STRATEGIES OF CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

The present paper emphasizes the corporate social responsibility (CSR) state and development strategies in the European Union and at the level of the Romanian business environment. The aim of the paper is to present the similarities and differences in theCorporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Strategy, Vision – Mission – Values System

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY DURING THE ECONOMIC CRISIS. THE CASE OF THE ROMANIAN COMPANIES

The aim of the present paper is to identify and comment on the existing relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the current economic crisis, by focusing on the experience of the Romanian companies. After briefly defining the concept of CSR, the article presents the above mentioned relationship from a triple perspective: the lack of ethics as a cause of the economic crisis, the threat of CSR in periods of crisis and the opportunity of CSR in periods of crisis, considering that the last perspective could be maximized if companies are going to approach CSR from a strategic point of view. Finally, the second part of the paper presents what Romanian companies really do, but, more important, what they should do in order to increase their effectiveness in terms of CSR implementation when social budgets seem to remain constant or even decrease.Corporate Social Responsibility, Economic Crisis, Stakeholders, Risk Management

Chebyshev Interpolation Polynomial-based Tools for Rigorous Computing

17 pagesInternational audiencePerforming numerical computations, yet being able to provide rigorous mathematical statements about the obtained result, is required in many domains like global optimization, ODE solving or integration. Taylor models, which associate to a function a pair made of a Taylor approximation polynomial and a rigorous remainder bound, are a widely used rigorous computation tool. This approach benefits from the advantages of numerical methods, but also gives the ability to make reliable statements about the approximated function. Despite the fact that approximation polynomials based on interpolation at Chebyshev nodes offer a quasi-optimal approximation to a function, together with several other useful features, an analogous to Taylor models, based on such polynomials, has not been yet well-established in the field of validated numerics. This paper presents a preliminary work for obtaining such interpolation polynomials together with validated interval bounds for approximating univariate functions. We propose two methods that make practical the use of this: one is based on a representation in Newton basis and the other uses Chebyshev polynomial basis. We compare the quality of the obtained remainders and the performance of the approaches to the ones provided by Taylor models

Special Section on Emerging and Impacting Trends on Computer Arithmetic

The papers in this special section focus on emerging and impacting trends on computer arithmetic. The computer arithmetic. field encompasses the definition and standardization of arithmetic systems for computers. It also deals with issues pertaining to hardware and software implementations, testing, and verification. Researchers and practitioners of this field also work on challenges associated with using Computer Arithmetic to perform scientific and engineering calculations. As such, Computer Arithmetic can be regarded as a truly multi-disciplinary field, which builds upon mathematics, computer science and electrical engineering. Thus, the range of topics addressed by Computer Arithmetic is generally very broad, spanning from highly theoretical to extremely practical contributions. Computer Arithmetic has been an active research field since the advent of computers, and it is progressively evolving following continuously advancements in technology

ANALYSIS OF A TRANSPORT PROCESS USING HYBRID PETRI NETS

Purpose of the paper is to analyze the Petri net model, to describe the transport process, part of amanufacturing system and its dynamics.A hibrid Petri net model is built to describe the dinamics of the transport process manufacturingsystem. Mathematical formulation of the dinamycs processes a detailed description. Based on this model, theanalysis of the transport process is designed to be able to execute a production plan and resolve any conflictsthat may arise in the system.In the analysis dinamics known two stages: in the continuous variables are discrete hybrid system in thehibrid discrete variables are used as safety control with very well defined responsibilities.In terms of the chosen model, analyze transport process is designed to help execute a production planand resolve conflicts that may arise in the process, and then the ones in the syste

Certified and fast computation of supremum norms of approximation errors

The version available on HAL corresponds to the version initially submitted to the conference and slightly differs from the published version since it does not account for remarks made by the referees.International audienceIn many numerical programs there is a need for a high-quality floating-point approximation of useful functions f, such as exp, sin, erf. In the actual implementation, the function is replaced by a polynomial p, leading to an approximation error (absolute or relative) epsilon = p-f or epsilon = p/f-1. The tight yet certain bounding of this error is an important step towards safe implementations. The main difficulty of this problem is due to the fact that this approximation error is very small and the difference p-f is highly cancellating. In consequence, previous approaches for computing the supremum norm in this degenerate case, have proven to be either unsafe, not sufficiently tight or too tedious in manual work. We present a safe and fast algorithm that computes a tight lower and upper bound for the supremum norms of approximation errors. The algorithm is based on a combination of several techniques, including enhanced interval arithmetic, automatic differentiation and isolation of the roots of a polynomial. We have implemented our algorithm and timings on several examples are given

Automatic generation of polynomial-based hardware architectures for function evaluation

International audienceMany applications require the evaluation of some function through polynomial approximation. This article details an architecture generator for this class of problems that improves upon the literature in two aspects. Firstly, it benefits from recent advances related to constrained-coefficient polynomial approximation. Secondly, it refines the error analysis of polynomial evaluation to reduce the size of the multipliers used. As a result, architectures for evaluating arbitrary functions with precisions up to 64 bits, making efficient use of the resources of recent FPGAs, can be obtained in seconds. An open-source implementation is provided in the FloPoCo project

Efficient and accurate computation of upper bounds of approximation errors

International audienceFor purposes of actual evaluation, mathematical functions f are commonly replaced by approximation polynomials p. Examples include floating-point implementations of elementary functions, quadrature or more theoretical proof work involving transcendental functions. Replacing f by p induces a relative error epsilon = p/f - 1. In order to ensure the validity of the use of p instead of f, the maximum error, i.e. the supremum norm of epsilon must be safely bounded above. Numerical algorithms for supremum norms are efficient but cannot offer the required safety. Previous validated approaches often require tedious manual intervention. If they are automated, they have several drawbacks, such as the lack of quality guarantees. In this article a novel, automated supremum norm algorithm with a priori quality is proposed. It focuses on the validation step and paves the way for formally certified supremum norms. Key elements are the use of intermediate approximation polynomials with bounded approximation error and a non-negativity test based on a sum-of-squares expression of polynomials. The new algorithm was implemented in the Sollya tool. The article includes experimental results on real-life examples

Racines carrées multiplicatives sur FPGA

10 pagesLes implantations actuelles de la racine carrée dans des bibliothèques d'opérateurs pour FPGA utilisent presque toutes une récurrence à base d'additions. Ce choix est particulièrement bien adapté à la structure des blocs logiques élémentaires d'un FPGA. Toutefois, il peut être remis en question à présent que la plupart des FPGA haute-performance incluent un grand nombre de blocs multiplieurs et de blocs mémoires. Cet article discute l'implantation d'une racine carrée compatible IEEE-754 en utilisant ces nouvelles ressources, et compare les performances obtenues avec l'approche classique