DSpace-CRIS 7

Participation in the multicultural conference of TECIS 2019 in Sozopol, Bulgaria, brought to the forefront of the participants' discussions a topic at the same time important and paradoxical for the 21st century: the marginalization of women in the fields of STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics). To discuss the topic, an ad hoc TECIS Inclusion and Diversity Working Group was set up, with 23 researchers from over 10 countries. The details provided by the participants regarding the situation in the country of origin have entrusted the researchers that this phenomenon is a versatile and extremely complex one. And yet, the difficulties encountered by women represented a common denominator; that is why the identification of the causes that led to the perpetuation of such traditionalist conditions in fields of accelerated modernization of society became a priority. In order to achieve the main objective of the Working Group, which is to work on building community and peer support, the first necessary and important step is to understand the current status of STEM in each country. To complete this stage, in this paper, we will perform a secondary analysis of the available statistical data for Romania to identify Romanian cultural specific in the field of participation of women in STEM education and STEM labor force. Further, we will develop a series of hypotheses that will underpin future studies.

Critical Infrastructure Protection represents a comprehensive conceptual framework for the management of risks, vulnerabilities and threats arising from interconnected socio-technical systems termed infrastructures. Their criticality stems from the impact which disruption or destruction would have on a society or a region, whether through human and material losses, or of prestige and trust. Cyber has become an important factor in CIP, a crosscutting issue whose ascent has resulted in significant changes. This article argues that the penetration of cyber into almost every facet of human activity has resulted in fundamental structural changes, describes those changes in a systematized manner and theorizes what may happen to security governance under the new status quo.

A factorization of a string w is a partition of w into substrings u1,…,uk such that w=u1u2⋯uk . Such a partition is called equality-free if no two factors are equal: ui≠uj,∀i,j with i≠j . The maximum equality-free factorization problem is to decide, for a given string w and integer k, whether w admits an equality-free factorization with k factors. Equality-free factorizations have lately received attention because of their application in DNA self-assembly. Condon et al. (CPM 2012) study a version of the problem and show that it is NP -complete to decide if there exists an equality-free factorization with an upper bound on the length of the factors. At STACS 2015, Fernau et al. show that the maximum equality-free factorization problem with a lower bound on the number of factors is NP -complete. Shortly after, Schmid (CiE 2015) presents results concerning the Fixed Parameter Tractability of the problems. In this paper we approach equality free factorizations from a practical point of view i.e. we wish to obtain good solutions on given instances. To this end, we provide approximation algorithms, heuristics, Integer Programming models, an improved FPT algorithm and we also conduct experiments to analyze the performance of our proposed algorithms. Additionally, we study a relaxed version of the problem where gaps are allowed between factors and we design a constant factor approximation algorithm for this case. Surprisingly, after extensive experiments we conjecture that the relaxed problem has the same optimum as the original.

ALPR based applications are more and more used today. Besides the OCR part, the vehicle registration plate detection in real world images represents the main challenge in LPR. This paper presents a simple, yet quite general, fast and effective method for license plate (LP) segmentation. It is based on the evaluation of a local contrast (high gradient) measure at the level of image blocks, binarization of the downscaled contrast map obtained with these values, and analysis of connectivity between its runs, requiring modest CPU and memory resources. It provides as output not only the locations of detected LPs, but also associated bitmaps, black on white, containing only their constituent alphanumeric characters, aligned horizontally, with no slope, slant or tilt, and free of other parasitic noise. Such black on white bitmaps are directly suitable for further OCR, the correctness and completeness of final LPR strongly depending on the quality of the bitmap provided. Extended experiments carried out on own image set, as well as on other (public) data sets, showed good performance and results of the implemented method in the vast majority of situations, even on certain difficult, poor quality images. Comparison with state-of-the-art (based on deep neural networks, and high-end GPU parallel computing), also proved average good performance on public data sets complying with the minimal requirements of our method.