Virtual Mentorship as an Advanced Method of Knowledge and Experience Sharing and Network Building

Access to advanced ideas, specific information, advanced expertise, accumulated experience and applicable knowledge are key competitive determinants of those that want to prosper in knowledge based society. In other words human capital is principal competitive advantage of knowledge based economies. Trends in today’s world are making us rethink the methods of delivering knowledge. In order to answer to those trends and as a proactive effort to foster their global competitiveness top students from two most influenced graduate schools (Faculty of Economics and Business and Faculty Electrical Engineering and Computing both within University of Zagreb) in Croatia gathered within eSTUDENT initiative and they have started project “Virtual Mentorship”. Its primary goal is to initialize and organize cooperation between senior undergraduate students from Croatian universities and acknowledged members of academic society and business world who live abroad but do have originated from Croatia. Purpose of the project is to establish mentor-protégé relationship between these two parties that will enable students to learn and improve their knowledge as well as gain new skills through quality virtual communication with respectable scientists and professionals. This project has a great potential and significance for development of Croatian system of education as well as for improvement of Croatian labor competitiveness in general. Its significance lies primarily on impacts that Virtual Mentorship has on educational system.mentorship, virtual, knowledge sharing, networking, distance learning

Navigating Corporate Responsibility: Unveiling the \u27Purpose\u27 as the Fourth P in Elkington\u27s 3Ps Model

In today\u27s business world, there is a growing recognition of the need for companies to be conscious of their social and environmental impact, aligning with the European Union\u27s goal of becoming a zero-impact continent by 2050. Businesses are now seen as key players in this transformation, moving away from traditional economic models. The contemporary framework underscores ignoring societal and environmental impacts is no longer viable. In this transformative era, a notable paradigm shift is evident as businesses shift from solely maximizing profits to optimizing them, balancing financial success with societal and environmental benefits. This change marks a departure from the traditional focus on just the bottom line, highlighting the dual role of companies as both profit-oriented and key drivers of positive societal change. This paradigm underscores a symbiotic relationship between profitability and positive societal impact, echoing the EU\u27s sustainable and responsible business paradigm vision. This narrative posits the EU as a trailblazer, spearheading a collective effort to harness the transformative potential of the business sector in realizing a zero-impact future by 2050. The paper aims to expand Elkington\u27s 3Ps model (People, Planet, Profit) and stakeholder theory by introducing \u27Purpose\u27 as a crucial fourth dimension, emphasizing the importance of a company\u27s underlying motives and values in shaping sustainable and responsible business practices. This paper reveals that integrating \u27Puropse\u27 into business models aligns with contemporary environmental and social governance standards and significantly enhances stakeholder engagement, fostering a more resilient corporate ecosystem

Procjena kvalitete strojnog prijevoda govora: studija slučaja aplikacije ILA

Machine translation (MT) is becoming qualitatively more successful and quantitatively more productive at an unprecedented pace. It is becoming a widespread solution to the challenges of a constantly rising demand for quick and affordable translations of both text and speech, causing disruption and adjustments of the translation practice and profession, but at the same time making multilingual communication easier than ever before. This paper focuses on the speech-to-speech (S2S) translation app Instant Language Assistant (ILA), which brings together the state-of-the-art translation technology: automatic speech recognition, machine translation and text-to-speech synthesis, and allows for MT-mediated multilingual communication. The aim of the paper is to assess the quality of translations of conversational language produced by the S2S translation app ILA for en-de and en-hr language pairs. The research includes several levels of translation quality analysis: human translation quality assessment by translation experts using the Fluency/Adequacy Metrics, light-post editing, and automated MT evaluation (BLEU). Moreover, the translation output is assessed with respect to language pairs to get an insight into whether they affect the MT output quality and how. The results show a relatively high quality of translations produced by the S2S translation app ILA across all assessment models and a correlation between human and automated assessment results.Strojno je prevođenje sve kvalitetnije i sve je više prisutno u svakodnevnom životu. Zbog porasta potražnje za brzim i pristupačnim prijevodima teksta i govora, strojno se prevođenje nameće kao općeprihvaćeno rješenje, što dovodi do korjenitih promjena i prilagodbi u prevoditeljskoj struci i praksi te istodobno višejezičnu komunikaciju čini lakšom nego ikada do sada. Ovaj se rad bavi aplikacijom Instant Language Assistant (ILA) za strojni prijevod govora. ILA omogućuje višejezičnu komunikaciju posredovanu strojnim prevođenjem, a temelji se na najnovijim tehnološkim dostignućima, i to na automatskom prepoznavanju govora, strojnom prevođenju i sintezi teksta u govor. Cilj je rada procijeniti kvalitetu prijevoda razgovornog jezika dobivenog pomoću aplikacije ILA i to za parove jezika engleski – njemački te engleski – hrvatski. Kvaliteta prijevoda analizira se u nekoliko faza: kvalitetu prijevoda procjenjuju stručnjaci pomoću metode procjene tečnosti i točnosti (engl. Fluency/Adequacy Metrics), zatim se provodi ograničena redaktura strojno prevedenih govora (engl. light post-editing), nakon čega slijedi automatsko vrednovanje strojnog prijevoda (BLEU). Strojno prevedeni govor procjenjuje se i uzevši u obzir o kojem je jezičnom paru riječ kako bi se dobio uvid u to utječu li jezični parovi na strojni prijevod i na koji način. Rezultati pokazuju da su prijevodi dobiveni pomoću aplikacije ILA za strojni prijevod govora procijenjeni kao razmjerno visokokvalitetni bez obzira na metodu procjene, kao i da se ljudske procjene kvalitete prijevoda poklapaju sa strojnima

Gender and affiliation differences in topic selection in U.S. congressional speeches

The aim of this paper was to study gender differences in topic choice selection using the corpus of speeches given in the 113th United States Congress. We also looked at whether there are topic choice selection differences with respect to party affiliation and chamber, and finally, whether conversational topics chosen by male and female politicians correlate with any other category we measured in our corpus. The corpus was composed of 672 speeches by the female and 2,983 speeches by the male politicians. The speech transcripts were downloaded from the official repository Thomas and analyzed using the text analysis software Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to identify the use of vocabulary related to seven conversational topics recorded by LIWC. The data was analyzed both quantitatively, using statistical analysis, and qualitatively, to determine if there are significant gender differences in speech topic selection. The analyses showed that there are overall gender and affiliation differences in topic selection by the male and female politicians in the 113th Congress, some confirming the trend of long-standing prevalence of home-related references in women’s speeches, and death and religion references in men’s speeches, others marking a social shift for some of the categories compared to previous studies on the topic, such as the increasing share of references to work, money achievement in women’s speeches, as well as women’s preference for security, and men’s preference for competitiveness, as signaled by their lexical choices. Further correlation test results recorded subtler differences which pointed to linguistic changes in stereotypization, such as women signaling less emotion and choosing more formal ways of expression