Contributions of Florin Gheorghe Filip in Information Science and Technology

Romanian scientist Florin Gheorghe Filip was born in 1947 and this year he turns 70. F.G. Filip is an engineer and Ph.D. in control engineering and computer science. Still very young, he became corresponding member of the Romanian Academy in 1991 (when he was only 44 years old), and, at 52 years old (1999), become full member in the highest learned society of Romania. From 1970 to 2000, he worked at the National R&D Institute in Informatics Bucharest (ICI). For 10 years, during 2000-2010, he was Vice President of the Romanian Academy. In 2010, he was elected President of the "Information Science and Technology" section of Romanian Academy. At present, he is the director of the Romanian Academy Library. His fields of scientific interest have been: decision support systems (DSS), large-scale systems control and optimization, technology management and foresight and IT application to cultural domain . He has authored/co-authored over 300 technical papers, 13 monographs, and edited/co-edited 24 contributed volumes

Obituary

On 6th February, Professor Ioan Dzitac passed away. &nbsp

Workflow Automation in a Risk Management Framework for Pavement Maintenance Projects

This paper presents a Workflow Management System (WfMS) for procurement process automation in road pavement maintenance and management. It fits information infrastructure for monitoring and maintenance of pavements and roads. Through the two roles of administrator and major users (builder and subcontractors), the solution models the entire process. This way, risks of exceeding allocated budget, time consuming tasks, overcoming deadline, and time consuming quality control, as main issues in risk management, are reduced and controlled

SmartSteg: A New Android Based Steganography Application

With the development of mobile devices the security issue migrates from the PC platform to this new technology. Securing confidential information on the mobile platforms has been, is and will be a topical issue for the specialists. In this paper we propose a new solution in order to provide security of digital data that is transferred through today’s available platforms for communication. We developed SmartSteg application that works on Android platform and it is able to hide and fast encrypt files using digital images of MB dimension as cover. LSB steganography is combined with a random function and symmetric key cryptography to transfer digital information, in a secure manner between smartphones that run under Android

Fuzzy Logic Is Not Fuzzy: World-renowned Computer Scientist Lotfi A. Zadeh

In 1965 Lotfi A. Zadeh published "Fuzzy Sets", his pioneering and controversial paper, that now reaches almost 100,000 citations. All Zadeh’s papers were cited over 185,000 times. Starting from the ideas presented in that paper, Zadeh founded later the Fuzzy Logic theory, that proved to have useful applications, from consumer to industrial intelligent products. We are presenting general aspects of Zadeh’s contributions to the development of Soft Computing(SC) and Artificial Intelligence(AI), and also his important and early influence in the world and in Romania. Several early contributions in fuzzy sets theory were published by Romanian scientists, such as: Grigore C. Moisil (1968), Constantin V. Negoita & Dan A. Ralescu (1974), Dan Butnariu (1978). In this review we refer the papers published in "From Natural Language to Soft Computing: New Paradigms in Artificial Intelligence" (2008, Eds.: L.A. Zadeh, D. Tufis, F.G. Filip, I. Dzitac), and also from the two special issues (SI) of the International Journal of Computers Communications & Control (IJCCC, founded in 2006 by I. Dzitac, F.G. Filip & M.J. Manolescu; L.A. Zadeh joined in 2008 to editorial board). In these two SI, dedicated to the 90th birthday of Lotfi A. Zadeh (2011), and to the 50th anniversary of "Fuzzy Sets" (2015), were published some papers authored by scientists from Algeria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, Hungary, Greece, Germany, Japan, Lithuania, Mexico, Pakistan, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Spain, Taiwan, UK and USA

Bounded Rationality Through the Filter of the Lisbon Objectives

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have created best conditions for grows of knowledge societies. An emerging global information society serves to building global knowledge societies as source for further development. Conventional paradigms of sciences starts to be more blemish and prone to redefinition of there foundations, understood as scientific knowledge. The perspective of knowledge and ideals of rationality are both heavily influenced by a new contemporary scientific thinking, through tools, inherent of autonomy and uncertainty. A new understanding of the world in terms of open dynamic heterogeneous uncertain systems is needed. Among the conclusions: classical rational reasoning is mainly aiming at effectiveness, not at uncertain knowledge processing, because of its temporality (mainly its ineffectiveness in dealing with future events); a bounded-rationality approach enables both, better economic models and better modelling, being based on trends in economic modelling as well as on agent-oriented software engineering

Memetic Engineering for Permanent Education in Line with Sustainable Growth

Given the recent point of view of the European Commission regarding the implementation of a new strategy for sustainable growth and jobs, this paper emphasises the opportunity and urgency of supporting the EU 2020 strategy, providing an appropriate educational tool for the knowledge society. The main objectives are: a. adapting memetic engineering expressed in terms of General System Theory to the teaching component of permanent education based on bounded rationality and "Just in Time"as key tools for fighting cognitive chaoplexity in the post-industrial era; b. facilitating the use of memetic engineering based on its double-faceted nature: as both positive and negative feedback; c. extending the applicability of memetic engineering to ecology as source of memes; d. exemplifying the above in primitive metamodels applying memetic engineering in ecology and highlighting the relevant design-space dimensions. Among the conclusions: a. to be sustainable in the long run permanent education must be modelled in line with learner bounded rationality, since bounded rationality is a psychological lasting feature; b. sustainable development depends on affordable permanent education; c. as a result, e-teaching should be systematically revisited through intense transdisciplinary research.