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In this paper we aimed to build a composite financial index for measuring the financial health of the companies listed in the AERO (Alternative exchange in Romania) market of the Bucharest Stock Exchange. We used a principal component analysis in order to build this composite financial index using the rates of return, liquidity and the management of 25 companies listed in the AERO market for the period 2011&ndash, 2018. We conceived this composite indicator as a score function that established according to the numerical values that result from its application when a company was financially healthy, when it had a poor financial health and when it was financially stable. In order to test the financial health of the selected SMEs (small and medium enterprises), we used the one sample t-test under the model of the study and the three classifications of Z (Z &lt, 0&mdash, companies with poor financial health, 0 &le, Z &le, 0.5&mdash, companies with good financial health and Z &gt, companies with very good financial health). In this study we also aimed to identify the possible correlations between the solvency rate and the financial health index and between solvency rate and the evolution of some economic and financial measures of the companies&rsquo, activities. The results of the regression analysis using panel data showed a positive and statistically significant relation between solvency and the three rates (rates of return, of liquidity and of management, respectively) determined using the analysis of the principal components. The former model of the solvency rate identified correctly 94.9% of the SMEs with poor financial health, 40% of the SMEs with stable financial health and 72.2% of the SMEs with good financial health.

Local administration is a major actor, both stakeholder and beneficiary, in the cross-border cooperation actions. However, there are very few references in the literature investigating the opinion of public managers and employees involved in implementing cross-border cooperation programs regarding the effectiveness of CBC projects. In this paper we address this issue, by reviewing the relevant literature and mostly by presenting the results of own survey-based researches conducted on field. This article captures the opinion of managers and staff regarding the transformations generated by involvement in cross-border actions in Bihor – Hajdú-Bihar Euroregion.

Robots have been gradually leaving laboratory and factory environments and moving into human populated environments. Various social robots have been developed with the ability to exhibit social behaviors and collaborate with non-expert users in different situations. In order to increase the degree of collaboration between humans and the robots in human–robot joint action systems, these robots need to achieve higher levels of interaction with humans. However, many social robots are operated under teleoperation modes or pre-programmed scenarios. Based on homeostatic drive theory, this paper presents the development of a novel collaborative behavior controller for social robots to jointly perform tasks with users in human–robot interaction (HRI) experiments. Manual work during the experiments is reduced, and the experimenters can focus more on the interaction. We propose a hybrid concept for the behavior decision-making process, which combines the hierarchical approach and parallel-rooted, ordered, slip-stack hierarchical architecture. Emotions are associated with behaviors by using the two-dimensional space model of valence and arousal. We validate the usage of the behavior controller by a joint attention HRI scenario in which the NAO robot and a therapist jointly interact with children.

Migration is a complex phenomenon with economic, social, political, cultural and human implications, and therefore, it is the locus of interest for many researchers from various fields. After 1989, migration in Romania became a social issue due to the large number of migrants searching for labour all around Europe. This paper focuses on investigating and forecasting labour migration from Romania and its geographical orientation. We analysed the gravity model, which simple and accurate, focused on the distance as a determinant of the length of the mobility and, thus, of the host country chosen by the migrant. Based on the proposed macroeconomic model, we discuss results for main destinations countries, i.e. Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, as well as for EU as a whole.

Social robots have been proven beneficial in different types of healthcare interventions. An ongoing trend is to develop (semi-)autonomous socially assistive robotic systems in healthcare context to improve the level of autonomy and reduce human workload. This paper presents a behavior control system for social robots in therapies with a focus on personalization and platform-independence. This system architecture provides the robot an ability to behave as a personable character, which behaviors are adapted to user profiles and responses during the human–robot interaction. Robot behaviors are designed at abstract levels and can be transferred to different social robot platforms. We adopt the component-based software engineering approach to implement our proposed architecture to allow for the replaceability and reusability of the developed components. We introduce three different experimental scenarios to validate the usability of our system. Results show that the system is potentially applicable to different therapies and social robots. With the component-based approach, the system can serve as a basic framework for researchers to customize and expand the system for their targeted healthcare applications.

he hereby work plans on analysing to what extent the life expectancy is subject to the influence by different markers, like: GDP, the percentage of GDP allocated for the health system, as well as the income level in Romania and Ukraine. We consider that a comparative analysis between the two countries is representative since, as it results from the data and the diagrams presented within the work, both the GDP evolution and the percentage allocated from GDP for the health system reveal a different evolution, ranging in both countries, unlike the life expectancy going through an ascending trend, slow for both cases. Partially considering the specialized literature in use, our attention was drawn towards the evolution of the income obtained by the people. More precisely, commencing from Keynes’ Basic Psychological Law stipulating that along with the income growth the expenditure on health, education and training the human resource will increase, we have chosen to econometrically test these theories for Romania and Ukraine. Therefore, we would like to research, using a simple linear regression model, whether the income growth, which represents the independent variable, obtained by the people, has a significant contribution in life expectancy (the dependent variable) increase in Romania, as well as in Ukraine.

Tourism can act as an important sector which captures both the attention of public authorities and the interest of people. It is also a main “target” for cross-border cooperation programs, aiming at fostering the role played by local and regional communities in addressing sustainable local development. This paper presents, both theoretically and by using a survey-based research conducted among public administration’s representatives and experts involved in tourism sector, across the Hungarian-Romanian border, some relevant issues concerning the interest and level of involvement of public authorities in cross-border cooperation actions conducted in tourism.

Local communities in border areas, which have been until recently separated by political borders intended to legitimate and defend the essence of the nation-state, discovered in cross-border cooperation (CBC) a facilitator of good neighborly relations, economic opportunities, or a possibility to promote innovative and high-quality public services. At a European level, cross-border cooperation, supported by the integration policies of the EU, highlighted the growing role of local authorities and communities, as stakeholders and beneficiaries alike. This paper presents the results of a survey-based research conducted among managers, experts, and staff from local public administration, across the Hungarian-Romanian border, analyzing their opinion regarding the changes to their institutions brought forth by their involvement in cross-border actions in the Bihor–Hajdu-Bihar Euroregion. It focuses on revealing aspects such as the issue of human resources in local administration, the relationship between CBC projects developed by local administration and the employees’ expectations, involvement in decision-making, and prospects and career satisfaction in (local) public administration. Research results show that the local governments’ involvement in CBC projects should not only consider the opportunities of additional financing sources or improving cross-border relations in various fields (economic, cultural, communication, health, public order, tourism), as the results also reveal specific vulnerabilities and a particular indifference of local administration staff to generous, but often less tangible, objectives of CBC projects. The research also highlights the key role of human resource quality, echoing the role of managers in the selection, retention, and efficient use of human resources, linking the projects’ objectives to individual performance and expectations of a career in public administration.

The use of robots in therapy for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) raises issues concerning the ethical and social acceptability of this technology and, more generally, about human-robot interaction. However, usually philosophical papers on the ethics of human-robot-interaction do not take into account stakeholders' views; yet it is important to involve stakeholders in order to render the research responsive to concerns within the autism and autism therapy community. To support responsible research and innovation in this field, this paper identifies a range of ethical, social and therapeutic concerns, and presents and discusses the results of an exploratory survey that investigated these issues and explored stakeholders' expectations about this kind of therapy. We conclude that although in general stakeholders approve of using robots in therapy for children with ASD, it is wise to avoid replacing therapists by robots and to develop and use robots that have what we call supervised autonomy. This is likely to create more trust among stakeholders and improve the quality of the therapy. Moreover, our research suggests that issues concerning the appearance of the robot need to be adequately dealt with by the researchers and therapists. For instance, our survey suggests that zoomorphic robots may be less problematic than robots that look too much like humans.

The use of Robot-Assisted Therapy (RAT) in healthcare interventions has increasingly received research attention. However, a lot of RAT studies are conducted under Wizard of Oz (WoZ) techniques in which the robots are teleoperated or pre-programmed. The trend of RAT is moving towards (partially) autonomous control in which the robot behavior control architecture plays a significant role in creating effective human–robot interaction by engaging and motivating human users into the therapeutic processes. This paper describes the state-of-the-art of the autonomous behavior control architectures currently developed for social robots in healthcare interventions, considering both clinical and exploratory studies. We also present certain requirements that an architecture used in RAT study should acquire, which provide roboticists and therapists an inspiration to orient their designs and implementations on the basis of their targeted RAT applications.

Many robots capable of performing social behaviors have recently been developed for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) studies. These social robots are applied in various domains such as education, entertainment, medicine, and collaboration. Besides the undisputed advantages, a major difficulty in HRI studies with social robots is that the robot platforms are typically expensive and/or not open-source. It burdens researchers to broaden experiments to a larger scale or apply study results in practice. This paper describes a method to modify My Keepon, a toy version of Keepon robot, to be a programmable platform for HRI studies, especially for robot-assisted therapies. With an Arduino microcontroller board and an open-source Microsoft Visual C# software, users are able to fully control the sounds and motions of My Keepon, and configure the robot to the needs of their research. Peripherals can be added for advanced studies (e.g., mouse, keyboard, buttons, PlayStation2 console, Emotiv neuroheadset, Kinect). Our psychological experiment results show that My Keepon modification is a useful and low-cost platform for several HRI studies.

Starting from the idea of quality in education defined as the level of satisfaction offered by the educational system, a level reached by meeting certain required standards due to the aggregated effort of the participants in the process of learning and of other interested stakeholders, the education of the 21st century will have to focus on removing the barriers to the mobility of teachers, students, researchers, and to program itself on an average and long term, rather than simply adapt itself to contexts; it will also have to use its academic freedom and autonomy as a tool for self renewal and innovation and it will face the fundamentals of modern knowledge while paying more attention to research and identity.

An ongoing trend in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is social robot. A number of platforms have been developed with an ability to exhibit social behaviors. Unlike traditional robots, human expect a social robot to behave in a natural way i.e. making the decision itself and expressing emotions. This paper presents the development and implementation of ROBEE, a novel social behavior controller for robots with a focus on HRI studies. Using the homeostatic drive theory, ROBEE selects the behaviors in order to maintain the needs, mainly psychological and social, within an acceptable range. We propose a hybrid concept for the decision making process, which combines the hierarchical approach and Parallel-rooted, Ordered, Slip-stack Hierarchical (POSH)architecture. Emotions are mapped in a two-dimensional space consisting of valence and arousal. A joint attention HRI experiment with children and NAO robot has been conducted showing the usage of the controller. ROBEE is expected to be implemented in more robotic platforms.