Gheorghe Sabau

Collaborative Network for the Development of an Informational System in the SOA Context for the University Management

Each university is mainly interested in improving higher education and this holds true both at national and international level. At first sight the activities within a university may seem simple, but in reality they are very complex and dynamic, including a wide range of domains and problems. We have to deal with virtual university campuses, virtual professional communities, virtual collaborative laboratories, virtual libraries, dynamic supply networks, e-learning platforms for students, research, planning and controlling, human resources, etc. With a view to improving U-governance we concentrated on creating a collaborative networking based on academic partnership aimed at conceiving an integrated informational system to be implemented and generalized. The informational system is going to be developed in the SOA context.

A Negotiation Approach for Inter-organizational Alliances

This paper presents a software infrastructure developed for supporting negotiation activities in concurrent inter-organizational alliances. The IT system offers a collaboration framework which fully preserves the autonomy of organizations grouped in an alliance, while enabling concurrency of their activities, flexibility of their negotiations and dynamic evolution of their environment. The purpose of this work is to provide a negotiation support to the managers of the organizations belonging to such alliances, which combines middleware-level coordination facilities and multi-agent systems support. This approach is illustrated by a sample scenario where partners are print shops grouped in an alliance to better accomplish customers’ requests.

Success Factors for Higher Education ERPs

In this paper we have identified some critical implementation factors of an ERP project implementation in universities. Taking into consideration that for industry implementations there are already many performed studies we started by considering university implementations as a particular case for the industry ones. The purpose of our research is to make a list of the main success factors in implementing an ERP in the academic environment.

Elements that Advocate the Nurturing of Digital Fluency

The article extends the research of the authors in the field of digital fluency and presents new experimental results obtained while testing tools that have been developed for increasing the digital fluency of young students. It starts from the findings presented in a previous article and brings data that advocates the correlation between the level of digital fluency and the capacity of students to use common software tools. The conclusions of the article can be useful for all of those who are involved into building young minds for the Knowledge Age.

SOA--A Performant Paradigm of Developing Integrated Informatics Systems

It is a fact that the field of informatics is extremely dynamic. Producers and users of software products are looking solutions to the multitude of problems they are confronted with. The focus is on finding cheap, flexible interoperating and reusable for informatic solutions which should meet the requirements of software users and which may be implemented not only by big companies but also by small and middle-size companies. Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) could be such a solution. SOA refers to a set of services, in the field of Internet and Intranet, called “Web Services”. Being used to Internet services companies have also unanimously accepted a series of standards which support Web services and consequently their interest in using SOA has increased significantly. In this way a SOA can be a new alternative to the traditional integration technologies which are rigid, complex and very expensive.

Recognizing Face Features Using Points of Active Contour, PHP Image Processing and GD Grafic Extension

Face recognition is one of the most spectacular and difficult biometric recognition methods because of the influence of the external factors like: distance, illumination, changes of person’s appearances, glasses and other factors [2]. The active contour method [4] can be used to determine face features in a picture with following amendments: the image is filtered with PHP- image processing and GD graphic extension [5], the energies calculated in active contour algorithm are adapted so the continuous energy is approximated with the distance between two consecutive points, the curvature energy is normalized using the same distance and the vicinity of each point are calculated until an edge is detected and that point will not “move” anywhere. Another condition imposed by our algorithm is that points are forced to avoid moving along the horizontal and vertical axis and the result is a much faster movement. Detection of the face features can continue inside of the area detected as the face contour. Farther research direction will be oriented to approximate the shapes detected [3] with the active contour algorithm using functions so that the bitmap image [1] is transformed in a vector image facilitating the process of recognition.