Methodology of Teaching and Learning for Micro-and Nano-Electronics During the COVID-19 Pandemic Using Online Educational Tools

Worldwide students are having their education disrupted by the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. Due to this, numerous contact courses have recently been moved to the online format in academic reforms. Microelectronics, Nanoelectronics, Nano-Electro-Mechanical Systems (NEMS) and Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS), in general, become challenging to educate and learn for both lecturers and students, respectively in this pandemic scenario. The epidemic has also offered a stimulus to increase the use of educational tools. The primary goal is to use Project-Based Learning (PBL) to explore conceptual online tools and generate attention in the field of MEMS and NEMS. This research describes a teaching style that combines PBL with NEMS and MEMS online courses for undergraduate students. This research work delves into the principles and ideas of Micro- and Nano-electronic models. Teaching styles develop understanding, skills, and values relative to the subject. The basics of MOSFETs, cantilever beams, biosensors, comb drive, piezoelectric devices, etc. are also examined clearly through assignments. The online platform is designed to develop creative concepts and model devices for future applications. Using the PBL technique, this research work fosters both academics and students' self-learning, resulting in more sophisticated studies on subjects such as NEMS, MEMS, and Bio-MEMS. This work displays its text description as well as numerical simulations. In a controlled experiment, two sets of pre- and post-evaluation analyses have been conducted to look at the impact of PBL utilizing numerical simulation tools on fundamental theory learning. The analytical assessment demonstrates that combining numerical simulation with PBL results in more efficient understanding of fundamental MEMS and NEMS ideas. It will be a potential teaching modality for the development of online courses in this area. © 2022 IEEE.

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Online Learning for Undergraduate and Graduate Studies of Electrical Engineering

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, lectures and exercises at the Department of Electrical Engineering of the Zagreb University of Applied Sciences were switched from face-to-face (F2F) to synchronous online. This seemingly emergency measure has been going on for four semesters and has brought many challenges but also provided an opportunity to evaluate the present state and define guidelines for further steps. The paper develops criteria for the effectiveness of education in terms of quality and tempo of acquired knowledge. The obtained values of the defined criteria for online education were analyzed and compared with the results for F2F mode of education. In addition, efficiency of learning was examined via defined key performance indicators. Finally, a proposal for the preparation of targeted presentation methods and types of educational content is given in order to achieve greater student motivation and better exam results. © 2022 Croatian Society MIPRO.

The Development and Implementation of a Microgrid SCADA System Simulator

Shifting the paradigm to decarbonized, distributed renewable future implies changes to conventional principles of power systems operation and requires the implementation of smart grid concepts. Microgrids have been widely recognized as a decentralized approach to successfully integrating renewable energy sources and end consumer empowerment. However, their implementation requires significant improvements and transformation of the distribution system in terms of increased observability and controllability, especially in the context of (near) real-time operation. Supervisory, Control, and Data Acquisition Systems (SCADA) enable system and infrastructure automated monitoring and control and serve as a foundation for advanced management and application of optimization-driven operation. Moreover, the development and testing of the functions mentioned above is a complex task, and today there is still a lack of holistic simulation tools, even though well-established power system simulators exist. The main objective of this paper is to introduce a novel simulation tool developed to simulate the SCADA system used in the Smart Grid Laboratory of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing for control, integration, and interactions between a microgrid's components. This paper includes simulator system architecture design, implemented functionalities, and future directions. Simulator testing shows successful communication, measurement generation, and meaningful response to commands and reference signals, proving correct functionality. Besides significant value in testing SCADA functionality, designing such a simulator has been of great benefit during restricted access to real-world devices in the Smart Grid Laboratory during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. © 2022 Croatian Society MIPRO.

IT Education in Clouds and Clouds in IT Education

The rapid development of information and communication technology (ICT) and growing participation of students in work life has already in several decades moved ICT education into 'clouds', using sources of knowledge on Internet from all around the world. The COVID pandemic has increased this process, forcing universities to restrict classroom teaching and rapidly increased student's self-study.At the same time, increase of amounts of data to be processed is constantly introducing new high-level software technologies, layers and layers of packages and libraries, deeper and more complex. This has created a new 'top-down' programming style: a new project is started with importing mass of libraries which have been used in earlier projects and only then is considered how to use them in order to solve the programming task. The self-studying ICT students see only tips of modern software icebergs and it is difficult for them to understand their working without face-to-face classroom communication where details of the 'depths' are explained. © 2022 Croatian Society MIPRO.

Advanced Medical Images Recognition and Diagnosis of Respiratory System Viruses

Detection of respiratory viruses is a perplexing task which regularly requires saving time by taking a quick look at clinical images of patients ceaselessly. Hence, there's a need to propose and develop a model to predict the respiratory viruses (COVID-19) cases at the earliest possible to control the spread of disease. Deep learning makes it possible to find out that Covid-19 can be detected in an efficient way using its classification tools such as CNN (Convolutional Neural Network). MFCC (Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients) is a very common and efficient technique for signal processing. In this research, a MFCC - CNN learning model to hasten the prediction process is proposed that assist the medical professionals. MFCC is used for extracting the image's features concerning existence of COVID-19 or not. Classification is performed by using convolutional neural network. This makes the time-consuming process easier and faster with more accurate results for radiologists and this reduces the spread of virus and save lives. Experimental results shows that using CT image converted to Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient spectrogram images as input to a CNN can achieve a high accuracy results;with classification of validation data scoring an accuracy of 99.08% correct classification of COVID and NON COVID labeled images. Hence, it can be used practically for detection of COVID-19 from CT images. The work here provides a proof of concept that high accuracy can be achieved with a moderate dataset, which can have a significant impact in this area. © 2022 Croatian Society MIPRO.

Challenges to Increasing Diversity in Engineering Education During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Specific Problems Encountered by Students From Underrepresented Groups

The upheaval caused by the global Covid-19 pandemic has been an unavoidable driver of rapid digitalization in engineering education. The goal of this preliminary study was to test a prototype survey to identify and evaluate problems encountered by engineering students during the pandemic. A special focus was placed on students from historically underrepresented groups, first generation students, those with a migration background, students with disabilities and students with children. An online survey of students was conducted during the pandemic. Questions were posed regarding their experiences with distance learning, language difficulties, social, financial, psychological and child-care problems during the pandemic. Initial results identified problems common to all students as well as problems specific to certain students from historically underrepresented groups. © 2022 Croatian Society MIPRO.

Digital Competences of Music Culture Teachers during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (DigCompEdu) is a framework describing what it means for educators to be digitally competent. This framework was the starting point for the research carried out in this paper regarding digital competences of Music Culture teachers of two Croatian counties, and special emphasis was put on the COVID-19 pandemic. The research results showed Music Culture teachers' usage of the digital tools during COVID-19 pandemic and their familiarity with specialized digital tools such as Finale, Sibelius, Encore etc. According to the research results, almost half (47.6%) of Music Culture teachers included in the research used some of digital tools in every lecture. The majority of Music Culture teachers strongly advocated OERs - Open Educational Resources for Music Culture education, which they could easily adjust to and use in the teaching process. Also, the majority of Music Culture teachers were aware of the ongoing need for lifelong learning and professional training, especially regarding specialized digital tools for teaching Music Culture and the development of their digital learning strategies in a virtual or traditional environment. © 2022 Croatian Society MIPRO.

Training of Innovative Education Methods of the University Teachers in the Field of Economics

The COVID-19 pandemic forced teachers to suddenly stay at home and adapt to a change in our educational style. The form of education forced by the pandemic still persists at Slovak universities. Now, our students learn online only for two years already, without any personal contact with their teachers or classmates. This situation revealed our unpreparedness, both technological and also pedagogical. During the last years, we have continuously eliminated technological problems, but unfortunately, the pedagogical shortcomings still persist. The paper presents the project "Holistic Education and Training of University Teachers in the Field of Economics", which main goal is to create and evaluate an educational platform for teachers with a focus on the crucial knowledge and skills of teachers, important for transition into student-centered education not only in the field of economics. Outcomes of the project help teachers to master new pedagogical approaches, methods that are supportive of education innovation that leads into understanding how to encourage key competencies of our students. In this contribution, we identified the challenges that we face in connection of undergoing reforms in order to reflect changes in the human society and present the mentioned project that supports the teachers to do their job better. © 2022 Croatian Society MIPRO.

Discovery and use of electronic information resources by higher education students during the COVID19 pandemic

Discovery (locating) and use of information resources in academic community (in general) are two essential activities supporting teaching and research. Recent generations of university students are commonly focused on e-resources which offer them easy access to up-to-date data and information in various research areas. However, not all e-resources are of the same quality or easily usable in the higher education environment and therefore research user studies should be caried out to get insight into perception of students about discovery and use of e-resources. The research study of students carried out at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia in December 2021 showed frequent use of selected types of scientific and professional e-resources. E-resources are accessed mostly by mobile devices suggesting their ability of use of e-resources at different locations. The problem arose with trust in librarians when locating e-resources, however, librarians were chosen for recommending e-resources. In this research study, students identified most important advantages of e-resources that server as selection criteria for e-resources for studying. The findings confirmed students' high confidence in value of e-resources for studying. Finally, the findings confirmed that the COVID19 pandemic influenced students to use e-resources more frequently than before. © 2022 Croatian Society MIPRO.

Improving city infrastructure resilience capacity: resilience management guidelines in mobile network

In Republic of Croatia ways of rescue and protection of citizens, materials, and other goods in catastrophes such as earthquakes, flooding or ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease are regulated by Law on Protection and Rescue. Some of the most important parts are ways of controlling, handling, and coordinating tasks, constitutions of bodies for administration and ways of alarming and informing in activities of protection and rescue. Water supply network is very important part of the city infrastructure. Hence, it is necessary to ensure high-quality and reliable water supply network management process. In our previous research network model and relevant real-time data are integrated into the complete system that will cover all city infrastructure, acting as infrastructure data interchange portal usable especially in the case of disasters. All citizens are communicated with this platform through different user roles or services using telecommunications infrastructure. Main goal of research in this paper is to improve ways of controlling, coordinating tasks and informing citizens. Platform is used to collect whole relevant data from different sources such as water supply network operating center, electricity network operating center, gas transmission network operating center, telecommunication network operating center, citizens, 112 service and so on in emergency. Different behavioral scenarios have been implemented in the platform. According to the collected relevant data, the platform activates a certain scenario that best suits the current situation. According to the scenario, the platform automatically generates tasks to relevant people via a mobile application. In addition, other citizens receive information about acting through social networks notifications. © 2022 Croatian Society MIPRO.

Face Mask Detection using MediaPipe Facemesh

Recently, face masks have received increasing attention due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as their correct use can reduce and prevent the spread of outbreaks. Thus, several research studies focused on developing new strategies for identifying if individuals are wearing a face mask before they can be admitted into public spaces, buildings, and transportation systems. In this paper, we present an alternative approach to face mask detection pipeline for automatically detecting whether an individual is equipped with a face mask. Our proposed solution utilizes MediaPipe, a popular image segmentation and object detection machine learning model designed especially for cross-platform operation, with specific regard to mobile devices. We present the architecture of our pipeline, detail its operation, and report the results of an evaluation study in which we analyzed the performance of our model in real-world scenarios. © 2022 Croatian Society MIPRO.

Using Project-Based Learning in the Course "Databases" on the Topic "Relational Algebra"

The paper presents the results of the application of the project-based learning approach during the last academic year (2020-2021), in the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, in the course "Databases", when teaching and studying the topic "Relational Algebra". During the project-based learning, students-bachelors from the specialty "Internet and Mobile Communications"at the University of Ruse "Angel Kanchev"had to use various computer-based tools, such as MS Excel, MATLAB, LearningApps, etc., to present the basic operations in relational algebra. An analysis of students' opinions about the approach used for their training in the course "Databases"is given in the paper. © 2022 Croatian Society MIPRO.

Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Adherence to Exercise Prescription: The case of Cardiac Rehabilitation Programs

Cardiac Rehabilitation Programs (CRPs) are an important tool of secondary prevention and their implementation within health services, despite the uneven geographical distribution, has been receiving attention from decision-makers in recent years. Adherence to the CRPs is one of the great challenges faced by the multidisciplinary team, and there are several strategies to maintain adherence, particularly in CRP-Phase III, which occurs outside the hospital environment. One of the strategies followed is the use of remote performance monitoring and recording of possible alert symptoms. With the pandemic due to COVID-19, these challenges have become even more evident as Phase II programs have been suspended, thus increasing the importance of the home-based CRPs. In this work, the results of a study aiming to understand the impact of the pandemic on adherence to the prescription of exercise and the perception of patients regarding the effects of physical activity on health conditions are shown. The results indicate that the pandemic did not have a major effect on the adherence to home-based exercises, in particular, in patients undergoing programs using a telemonitoring system. Moreover, the perception of the importance of physical activity for health and well-being was reinforced in the context of the pandemic. © 2022 Croatian Society MIPRO.

Digital transformation - New Approaches and Challenges in Education

In early 2020, the world faced a pandemic of the COVID-19 disease that suddenly changed the way we learn, live and work. It was necessary to ensure the continuity of teaching and learning literally overnight. The university management, teachers and academic staff, students and all administrative services had to adapt to the new situation.Although the impact of the pandemic on higher education institutions was stressful and in most cases there was no contingency plan, higher education systems ensured continuity of the educational process. The system required the reorganization of teaching and learning, significant teacher involvement and additional time, advanced organization and continuous training of teachers.The lessons learned so far should serve as a guide for the future development of education as a whole and through the analysis and application of good solutions to put in the forefront a recovery program and increase investment in education. At the same time, digital transformation is becoming one of the strategic goals of the development strategy of most universities. Paper will present what necessary steps should be taken to achieve digital transformation in education, why continuous teacher training is important and what are the trends and further steps of development. © 2022 Croatian Society MIPRO.

Prediction of COVID-19 tweeting: classification based on graph neural networks

This paper presents the application of graph neural networks (GNNs) to the task of node classification. GNNs have been shown to be useful in various classification tasks where data and the relationships between them can be represented using graphs. This research aims to develop a classifier that can identify two possible classes of Twitter nodes: COVID and nonCOVID. COVID nodes refer to Twitter users (nodes) that post tweets related to COVID-19 and nonCOVID are users (nodes) that do not post tweets about COVID-19. For that purpose, in the first step, we implement a pipeline that enables the automatic, continuous collection of data from Twitter and network construction. In the second step, we prepare the data and train a graph convolutional networks(GCN) classifier. We compare GCN and multilayer perceptron (MLP) in terms of standard measures: precision, recall, F1 and accuracy. The results show that GCN performs better than MLP in the task of node classification. © 2022 Croatian Society MIPRO.

COVID-19 Fake News Detection by Using BERT and RoBERTa models

We live in a world where COVID-19 news is an everyday occurrence with which we interact. We are receiving that information, either consciously or unconsciously, without fact-checking it. In this regard, it has become an enormous challenge to keep only true COVID-19 news relevant. People are exposed to these stories on a daily basis, and not all of them are true and fact-checked reports on the COVID-19 pandemic, which was the primary reason for our research. We accepted the challenge that fake news is extremely common and that some people take these news as they are. Knowing the true power of the most recent NLP achievements, in this research we focus on detecting fake news regarding COVID-19. Our approach includes using pre-trained BERT and RoBERTa models, which we then fine-tune on real and fake news about the COVID-19 pandemic. By using pre-trained BERT and RoBERTa models on tweet data, we explore their capabilities and compare them to previous research in regard to fine-tuned BERT models for this task in which we achieve better accuracy, recall and f1 score. © 2022 Croatian Society MIPRO.

YOLO-Based Face Mask Detection on Low-End Devices Using Pruning and Quantization

Deploying Deep Learning (DL) based object detection (OD) models in low-end devices, such as single board computers, may lead to poor performance in terms of frames-per-second (FPS). Pruning and quantization are well-known compression techniques that can potentially lead to a reduction of the computational burden of a DL model, with a possible decrease of performance in terms of detection accuracy. Motivated by the widespread introduction of face mask mandates by many institutions during the Covid-19 pandemic, we aim at training and compressing an OD model based on YOLOv4 to recognize the presence of face masks, to be deployed on a Raspberry Pi 4. We investigate the capability of different kinds of pruning and quantization techniques of increasing the FPS with respect to the uncompressed model, while retaining the detection accuracy. We quantitatively assess the pruned and quantized models in terms of Mean Average Precision (mAP) and FPS, and show that with proper pruning and quantization, the FPS can be doubled with a moderate loss in mAP. The results provide guidelines for compression of other OD models based on YOLO. © 2022 Croatian Society MIPRO.

The LanGuide Project - Strengths and Threats

The project "Language guidance tool for improving language knowledge"(LanGuide) is supported by the Erasmus+ program Strategic Partnerships for Higher Education. The project duration is 36 months. The coordinating institution is the University of Primorska, and the partner institutions are Mälardalen University, the University of Castilla - La Mancha, Transilvania University of Braov, and two Croatian universities - the University of Zadar, and the University of Rijeka. The main aim of the project is to build an open access students/teachers/administrative staff centered mobile app for improving language knowledge. To achieve the goal, the first phase of the project is concerned with the development of a universal methodology for the preparation of language exercises focused on language for specific purposes. In the second phase, the methodology is applied in the preparation of language resources for six languages in four LSP fields at different levels of difficulty. Appropriate IT tools are developed simultaneously with the preparation of exercises. Finally, the developed tools and resources are evaluated through two rounds of user testing. This paper first describes the motivation behind the project proposal. Next, each of the four intellectual outputs and activities carried out within the project are described. Finally, challenges such as the one brought about by the pandemic of COVID-19 are highlighted. © 2022 Croatian Society MIPRO.

The Reasons for Limited Success of Hybrid Lectures

In the recent years COVID 19 restrictions all around the World forced the education to adopt the new reality. In the short time, we managed to advance from illiterate remote lecturers to the proficient remote lecturers. Never the less we could still see more and less proficient lecturers. In general, those less ICT proficient and/or ICT inclined lecturers favors the traditional classroom lectures. The quality of the classroom lectures is higher because of better interactions. Equal interactions could also be achieved online though.The online questionnaire overloaded most of us therefore;we decide to use focus group approach and quality analysis. Only colleagues who are highly proficient in the remote teaching were in the focus group that aim to search for the reason why the hybrid lectures were less successful than online or classroom lectures. Findings have shown that the limited success is mostly due to the unsuitable equipped workplaces in the classrooms. Other findings are more severe and are due to the different focus of the students in classroom or at home. To solve these obstacles, we need to change the strategy, it is more costly but it is feasible. © 2022 Croatian Society MIPRO.

Public Procurement of Innovative and Technological Solutions in the EU

Smart cities should identify and procure the best technical solutions for their communities and companies while at the same time demonstrating the local economic benefits of public procurement. Whenever possible, the procurement process should increase innovation in sustainability. Public procurement of innovative solutions can contribute to the economic recovery of the EU, especially after the crisis caused by COVID-19 with the help of better and more technologically accessible public investments. It is a means of stimulating the transformation of European economies into digital economies. This paper seeks to explain the use and advantages of public procurement of innovative solutions. The contracting authority acts as the first customer (launch customer) of innovative goods or services that are not yet widely available commercially and are technologically acceptable. Instead of buying a finished product, service or process, the contracting authority acts as the first user and buys a product, service or process that is new to the market and has significant new features in terms of innovation and technological achievements. Therefore, this paper will try to identify how various stakeholders can use innovative and technology-aware public procurement systems procedures and contribute to the accelerated development of digitalization mandated by the European Commission. © 2022 Croatian Society MIPRO.