This article provides an overview of the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca's digital ecosystem, focusing on a digital security protocol that includes simulations, training, and awareness resources to tackle cyber vulnerabilities. It analyzes user behavior during cyber attacks and aims to raise awareness among the academic community about these risks while documenting preventive measures. A new iteration of simulation of cyber-attack techniques within the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca is proposed, comparative analysis of the results obtained from previous simulations of 2023 is conducted, consolidating the prevention practices promoted within the institution, based on centralization and analysis of results. Findings highlight implications for cybersecurity education in higher education, including the development of tailored learning modules to address skill gaps and improve digital infrastructure resilience. The results show that certain phishing techniques, like Drive-by URLs, were effective despite mitigation strategies, pointing to varying user awareness levels. (Abstract)

The current study presents a systematic mapping of text-based formative assessment tools and services used for evaluating online student assignments. Research conducted between 2012 and 2022, specifically in engineering/ICT education, is analyzed, drawing from academic databases such as IEEE Xplore, Science Direct, and Springer Link. Previous literature, mainly focused on certain tools like Turnitin for plagiarism detection and spell checking, has been found to lack evidence of user perception. To address these gaps, this paper poses two questions: mapping the landscape of these assessment tools over the studied years and understanding perception of their use in classrooms. Using a PICO strategy, the search strings made reference to specific tools like Grammarly, Copyscape, SafeAssign, and Quetext etc. A total of 38 relevant studies were selected, which revealed the increasing prevalence, especially during the pandemic period, of such tools in education. User perception has been analyzed both from a student and teacher perspective. The study further explores usage trends and perception in relation to features such as feedback, plagiarism check, grammar correction, and assessment protocols, which commonly range from qualitative to quantitative.

Cybersecurity represents a critical challenge in the protection of educational institutions' digital assets and the sensitive data they hold. Phishing attempts are exploiting user vulnerabilities at an alarming rate, in a context defined by a substantial increase in internet usage and in the personal information shared online. Preliminary findings suggest a varying degree of security literacy, indicating the need for targeted educational interventions. The Technical University of Cluj-Napoca's digital ecosystem encompasses over 20,000 users, including students, faculty, and administrative staff. In November 2023, an attack simulation was conducted through the configuration of various attack scenarios using social engineering techniques via Office 365's educational services. Including elements such as deceptive emails and fraudulent login pages, the initiative aimed to observe phishing behaviours closely. The simulation campaign captured quantitative data on click rates, report rates, and feedback on user confidence and perceived difficulty of the phishing attempts. Furthermore, it engaged participants in reflective practices, enabling the identification of potential improvements in individual and institutional cybersecurity protocols. Training-related data was collected and synthesized from users who exhibited varying rates of compromise. Such a simulation can reveal a broad overview of the ecosystem's vulnerabilities, offering critical insights into the users' level of readiness to counter such threats and fostering a culture of continuous monitoring against cyberattacks. Strategic implications for the structuring of cybersecurity education in higher education institutions are envisioned, along with the development of customized, adaptive learning modules that envision to identified skill gaps and strengthen the overall resilience of the digital infrastructure (Abstract)

Within the vision of the European University of Technology (EUt+), a University Alliance of 8 European partners, augmenting a Mobility Friendly Plan through a virtual worlds approach, helps prepare students to overcome communication, language and cultural barriers. Such virtual environments can allow students to be immersed in the academic environments of the destination location, creating spaces for team building, collaboration, and creative activities. In the context of effective social interaction, communication and language learning become key pillars. Technological means that develop key competencies and abilities in such immersive environments, should be tackled. The current paper describes three uses cases of VR environments from the European University of Technology Alliance, implemented with the purpose of facilitating communication skills to overcome language and cultural barriers. The application of various technology levels, from prototype-based to customization of existing platforms is analyzed, under a TAM adoption assessment, to identify common challenges that may accompany the development of a shared VR campus, intended for effective communication, while providing the students a feeling of comfort, safety and confidence.

Career counseling assists students in the decision-making process for a future career path. The current work augments the counseling activity conducted by a professional, with a proposal of an assistive NLP agent (chatbot) that provides a support for identifying and mapping out action tracks for a future career under the student’s profile. The resulting prototype has been deployed as a conversational service, though an institutional eCampus infrastructure and has been validated by both a focus group of students and experts in the field.

Conversational agents assist traditional teaching-learning instruments in proposing new designs for knowledge creation and learning analysis, across organizational environments. Means of building common educative background in both industry and academic fields become of interest for ensuring educational effectiveness and consistency. Such a context requires transferable practices and becomes the basis for the Agile adoption into Higher Education, at both curriculum and operational levels. The current work proposes a model for delivering Agile Scrum training through an assistive web-based conversational service, where analytics are collected to provide an overview on learners' knowledge path. Besides its specific applicability into Software Engineering (SE) industry, the model is to assist the academic SE curriculum. A user-acceptance test has been carried out among 200 undergraduate students and patterns of interaction have been depicted for 2 conversational strategies.

Emergency trainings simulated in alternative environments are fundamentally dependent on user engagement and may be addressed as crucial validation scenarios for proposing new approaches to learning designs. Developing an interactive engaging experience while building a know-how becomes a challenging demand to be addressed in current training setups. A fire-safety training has been recreated as a gamified learning experience, where coordinative multiplayer gameplay elements have been integrated in 3D fire emergency simulation. 3C implications (collaboration, cooperation, coordination) have been analyzed for modeling multiuser navigation and a coordinative approach has been selected for accomplishing the goal-oriented mission of successful evacuation in a fire-based emergency scenario. Game-based analytics have been collected and analyzed in an experimental pre-test, addressed to 1styear students enrolled in the Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Information Technology of the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania, where out of a total number of 196 students, 22 participants actively ran the simulation as either belonging to the control or experimental group.

According to the latest trends, users prefer to acquire knowledge through unconventional streams, using cumulative senses (hearing, viewing, sensing). Access to informational data should be characterized through its ease of use, consistency and reliability. Libraries have become target spaces for the deployment of applications for Augmented and Virtual Reality worlds, due to their complexity of information repositories and the associated indexing processes, as well as to its users' profiles (students, professors, librarians) and their access to technology. The current work models interaction in a virtually rendered library aiming to provide the users with an immersive experience of viewing library resources (books) and their metadata. A low-cost, affordable, technical setup is proposed for deployment, consisting of a mobile device and the Google Cardboard VR Headset. With the purpose of further integration, the virtual scene has been rendered using panoramic-based imagery. Complementary to the state-of-the art virtual tours for educational landscapes (museums, classrooms, libraries), such solutions could enhance indoor exploration for informational or marketing purposes.

Multiple assessment options have been adopted in engineering education in the last years due to different reasons. Most of them are related to increasing the efficiency of the evaluation process applied in each activity performed by students/trainees and decreasing stress among them. The assessment methodology implemented in the formal and informal education programs mentioned in the article includes the automated evaluation approach consisting of assessment of conceptual/theoretical knowledge, as well as competences achieved within individual and/or team projects, hands-on laboratory, or simulation work. An analysis of the assessment scores reveals that end-of-programs assessments looks better if continuous evaluation methods are applied during the whole study act while students and trainees develop their own modes of learning and working based on the assessment results.

Context: Heuristic optimization has been of strong focus in the recent modeling of the Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP), but lack of evidence exists in systematic assessments.New solution methods arise from random evaluation of existing studies.Objective: The current work conducts a secondary study, aiming to systemize existing primary studies in heuristic optimization techniques applied to solving classes of RCPSPs.Method: The systemizing framework consists of performing a systematic mapping study (SM), following a 3-steped protocol.Results: 371 primary studies have been depicted from the multi-stage search and filtering process, to which inclusion and exclusion criteria have been applied.Results have been visually mapped in several distributions.Conclusions: Specific RCPSP classes have been grounded and therefore a rigorous classification is required before performing a systematic mapping.Focusing on recent developments of the RCPSP (2010-2015, a strong interest has been acknowledged on solution methods incorporating AI techniques in meta-and hyper-heuristic algorithms.

This paper introduces a novel method for blind speech segmentation at a phone level based on image processing. We consider the spectrogram of the waveform of an utterance as an image and hypothesize that its striping defects, i.e. discontinuities, appear due to phone boundaries. Using a simple image destriping algorithm these discontinuities are found. To discover phone transitions which are not as salient in the image, we compute spectral changes derived from the time evolution of Mel cepstral parametrisation of speech. These socalled image-based and acoustic features are then combined to form a mixed probability function, whose values indicate the likelihood of a phone boundary being located at the corresponding time frame. The method is completely unsupervised and achieves an accuracy of 75.59% at a -3.26% over-segmentation rate, yielding an F-measure of 0.76 and an 0.80 R-value on the TIMIT dataset.