Informatica Economica Vol. 16 No. 4/2012Issue Topic: Smart CitiesIssue Editor: Lorena BATAGAN, PhDCONTENTSGrigore C. Moisil Award 2012 5Analysis of Return on Investment in Different Types of Agile Software Development Project Teams Goran MILANOV, Angelina NJEGUŠ 7 This exploratory study of IT project teams in Serbia investigates how the choice of agile methods in different development project teams affects the return-on-investment (ROI). In this paper different types of software project teams are analyzed in order to examine and identify the business-value of using agile methods. In various software development project teams, the ROI of agile methods is yet to be fully explored, while the ROI of traditional methods is well-understood. Since ROI is important indicator of the projects success, in this paper we examine the factors that influence the ROI both from software solution customer point of view, and different agile project teams. Keywords: Agile Methodology, Scrum, Return on Investment, Project Teams, Software Development The Role of Festivals and Cultural Events in the Strategic Development of Cities. Recommendations for Urban Areas in Romania Ruxandra-Irina POPESCU, Răzvan-Andrei CORBOS 19 Building a good image of a city or state so as to differentiate it and to make it unique in tourists’ minds is a vital condition nowadays, in a world of global competition. This image may be created by taking advantage of local culture and values’ promotion or by organizing festivals and special events. There are various festivals and events held every year somewhere in the world that add image and competitive advantages to host cities. In order to illustrate this idea, the paper presents some less common festivals hosted by different cities that are turning themselves into real “urban agglomerations” during these events. The study analyses the impact of festivals on the strategic development of cities and the importance gained by urban areas after organizing these events. In the final part of the paper there are some recommendations for Romanian cities which might enhance their image and might become more known through the organization of such festivals and cultural events. Keywords: Competitive Advantage, Cultural Events, Festivals, Strategic Development, Urban Development A Regional Approach of the Information Technology Adoption in the Romanian Agricultural Farms Liliana Mihaela MOGA, Daniela Luminita CONSTANTIN, Valentin Marian ANTOHI 29 The aim of this paper is to evaluate the stage of Information Technology implementation in the agricultural farms in Romania. At the level of each Romanian development region it was performed a research for identifying the use of Information Technology. In addition, it was conducted a study on the management applied in the agricultural farms, the market of information solutions developed for farms specific needs and of the politics that promote the investments in the Information Technology. The research had as result the identification of the main factors that lead to a reduced Information Technology penetration rate in the Romanian agriculture such as: the reduced number of agricultural farms with legal personality, the decreased investment potential of agricultural farms, the lack of interest of software developer enterprises in providing Farm Management Information Systems and the poor professional skills of farm managers and their employees in the Information Technology field. Keywords: Farms Management, Information Technology, Farm Management Information Systems, Incentive Factors, Regional Development The use of Intelligent Solutions in Romanian Cities Lorena BATAGAN 37 All over the world we find smart solutions which are implemented for improve quality of life. The smart solutions make daily activities more easily, efficiently and represent a real support for city development. The paper aims to analyze and presents the necessity of use smart solutions in Romanian cities. Also, the paper highlights the advantages of smart cities and the stage of urban area from our country in term of smart cities. Keywords: Smart City, Smart Solution, Quality of Life, City Development The Importance of Local Action Groups in the Romanian European Integration Process: an Empirical Study Liviu-Cosmin MOSORA, Mihaela-Hrisanta MOSORA 44 This article aims to examine the factors affecting the implementation of local action groups in Romania. A relatively new member state, Romania has the highest share of EU rural areas which generates and maintains a long series of regional disparities. Because of these disparities, the economy faces a number of issues that undermine the quality of human and social capital and reduce the growth potential: precarious social and economic infrastructure, reduced access to markets and thus to goods, a low level of both economic cohesion and living standards and a difficult access to education and training. From this perspective, the local action groups can contribute to the revival and development of urban areas, through the promotion of economic activities in adjacent rural areas. Therefore, an empirical analysis was conducted to study how economic and social disparities in the regional development of Romania influenced the implementation of local action groups. Keywords: Local Action Groups, Regional Development, Regional Disparities The Third Mission of Universities in the Development Strategy of Vienna City Mihaela-Cornelia DAN 49 Vienna City is one of the most attractive cities in Europe and according to different rankings [1], [2]it is placed on the top ten in the list of cities with best living conditions, excellent education, infrastructure and good urban planning. This is the result of a systematic approach of the local government, companies, universities and public in the development and modernization of the city. Since 2000 the city has known a growth in different areas (number of researchers, number of patents, joint programs for the popularization of science etc.) and evolved into a network point not only for business but also for research and innovation. In this paper we investigate the strategy of Vienna City regarding research and development and the extensive and complex role of universities in the city. Keywords: Regional Innovation System, Third Mission of Universities, University Business Cooperation, Vienna City Smart Cities Design using Event-driven Paradigm and Semantic Web Liviu-Gabriel CRETU 57 The concept of “smart city” has attracted considerable attention lately. Still, common definitions are hard to find, and there is a lack of formal models to guide their design. This paper introduces the architecture of Event-driven Smart City, the kind of city where digital artifacts enable the interoperability between Internet of Services, Internet of Things and Internet of People in order to empower inhabitants to quickly react to a larger variety of events, even remotely and using fewer resources than before. Configurability of actions to be carried out automatically when events happen is considered here as core requirement for a smart city. We also explore the usability of the latest advances in Event-driven SOA and Semantic Web technologies to implement smart cities as systems based on the proposed architecture. Keywords: Smart Cities, Event-driven Architecture, Business Rules, Semantic Web Improving Image Processing Systems by Using Software Simulated LRU Cache Algorithms Cosmin CIORANU, Marius CIOCA, Lucian-Ionel CIOCA 68 Today’s scientific progress is closely related with data processing, a process is implemented using algorithms, but in order to have a result, algorithms need data, and data are generated by sensors, particularly satellite imagery or collaborative GIS platforms. The progress has made those imaging capturing sensors more and more accurate therefore the generated data are becoming larger and larger. The problem is mostly related to the operating system and sometimes software design’s inability to manage contiguous spaces of memory. In an ironic turn of events, those data sometimes cannot be held all at once in a computer system to be analyzed. A solution needed to be devised to overcome this easy problem at first, but complex in implementation. The answer is somehow hidden, but is has been around since the birth of computer science, and is called a memory cache, which is basically at its origins a fast memory. We can adjust this concept in software programming by identifying the problem and coming up with an implementation. The data cache can be implemented in many various ways but here we will present one based on LRU (least recently used) algorithm mostly to handle three dimension arrays, called 3dCache which is widely compatible with software packages that supports external tools such as Matlab or a programming environment like C++. Keywords: Cache, LRU, Matlab, C++, Three Dimension Array, Satellite Imagery Smart Data Web Services Catalin STRIMBEI 74 In the new world where the Internet business resembles with a large and distributed sea of links, using Cloud architectural model, the web-service interoperability and SOA model one could deploy an arguably new class/generation of apps/services that could leverage the marriage of these originally distinct computing models to be real smart, as autonomous, dynamic and agile, but open to integrate and adapt. Keywords: Web Services, Cloud Computing, SEO, SQL, XML Decision Assistance in Risk Assessment – Monte Carlo Simulations Emil BURTESCU 86 High security must be a primary and permanent concern of the leadership of an organization and it must be ensured at any time. For this, a risk analysis is compulsory and imperative to be done during the risk management cycle. Security risk analysis and security risk management components mostly use estimative data during the whole extensive process. The further evolution of the events might not be reflected in the obtained results. If we were to think about the fact that hazard must be modeled, this concern is absolutely normal. Though, we must find a way to model the events that a company is exposed to, events that damage the informational security. In the following lines of this paper we will use the Monte-Carlo method in order to model a set of security parameters that are used in security risk analysis. The frequency of unwanted events, damages and their impact will represent our main focus and will be applied to both the quantitative and qualitative security risk analysis approach. The obtained results will act as a guide for experts to better allocation of resources for decreasing or eliminating the risk and will also represent a warning for the leadership about certain absolutely necessary investments. Keywords: Security, Risk Analysis, Monte-Carlo Method, Likelihood, Impact, Loss Requirements of a Better Secure Program Coding Marius POPA 93 Secure program coding refers to how manage the risks determined by the security breaches because of the program source code. The papers reviews the best practices must be doing during the software development life cycle for secure software assurance, the methods and techniques used for a secure coding assurance, the most known and common vulnerabilities determined by a bad coding process and how the security risks are managed and mitigated. As a tool of the better secure program coding, the code review process is presented, together with objective measures for code review assurance and estimation of the effort for the code improvement. Keywords: Secure Coding, Code Vulnerabilities, Code Review Software Architecture Coupling Metric for Assessing Operational Responsiveness of Trading Systems Claudiu VINTE 105 The empirical observation that motivates our research relies on the difficulty to assess the performance of a trading architecture beyond a few synthetic indicators like response time, system latency, availability or volume capacity. Trading systems involve complex software architectures of distributed resources. However, in the context of a large brokerage firm, which offers a global coverage from both, market and client perspectives, the term distributed gains a critical significance indeed. Offering a low latency ordering system by nowadays standards is relatively easily achievable, but integrating it in a flexible manner within the broader information system architecture of a broker/dealer requires operational aspects to be factored in. We propose a metric for measuring the coupling level within software architecture, and employ it to identify architectural designs that can offer a higher level of operational responsiveness, which ultimately would raise the overall real-world performance of a trading system. Keywords: Software Architectures, Quality and Coupling Metrics, Trading Systems, Operational Responsiveness, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Message-Oriented Middleware (MOM), Cloud Services Data-Flow Modeling: A Survey of Issues and Approaches Cristina-Claudia DOLEAN, Răzvan PETRUSEL 117 This paper presents a survey of previous research on modeling the data flow perspective of business processes. When it comes to modeling and analyzing business process models the current research focuses on control flow modeling (i.e. the activities of the process) and very little attention is paid to the data-flow perspective. But data is essential in a process. In order to execute a workflow, the tasks need data. Without data or without data available on time, the control flow cannot be executed. For some time, various researchers tried to investigate the data flow perspective of process models or to combine the control and data flow in one model. This paper surveys those approaches. We conclude that there is no model showing a clear data flow perspective focusing on how data changes during a process execution. The literature offers some similar approaches ranging from data modeling using elements from relational database domain, going through process model verification and ending with elements related to Web Services. Keywords: Data Flow, Process, Workflow Option Price Estimations and Speculative Trading In Knowledge Society Ovidiu TURCOANE 131 Derivatives market has known an enormous and continuous development from the late 1970s, thanks to the most celebrated Black-Scholes-Merton formula. The impact on global economy is also tremendous, but due to the high leverage of speculative option trading there is a perpetual danger of economic collapse. This paper gives a short description of knowledge society and proposes methods for option price estimation based on implied volatility, skewness and kurtosis. ‘Free-lunch’ is hardly achievable if one predicts the option price using the knowledgeable information from the market and there is almost impossible to speculate, rather than to hedge, when trading option. Keywords: Ethics; Knowledge Society; Option Pricing; Implied Volatility, Skewness, Kurtosis; Minimization Algorithm Marketing Recommender Systems: A New Approach in Digital Economy Loredana MOCEAN, Ciprian Marcel POP 142 Marketing information systems are those systems which make the gathering, processing, selection, storage, transmission and display of coordinated and continuous internal and external information. Includes systematic and formal methods used for managing all of an organization's information market. Recommendation systems are those systems that are widely used in online systems to suggest items that users might find interesting. These recommendations are generated using in particular two techniques: content-based and collaborative filtering. This paper aims to define a new system, namely Marketing Recommender System, a system that serves marketing and uses techniques and methods of the digital economy. Keywords: Marketing Recommender Systems, Information Systems, Database, Consumer Environment Integrability and Interoperability of Mobile Applications Alin ZAMFIROIU 150 Features of mobile applications are presented. The characteristics of quality for the mobile applications are described. The categories of mobile devices are presented. The restrictions for all mobile devices categories are presented. Treated separately accessing integrability factors influence the level or growth paths and measurement indicators. Establish ways to integrate information through interfaces and appearances by database and by calling. The interoperability characteristic of mobile applications is presented according the using of output of the application by another application. Keywords: Integrability, Interoperability, Quality Characteristic, Mobile Application The 12th International Conference on Informatics in Economy, IE 2013 Call for papers 159 The 6th International Conference on Security for Information Technology and Communications, SECITC’13 Call for papers 160 Publishing Guide for Authors 161 Inforec Association 163 |