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The article presents researches on the use of drones in agriculture. Going away from military and espionage applications, like many other inventions of mankind, drones have finally come to peaceful applications. The inclusion of top technologies in the construction and endowment of drones has made these devices very useful in many applications, such as: industry, agriculture, health, civil engineering, environmental protection, local administrations, security and guarding, transport, etc. In the literature, various methods of using drones that will revolutionize agriculture are formulated, as follows: soil and field analysis, planting, spraying crops, crop monitoring, irrigation, crop health assessment and remote sensing. Agricultural drones ensure permanent crop monitoring from planting to harvesting. Data collected by drones is translated into useful and easy to understand information by farmers, due to specific algorithms. Highresolution images and data taken by drones that fly over farmland are collected and transmitted in cloud, or are provided to customers, who can analyze them using their own instruments or specialized software. Due to these data, the user can select the desired information and can perform different treatment maps, depending on the operation, which the farmer wishes to perform in the field. Maps can then be loaded on the agricultural equipment, which will adjust accordingly, the amount of raw materials (seeds, fertilizers, pesticides) applied in the field. The mapping tasks and the management of the activities of the crops administration treatment have been partly taken over by drones from the GPS satellite systems. The crops most closely supervised with drones are: cereals, legumes, rapeseed and sunflower, then orchards and vineyards. The drones collect information about plant status and perform analyzes of these stages. The resulting data is communicated to farmers, in order to quickly assess the situation in the field and apply appropriate treatments when is needed, in order to reduce the damage caused by diseases or pests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of computers has become very popular, the interaction between man and machine is indispensable every day. People's need and desire to communicate with machines naturally led to the evolution of natural language processing. While progress is being made in this area, it is likely that voice interaction systems will replace most portable and digital devices such as keyboards, card readers, etc. This paper presents the main paradigms for speaker recognition, being one of the most important and needed biometric feature and it also focuses on the use of these biometric technology for interactive voice response system for agriculture assistance to farmers. Agriculture has been the primary occupation of human being. Generally farmers do not have the scientific information or competence to find out the cause and solution of any situation that could appear as diseases of their animals or even crops, behavioral features etc. They could have difficulties with understanding machine language or even typing. To facilitate the farmer’s access to information regarding the solution of a specific kind of livestock or crops matter this paper proposes a concept of an interactive voice response system through their mobile phones; a model with voice response in many languages. This model will be advantageous in following conditions: for people with disabilities, people with few PC knowledge or even those who are very busy. Biometric recognition or, simply, biometrics refers to the automatic recognition of individuals based on their physiological and/or behavioral characteristics. The voice is a physiological feature (each person has a different vocal tract), but the recognition of a speaker is mainly based on the study of how it speaks, usually classified as behavioral. Speech recognition is a multi-application domain: security of any kind, telecommunication, daily activities, and now it could be used in agricultural situation. Speech Recognition summarizes a variety of issues such as recognizing isolated words, identifying speakers based on their voice tag, recognizing phonemes, etc. The utility of identifying people based on their voice is growing with the development of automation and telecommunication, and, also regarding the new-entry telephone line applications, the need to recognize the speaker has become more pressing. Speech recognition has a particularly high applicability due to the fact that this method is non-intrusive, universally accepted, with acceptable accuracy, and speech samples are easily sampled either by phone or by microphone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Open innovation is a new paradigm for the development of agribusiness in Romania and the Danube macro-region. Studies on agro-food chains and clusters are still scarce. In the Romanian agro-food sector, 7 regional and cross-regional clusters are very active. This study aims to present the state of the art on open innovation in agribusiness in Romania, identifying how it is adopted, the role of clusters and the factors that influence this process, a collaborative platform for agro-food clusters and their members and future research possibilities. Is a need for internal organizational changes, the support of communication tools and an intellectual property model that encourage knowledge sharing. The main obstacles to the implementation of the digitization process in the agro-food sector are lack of expertise, high costs or in compatibility with the field of activity. Open innovation is a field that needs to be explored in different links in the chain, clusters being facilitators of this process. The challenges of agribusiness today demand more complex and systemic innovations that can be achieved through more open processes of product development. Clusters from agro-food sector are increasingly opening their innovation processes, streamlining their research and development activities with the expectation of better results. In general, the main barrier in establishing innovation alliances refers to the inherent risk of knowledge sharing, which creates a lack of trust between partners. The study could be a good practice model for other countries from the Danube macro-region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Enterprise Europe Network (EEN) is a collaborative instrument for developing business/technological/research partnerships for entities around the world especially SME's (Small and Medium sized Enterprises). One of the key factors for business development is innovation. Innovation management can be assessed using specific methods and instruments. One of these methods is the approach developed by the ImP3ove Academy. The ImP3ove methodology is based on an on-line questionnaire which is filled out by the entity. The questionnaire contains a set of questions from different innovation management dimensions. These dimensions are: Innovation Strategy, Organization and culture, Innovation life cycle processes, Enabling factors and Innovation results. After filling the questionnaire, according to the entity's needs regarding to innovation management, a customized benchmark can be applied. Based on ImP3ove database the benchmark can be generated for industry sectors, countries and company size or age classes. Using the filled questionnaire and the benchmarking selection the on-line software based on the ImP3ove methodology can generate a report. This report contains the relevant elements of the innovation management assessment structured on the innovation management dimensions. The paper also presents the results and analysis of the innovation management assessment for various Romanian entities. The results of the innovation management assessment can contribute to the business development, increasing market visibility and increasing client confidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clusters through their structure (the "four-leaf clover" model: members of the Business and Research-Development-Innovation areas, Authorities and Catalysts) play an important role in the innovation eco-system as accelerators for innovation and competitive value chains development of value in the smart specialization priorities. The services provided to the cluster members, especially aimed at creating synergies between science and research through the collaboration between the business environment and the RDI based mainly on demand and supply, are a real support for SMEs in order to increase their competitiveness through the implementation of advanced technologies, digitization, industry 4.0, new business models, open innovation 2.0 principles and circular economy. All of this creates the premises for the creation / development of competitive industrial value chains, based on innovation. Collaboration between and within clusters, especially the interdisciplinary and intersectoral one, is one of the keys to success on the global market. The paper also analyses the role of clusters at European level in the innovation ecosystem. Good practices are highlighted in the strategic areas of cross-sectoral and cross-regional collaboration. The potential of clusters as drivers of regional innovation is highlighted and the role of clusters in developing specific policy tools (such as innovation policy, cluster policy, industrial policy, value chains) is analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a structural model of the smart farm to improve environmental protection. This model is based on a digital platform that integrates all the elements that participate directly or indirectly in decision-making into agricultural farm. An intelligent farm must manage optimally and efficiently in the spirit of sustainable agriculture and environmental protection the following components: agricultural lands, farm energy balance, inputs and outputs in accordance with the applicable regulations and environmental protection. Thus, this ensures mainly: - The optimal structure of agricultural crops and efficient rotation of these crops; - The optimized map of application of general inputs (chemical and natural fertilizers, etc.) - Optimization of the usage of the energy sources: tractor, electric power, photovoltaic energy, wind energy and other kind of renewal energy; - Optimization of the machinery (installed power, performant types, costs); - Optimization of the energy type, depending on activities, operations, etc.; - Energy efficiency through the use of combined resources; - Optimization of technologies; - Optimization of cost-benefit; - Framing into environmental norms; - Social responsibility. The informational elements and equipment are presented together with the sensors involved in development of an informational framework. Developing on a digital platform will be able to contribute to making decision and increasing the agricultural yield and environmental protection. At the same time, the platform can be a means of command and control of all components and equipment used in a farm. A special attention will be given to the next databases that can be as follows: - Traceability GIS databases: maps with the historic of cultures location, maps with the historic of agriculture yields; maps with the historic of nutrients and phytosanitary treatments distribution; - GIS databases with exploitations: yields maps; soil properties maps; maps with needed irrigations; maps and files for command and control of nutrients distribution and phytosanitary treatments using adequate equipment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Determination of soil properties is based on soil sampling with low resolution (1- 2 or more samples per hectare) and their analysis in the laboratory. This method does not provide sufficient data to highlight the significant variability of the soil properties for the analysed parcel. This leads to a uniform distribution of the nutrients that can also be synthetic chemical substances (pollutants). Since the soil properties can influence plants growth, high-resolution mapping is required by the help of some sensors mounted on systems in motion, correlated with the GPS spatial location, in order to collect data. On the other hand, it allows distribution of the nutrients locally, according to the necessary, and thus obtaining nutrients and fuel economy that has positive effects on the environment. In addition, other adverse effects are added, due to the intensive usage of heavy machinery with several crossings through the farmland, which causes degradation of the soil structure and possible increase of soil compaction. A solution to all these problems consists of combining multiple sensors into a single system simultaneously. The paper presents the combining mode of the sensors in motion, in order to determine the soil properties with implementation to a pH sensor. The soil pH is an important indicator in determining the necessary of nutrients in the soil and is in correlation with agricultural production. In this paper are also presented the architecture of a measuring module in motion with pH sensor, the command and control algorithm and the interfacing with other measuring modules for other types of sensors, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a study of the structural models convergence, rezulted from CAD (Computer Aided Design ), based on method of estimation. The study of the structural models convergence presented a method based on the convergence, in the sense of mathematical analysis, adapted to finite strings. The convergence estimators are status sizes that characterize the response of the structural model to the given load. As convergence estimators can be used sizes that characterize the response of the structure, like follows: relative displacements (translations, rotations), specific strains, equivalent stress (Von Mises), components of the displacement velocity vector, local sizes that characterize cinematic phenomena, components of the acceleration vector, local sizes which characterize dynamic phenomena: the temperature in the body, etc. For the convergence study of a problem, one can use a single mathematical model for a given structural analysis problem. The mathematical model is resolved by numerical or analytical methods, refining the meshing, respectively, increasing the number of the series terms, until it touches the convergence. More models can also be used for a problem. Each model is refines until the results, in terms of the convergence estimators, are close enough. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows the results obtained by applying a study method of the convergence of structural models, for the particular case of a structural model from the geotechnical domain. For this purpose, is used the study method of the structural models convergence, already widely used in the field of research and CAD - CAE design. For a larger relevance and utility is presented the convergence study of a structural model for a ground section to which it applies a uniform load. The problem of ground compaction is solved by using the finite element method. Is applied a study method of the convergence of the structural model in order to estimate more accurate the stress and compaction of the soil, while reducing as much as possible the computational effort. This simple example demonstrates the need for the study of convergence. Two important reasons underlying the need for this study. The first is the satisfying accuracy of the expected results. The second reason relates to the formation of the experience to choose the meshing step for users of such as programs. In essence, the two requirements can be synthetically expressed by obtaining an optimal meshing (broadly) so as to obtain the necessary results with desired precision in the shortest time possible. Through the study presented in this article, we hope to open debates on convergence structural models in geotechnical, at least as interesting as those of the CAD-CAE domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social innovation in clusters is a novelty for Romania and the paper presents a scientific method to evaluate and monitor of the social innovation performances in clusters. Clusters are drivers of entrepreneurship, innovation, economic growth and jobs. The paper intends to focus on the objectives related on the innovative capacity of clusters and of linkages that involve social relationships or networks that produce benefits for the cluster members, on the competitiveness of clusters and their potential of creating new jobs, on tools and measures to increase social innovation and on social awareness within cluster for closing the gap between the needs of cluster members and the educational/R&D output to reduce the gap between clusters from EU and Ro. From a methodological point of view, the research paper encompasses 4 components: 1) Cluster development in Romania and promotion of social innovation, 2) Elaboration of a scientific method to improve the cluster impact on innovation, economic growth and social integration, 3) Expected results using specific tools for the new method developed (social innovation audit; benchmarks; foresights; IP audit; specific questionnaires) and a large scale dissemination including: a Guide on social innovation in clusters in the near future; the creation of the Ro-EU cluster networks and a national platform for collaboration on social innovation in Romania, 4) Conclusions on cluster willingness to embrace this concept of social innovation primarily because there is a new sense of urgency in the need to find solutions to many of the clusters problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the structure of an e-learning system and applications designed and adapted to help the internet users to easy access to knowledges and courses, in order to improve the public awareness on environmental management and protection. The e-learning system has been developed using web technology and database programming in open-source software system, which allows easy updating and maintenance of the information contained. The e-learning platform includes actively and directly usable, updated information about the environment, relevant, representing an easy tool for: - Improving the public awareness for management and environmental protection; - Environmental knowledge transfer to specialized training environments, organizations with environmental impact and other stakeholders and also to the public. Based on the web platform for self-training and on-line assistance training, the target groups (environmental specialists from environmental organizations, as well as those from organization with environmental impact, higher education and the environmental education, general public, secondary and gymnasium school, etc.) will be trained in management and environmental protection. Beside of self-learning, the web platform users have unlimited access to a lot of interest aspects on environmental management and protection, like: legislation in domain, diverse types of management systems, links to the others specially sites, a discussion forum, cases studies, presentation of technologies for solving the environmental problems, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The environment is in continuous transformation because of human action and natural factors. The human society is beneficiary of the environment, which through its activity and creation can produce harmful or beneficial effects on it. This paper presents a the structure and application for a spatial database based on GIS (Geographic Information System) with environmental impact effects and phenomena, designed and adapted to help the public to easy know the effects and consequences of harmful practices in interaction with the environment. GIS database will be available online under web platform and allows online access to locations with environmental impact and problems. The structure contains layers and geographical information. The interaction and administration of the database will by assured by web interfaces. The applications will be based on analysis of a county from Romania. In terms of structural, conceptual and application level, it can be adapted to a region of any European country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]