Digital aging in romanian public libraries

In the past years, libraries have become vibrant community places where people of all ages and from all social strata access technology in order to solve personal problems and live better lives. Since 2009 the Progress Foundation works with public libraries across Romania in order to introduce Digital Storytelling (DS) as a permanent library service, to train librarians and library users in this methodology, especially senior citizens and third sector organization representatives, working with vulnerable citizens. However, DS in libraries is not a new activity. Conrad (2013) examines the way in which storytelling can contribute to the documentation of local history, while some research has been carried out already on why participants in DS workshops carried out in Romanian libraries choose to tell a certain story (Crisan and Dunford, 2014). The initial format of the DS workshop has been changed by the Romanian librarians based on the first round of implementation, the feedback from the elderly participants and by comparison with how other partners implement their DS workshops. This has led us to putting together a lessons learned document emphasizing what we have done right, and what needed change for future implementation. These lessons and the path that lead us to changes in facilitation techniques and in the quality of the stories will be the focus of our presentation.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

RekomGNN: Visualizing, Contextualizing and Evaluating Graph Neural Networks Recommendations

Content recommendation tasks increasingly use Graph Neural Networks, but it remains challenging for machine learning experts to assess the quality of their outputs. Visualization systems for GNNs that could support this interrogation are few. Moreover, those that do exist focus primarily on exposing GNN architectures for tuning and prediction tasks and do not address the challenges of recommendation tasks. We developed RekomGNN, a visual analytics system that supports ML experts in exploring GNN recommendations across several dimensions and making annotations about their quality. RekomGNN straddles the design space between Neural Network and recommender system visualization to arrive at a set of encoding and interaction choices for recommendation tasks. We found that RekomGNN helps experts make qualitative assessments of the GNN's results, which they can use for model refinement. Overall, our contributions and findings add to the growing understanding of visualizing GNNs for increasingly complex tasks

A Hybrid Heuristic for Solving the Triangulation Problem

The Triangulation Problem consists in finding a simultaneous permutation of rows and columns of a given square matrix, so that the sum of the upper-diagonal entries is maximal. The researchers study this problem intensively, as it has major applications in broad domains. A new hybrid Ant Colony Optimization algorithm is introduced. The algorithm starts with a greedy search procedure. It is followed by an improved version of the Ant Colony System mixed with a problem-specific local search.<br /><br /&gt

Romania TSP instance with GPS coordinates and GEOM norm

Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) instance with GPS coordinates of 2950 real settlements from Romania

On the Resilience of an Ant-based System in Fuzzy Environments. An Empirical Study

The current work describes an empirical study conducted in order to investigate the behavior of an optimization method in a fuzzy environment. MAX-MIN Ant System, an efficient implementation of a heuristic method is used for solving an optimization problem derived from the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). Several publicly-available symmetric TSP instances and their fuzzy variants are tested in order to extract some general features. The entry data was adapted by introducing a two-dimensional systematic degree of fuzziness, proportional with the number of nodes, the dimension of the instance and also with the distances between nodes, the scale of the instance. The results show that our proposed method can handle the data uncertainty, showing good resilience and adaptability.Comment: This paper has been withdrawn by the author due to copyright

Low-Cost Internet-of-Things Water-Quality Monitoring System for Rural Areas

Water is a vital source for life and natural environments. This is the reason why water sources should be constantly monitored in order to detect any pollutants that might jeopardize the quality of water. This paper presents a low-cost internet-of-things system that is capable of measuring and reporting the quality of different water sources. It comprises the following components: Arduino UNO board, Bluetooth module BT04, temperature sensor DS18B20, pH sensor—SEN0161, TDS sensor—SEN0244, turbidity sensor—SKU SEN0189. The system will be controlled and managed from a mobile application, which will monitor the actual status of water sources. We propose to monitor and evaluate the quality of water from five different water sources in a rural settlement. The results show that most of the water sources we have monitored are proper for consumption, with a single exception where the TDS values are not within proper limits, as they outperform the maximum accepted value of 500 ppm

The influence of far-red light on attributes of green bell pepper fruits (Capsicum annuum l.) during storage

Green bell peppers fruits, stored for 1 month at 8oC and 455% relative humidity in Far-Red light (FRL) and darkness respectively, were investigated in terms of physical, chemical and microbiological parameters. The exposure to FRL slows down the water loss from fruits by stimulating the surface wax biosynthesis into a higher specific amount and hydrophobic nature and reducing the apertures, diameters of the pericarp cells, intercellular walls and dermal layer thicknesses. The higher level of catalase enzyme in the FRL-exposed fruits resulted in lower chilling injury index in comparison with the one in fruits exposed to darkness. FRL has favorable effect on chlorophyll and carotenoids accumulation rates. The multiplication of yeasts and molds on the surface of FRL-exposed bell peppers was significantly delayed as compared to the multiplication on the surface of the darkness-exposed bell peppers