A P.E.S.T. ANALYSE OF THE MARKETING ENVIRONMENT OF THE ROMANIAN SME SECTOR DURING THE LAST FINANCIAL CRISIS YEARS

The health of an economy depends, no doubt, by the dynamic of SME sector andtheir level success on the domestic and international markets.Our work aims a PESTLE analysis of the Romanian SME sector after 2008 year when theywere felt the effects of the global financial crisis and to emphasize the powerful adaptivemanagement process continues to change the demand and to identify, also, the effectivetactics to the companies level to reduce the negative impacts and threats because of themacroeconomic context of today, less favorable to SME of Romania.The reflection will bring the possible macroeconomic and sectorial consequences in terms forthe economy of Romania in the coming years and the measures that must be take in place tomitigate these consequences of the Romanian SME sector which represents 96% of theRomanian economy.marketing environment turbulence, financial crisis, macroeconomic consequences,Romanian SME sector dynamic, sector attractiveness

Regional Disparities in Romania. Contribution of the Regional Operational Program to Health Infrastructure

Health infrastructure is one of the weaknesses of socio-economic development in Romania and in other European states. In order to get a better picture of the Romanian health system issues, this paper analyzes a number of statistical indicators considered representative for the national and European health infrastructure for a 20 years period, between 1990 and 2010. Our paper has three main objectives: (a) to identify the main trends for health infrastructure in some of the European Union countries; (b) to describe the evolution of the health system in Romania, the comparative situation at the European level as well as regional level indicators dynamics; (c) to overview the Regional Operational Program in Romania, how much does it help the regional health infrastructure in our country. At the European level, there is a constant decrease in the number of hospital beds. For this indicator, Romania has slightly higher values than the European average. We must mention that the hospital beds indicator offers limited information on health infrastructure which also includes medical equipment and specific devices and practices. The number of hospitals in Romania increased with 18.9% during the last 20 years (1990-2010). During the observed timeline, the number of hospitals in Romania had a constant positive evolution at regional level. The number of doctors in hospitals has an increasing trend at the local as well as at the international level. Romania has a number of doctors twice lower than the European average (3.6 doctors for one thousand inhabitants). The Regional Operational Program (ROP) has a limited influence in achieving the objectives stated in Applicants Guide for Priority Axis 3. Major Intervention Area 3.1. This happens because supporting infrastructure improvements will not create institutional modernization. The financial contribution through ROP will result in the modernization of 11% of the existing hospitals in Romania

Path planning for socially-aware humanoid robots

Designing efficient autonomous navigation systems for mobile robots involves consideration of the robotís environment while arriving at a systems architecture that trades off multiple constraints. We have architected a navigation framework for socially-aware autonomous robot navigation, using only the on-board computing resources. Our goal is to foster the development of several important service robotics applications using this platform. Our framework allows a robot to autonomously navigate in indoor environments while accounting for people (i.e., estimating the path of all individuals in the environment), respecting each individualís private space. In our design, we can leverage a wide number of sensors for navigation, including cameras, 2D and 3D scanners, and motion trackers. When designing our sensor system, we have considered that mobile robots have limited resources (i.e., power and computation) and that some sensors are costlier than others (e.g., cameras and 3D scanners stream data at high rates), requiring intensive computation to provide useful insight for real-time navigation. We tradeoff between accuracy, responsiveness, and power, and choose a Hokuyo UST-20LX 2D laser scanner for robot localization, obstacle detection and people tracking. We use an MPU-6050 for motion tracking. Our navigation framework features a low-power sensor system (< 5W) tailored for improved battery life in robotic applications while providing sufficient accuracy. We have completed a prototype for a Human Support Robot using the available onboard computing devices, requiring less than 60W to run. We estimate we can obtain similar performance, while reducing power by ~60%, utilizing low-power high-performance accelerator hardware and parallelized software.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Preface on laser material interactions: from basic science to industrial applications (LaserMaterInter2020)

International audienc

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT – HUMAN DEVELOPMENT CONNECTIONS IN THE POST-TRUTH ERA

Following the distancing of current policy from economic rigors and ethical demands aimed at redistribution of wealth, modern societies are parasitized by post-truth of actual facts. It distorts the shape and content of general interest data, for example political distortion of scientific evidence proving anthropogenic climate change. Under these circumstances, the question "to what extent economist’s truth stating what you cannot measure you cannot manage is sustained?" becomes absolutely legitimate. Regarding sustainable development management, monitoring the degree of achievement of Sustainable Development Goals is no longer sufficient to track progress in this area. Therefore, experts propose to introduce as much as possible qualitative data which, combined with quantitative data, will enhance their relevance and make them harder to be diverted for political purposes. This paper follows this direction, trying to prove that protection of data’s real meaning can be achieved by systemic analysis of all data originating from monitoring certain processes, which can be aggregated, with applicability in sustainable development. Thus, analyzing together data on sustainable development and those that indicates the state of human development emphasizes on one hand, the intrinsic link between these concepts and, on the other, maintain the sense of sustainability even in the post-truth era

POST-TRUTH ERA – A TIME TO RECONSIDER SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Current development policies are farther away from established economic patterns and corresponding ethical requirements, resulting in post-modern society parasitism by the post-truth of actual facts. It distorts both the form and content of issues of general interest by exacerbating secondary factors. The best example is the distortion of the political criteria of scientific evidence proving climate change due to human activity. However, we must not let ourselves overwhelmed by massive manipulation of economic and climate data, which are analyzed in good faith by experts. In terms of managing sustainable development, monitoring the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) is no longer sufficient to have a clear picture of progress in the field. The paper presented here wants to demonstrate that real meaning of data can be protected by systematically analyzing all data on a subject, from different sources, that can aggregate, with applicability on sustainable development

Solving Large-Scale Markov Decision Processes on Low-Power Heterogeneous Platforms

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) provide a framework for a machine to act autonomously and intelligently in environments where the effects of its actions are not deterministic. MDPs have numerous applications. We focus on practical applications for decision making, such as autonomous driving and service robotics, that have to run on mobile platforms with scarce computing and power resources. In our study, we use Value Iteration to solve MDPs, a core method of the paradigm to find optimal sequences of actions, which is well known for its high computational cost. In order to solve these computationally complex problems efficiently in platforms with stringent power consumption constraints, high-performance accelerator hardware and parallelised software come to the rescue. We introduce a generalisable approach to implement practical applications for decision making, such as autonomous driving on mobile and embedded low-power heterogeneous SoC platforms that integrate an accelerator (GPU) with a multicore. We evaluate three scheduling strategies that enable concurrent execution and efficient use of resources on a variety of SoCs embedding a multicore CPU and integrated GPU, namely Oracle, Dynamic, and LogFit. We compare these strategies for solving an MDP modelling the use-case of autonomous robot navigation in indoor environments on four representative platforms for mobile decision-making applications with a power use ranging from 4 to 65 Watts. We provide a rigorous analysis of the results to better understand their behaviour depending on the MDP size and the computing platform. Our experimental results show that by using CPU-GPU heterogeneous strategies, the computation time and energy required are considerably reduced with respect to multicore implementation, regardless of the computational platform.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech. This work was partially supported by the Spanish project TIN 2016-80920-R

Three is not a crowd: ACPU-GPU-FPGA K-means implementation

Clustering is the task of assigning a set of objects into groups (clusters) so that objects in the same group are more similar to each other than to those in other groups. In particular, K-means is a clustering algorithm that calculates the cluster with the nearest mean for each object. To achieve this, it uses a function like Euclidean or Manhattan distance. Our objective is to exploit our heterogeneous computing environment, that integrates an Intel Core i7-6700K chip, 2x NVIDIA TITAN X and an Intel Altera Terasic Stratix V DE5-NET FPGA, to run K-means as fast as possible.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Metodologie preliminară Analiza Cost Beneficiu pentru bazine hidrografice

This study refers to the methodological framework for performing the cost-benefit analysis, at the level of a river basin, for the program of measures needed to achieve the good environmental condition of water bodies within the framework of Water Framework Directive (WFD). The Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) aims to identify the disproportionate threshold of costs associated with the program of measures, in order to justify the exceptions to the environmental objectives of water bodies, according to the requirements of the Water Framework Directive 2000/60 / EC. The WFD defines two categories of measures: "basic" and "additional". "Basic measures" are the minimum compliance requirements and consist of those measures required by the implementation of Community water protection legislation, including measures under the legislation specified in Article 10 and Part A of Annex VI (list of basic measures to be included in programs of measures). "Additional measures" are those measures identified and implemented in addition to the basic measures, in order to achieve the objectives, set as a result of art. 4 to the WFD

Atenuarea impactului COVID-19, în România, prin gestionarea corespunzătoare a deșeurilor medicale periculoase

The research paper analyzes the ways of disposing of hazardous medical waste, which also includes infectious medical waste, and proposes some solutions to solve the identified problems. Regarding the evolution of medical waste quantities, in the context of the pandemic caused by COVID-19, it is obvious that large additional quantities of hazardous medical waste are generated. In Romania, the total amount of hazardous medical waste, generated by medical units with beds registered a jump: from a quantity of 8,900 tons of hazardous medical waste in 2012, it reaches 13,031 tons in 2018. It should also be noted that, the total medical waste, in the period of seven years (2012-2018) decreased from 33,732 tons to 15,424 tons (decrease of 54% or 18,308 tons). In 2018, there were several treatment / final disposal stations in Romania for the processing of medical waste: 11 incinerators operating in a centralized system; 14 thermal decontamination treatment plants at low temperatures operating in a centralized system; 23 treatment equipment operating within the sanitary units; 5 transfer stations used for certain categories of medical waste. The existing installations have a cumulative capacity of approx. 15,000 t / year: 11 thousand tons disposal by incineration and 4,000 t by cryogenic treatment. However, there is no information on the quality of existing installations, the degree of wear, the degree of load capacity, the performance achieved, etc. Thus, currently, in 14 counties there is no treatment facility for thermal decontamination at low temperatures of hazardous medical waste; there are also a number of 20 counties that do not have any centralized capacity for incineration of hazardous medical waste. In order to process the high volume of medical waste generated in the process of prevention and treatment of patients infected with the COVID-19 virus, this paper proposes a series of measures, investments and mechanisms