Influence of ICT Development on Education

The progress of information technology has a major impact on education process as computers represent the main support for most of educational activities. Although investments in ICT in Romania are 10-15 times smaller than in developed European countries, it seems that they are not related to the use of mobile devices. As mobile devices are becoming increasingly more popular, their role in education should not be neglected. This paper presents the transition towards mobile learning, complementary to e-Learning

SciTech News Volume 71, No. 2 (2017)

Columns and Reports From the Editor 3 Division News Science-Technology Division 5 Chemistry Division 8 Engineering Division 9 Aerospace Section of the Engineering Division 12 Architecture, Building Engineering, Construction and Design Section of the Engineering Division 14 Reviews Sci-Tech Book News Reviews 16 Advertisements IEEE

Mobile application to identify recyclable materials

This dissertation proposes a system to help the consumer recycle efficiently. The system is composed by a mobile application that can capture images of waste and classify their category through the usage of a machine learning model. Furthermore, this application can communicate with a server to update the model with new improved versions and also upload the images to the server in order to contribute to the creation of more precise model versions. The system has been validated by a fully working prototype. Although the proof of concept has been achieved, with some types of waste items correctly categorized, the machine learning model produced is not precise enough to be used in real-life scenarios, that is, for any type of waste. The main contributions of this study are a compendium of information in the area of computer vision and machine learning to categorize waste, and a working prototype system that utilizes crowdsourcing and machine learning elements to help the consumer recycle more efficiently.Nesta dissertação é proposto um sistema para ajudar o consumidor a reciclar eficientemente. O sistema é composto por uma aplicação móvel que captura imagens de lixo e classifica a sua categoria usando um modelo de aprendizagem automática. Consegue também comunicar com um servidor para atualizar o modelo com versões melhoradas e enviar as imagens para o servidor para contribuir para a criação de modelos mais precisos. Foi demonstrado através de um protótipo totalmente funcional que o sistema proposto funciona. Algumas imagens de lixo foram categorizadas correctamente, mas o modelo de aprendizagem automática produzido durante este projeto não é preciso o suficiente, em qualquer categoria de lixo, para usar em cenários da vida real. As principais contribuições deste estudo são um compêndio de informação na área de visão de computador e aprendizagem automática para categorizar lixo, e um sistema protótipo funcional que utiliza elementos de contribuição colaborativa e aprendizagem automática para ajudar o consumidor a reciclar mais eficientemente

Location privacy and public metadata in social media platforms: attitudes, behaviors and opinions

The highavailability of geolocation technologies is changing the social media mobile scenario and is exposing users to privacy risks. Different studies have focused on location privacy in the mobile scenario, but the results are conflicting: some say that users are concerned about location privacy, others say they are not. In this paper, we initially investigate attitudes and behaviors of people toward a location-aware scenario; then, we show users the amount of personal and sensitive data that can be extracted from contents publicly available in social platforms, and finally we ask for their opinions about a location-aware scenario. Results show that people who were not initially concerned about privacy are the most worried about the location-aware scenario; conversely, people who were initially concerned are less worried about the location-aware scenario and find the scenario interesting. A deeper analysis of the obtained results allows us to draw guidelines that might be helpful to build an effective location-aware scenario

An Android Mobile App To Visualize ASU Wind Energy Production

Appalachian State University prides itself on its commitment to utilizing renewable energy sources to minimize its carbon footprint. One of the most iconic examples of this commitment is the Broyhill wind turbine. As it stands, there are few access points for citizens to learn about the turbine’s active state: its current output, rotational speed, orientation, etc. The goal of this thesis is to build upon preexisting frameworks and outline the implementation of an Android application that could fill this role and be distributed by the University. The application consists of a tabbed interface including several topical pages, most notably being the animated turbine tab which gathers and animates a turbine using close-to-real-time data acquired via a constructed system of a webserver and a backend database. The resulting application could easily be distributed by the University, following a few server-moves and modifications, as well as become the foundation for several other possible projects. Includes CD