicating with peers and professors, for interaction with institutions, retrieve content, propose topics, and inquire for information at a pace and in a volume, that can be overwhelming without the intervention of ICT. Computer assisted teaching and learning already have a history both in practice, and in research. However, new technologies and convergent devices make way for a new philosophy on educational processes. The present study considers the perceptions of students at Politehnica University regarding the shared educational resources, both on a vertical communication stream (professor-tostudent) and horizontally (student-to-student). The study explores common practices of students who need to evaluate, decide and create or not a virtual learning community, since they are enrolled and expected to attend classes in the traditional manner. The outcomes of the sociological survey are useful for educating critical thinking in evaluating educational resources on the part of the students, but also help professors in higher education to make informed decisions regarding their educational practices.