Quantitative marketing research on behavior of the small and medium companies on financial advisory services

This paper presents the results of quantitative marketing research conducted among small and medium enterprises in Braşov County. The research identified organizational elements of the consumer behavior in the use of the financial advisory services. The objective is to determine whether there is association between firm size and the number of financial advice services outsourced. Results of the study will be based construction of the price policy for financial advisory firms, tailored to the financial constraints faced by small and medium enterprises in Romania

Virtual humans in cultural heritage ICT applications: A review

Abstract Virtual Reality (VR) is becoming an increasingly important tool for the research, the communication and the popularization of cultural heritage. A great deal of 3D interactive reconstructions of artefacts, monuments and entire sites have been realized which meet the consent of both specialist and public at large. However, until a few years ago most of these reconstructions were basically static and often missing an important factor: human presence. Thanks to the advancements in the technology, in latest years Virtual Humans (VHs) have started being used in a variety of cultural-related VR applications. From simple 2D characters to complex 3D avatars, technology continues to evolve and so is the adoption of virtual assistants in digital heritage. The acceptance of such tools deserves a greater attention from the scientific community. When designing such applications, researchers need to take into consideration not only motivations and constraints, but also the type of virtual human fitting in the scenario. In this paper we aim at providing a state-of-the-art on this subject, focusing specifically on the cultural heritage area, underlining the technological challenges and also analyzing the effects of avatar interaction on user engagement, sense of immersion and learning effectiveness. This review also presents the usage of VHs from user's perspective and from the design point of view. We finally discuss the strengths and weaknesses of current approaches and point out unsolved issues, identifying a set of recommendations and good practices to follow when designing VR-based cultural heritage applications including VHs

Comparing innovative xr systems in cultural heritage. A case study

The technological advances made in the recent years in the field of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have led to a revolution in many adjacent areas. One of these is Cultural Heritage (CH), as the new array of XR technologies (a concept integrating Augmented, Mixed and Virtual Reality) is offering new interaction possibilities. The purpose of this paper is to compare several such technologies at application level, and to classify them based on common features such as Interaction, Manipulability, Ease of Use and others. The study presented in this paper was carried out during the H2020 project eHERITAGE (ĝ€ Expanding the Research and Innovation Capacity in Cultural Heritage Virtual Reality Applications'). The action had as output multiple XR systems/applications. We compare 4 of them: A smartphone-based AR application, a digital book with 3D elements deployed on a large touchscreen, a large holographic display and a bow simulator built using a VR headset and a mechatronic system. We evaluate these innovative systems in the context of the 2 educational events, when over 4000 participants interacted with our team. Results show that systems with greater interaction and immersion features were preferred over the others. Furthermore, Mixed Reality was preferred over Virtual and Augmented Reality

Inner-Learning Mechanism Based Control Scheme for Manipulator with Multitasking and Changing Load

With the rapid development of robot technology and its application, manipulators may face complex tasks and dynamic environments in the coming future, which leads to two challenges of control: multitasking and changing load. In this paper, a novel multicontroller strategy is presented to meet such challenges. The presented controller is composed of three parts: subcontrollers, inner-learning mechanism, and switching rules. Each subcontroller is designed with self-learning skills to fit the changing load under a special task. When a new task comes, switching rule reselects the most suitable subcontroller as the working controller to handle current task instead of the older one. Inner-learning mechanism makes the subcontrollers learn from the working controller when load changes so that the switching action causes smaller tracking error than the traditional switch controller. The results of the simulation experiments on two-degree manipulator show the proposed method effect

An algorithm for swarm robot to avoid multiple dynamic obstacles and to catch the moving target

This paper presents a method for swarm robot to catch the moving target and to avoid multiple dynamic obstacles in the unknown environment. An imaginary map is built, including the highest mountain, some small hills, and a lowest lying land, respectively corresponding to the starting position of the robot, the detected obstacles, and the target. The robot is considered as a flow of water flowing from high to low. The flow of water is the robot trajectory that is divided into a set of points created by an algorithm called Self-organizing migrating algorithm. Simulation results are also presented to show that the obstacle avoidance and catching target task can be reached using this method. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.VSB-Technical University of Ostrava [SGS 2019/137]; Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech RepublicMinistry of Education, Youth & Sports - Czech Republic [LO1303 (MSMT-7778/2014)]; European Regional Development Fund under the Project CEBIA-Tech [CZ.1.05/2.1.00/03.0089