The main goal of this proposal is to learn how to apply digital transformation techniques in order to boost digital awareness of female freshmen studying university-level International business programs. According to WEF Global Gender Gap Report for 2021, women have greater representation in roles that are being automated; but still not enough women are entering professions where wage growth is the most pronounced (most obviously, STEM professions), and globally women face the perennial problem of insufficient access to the new technologies. Developing and deploying women who present one-half of the world's available talent has a huge bearing on the growth, competitiveness, and future readiness of economies and businesses worldwide. Globally, even though women have been less engaged in the labor market as opposed to men (55% and 78% respectively), they still represent a significant population in the workforce. Therefore we would first analyze and then implement new digital skills for women freshmen students based on digital transformation to succeed in the world of future jobs. Furthermore, a business laboratory will be used to simulate and monitor the artificially created effect of digitally encouraged leadership and entrepreneurial characteristic on economic performance within 10 and 20 years, and then we would able to compare the effects on inclusive growth. The additional goal of this proposal is to detect how entrepreneurship and leadership skills could be strengthened through education in digital transformation in order to upgrade new generations of woman leaders.

In recent decades, the overpopulation on our planet has had an impact on environmental change. Addressing and understanding such changes in a reliable manner requires contemporary data-science knowledge and methodologies since the amount of information available online has been increasing at an exponential rate. Additionally, to draw meaningful conclusions and predict certain events in terms of environmental changes, one must be familiar with existing natural processes. Thus, combining data science with knowledge about global conditions in the world and how they impact Earth's biosphere, would highly benefit the understanding of possible consequences in the environment. Since our planet is a complex, dynamic system that is likely to change, one must be knowledgeable about the global climate system as a whole. As well, one must understand its processes and interactions with the environment to be able to understand and work on preventing the potential inevitable drastic circumstances for living. This paper addresses the issue of environmental changes and presents a solution in the form of academic education, which is currently in progress, and also related to the COVID-19 issues. As shown in the results section, this type of education aims to teach students about the basics of data science and how to interpret and visualize information related to current environmental changes.

Driven by the fact that many of us experienced softer or not-so-soft lockdown, the intention of a couple of instructors at our university was to develop a collaborative tool that could help in online delivery and gamification on two courses that are delivered in the Business and IT curriculums we are offering to our students. That tool could be described as a decentralized web application that simulates Internet marketing principles and helps in gamification of the learning process for our students. We planned our web application for Internet marketing simulation as the gamification of the learning process, which is one of the basics for active learning for Internet Marketing course for International Business students, to gain new class activities by online simulation competing in the field of Internet marketing principles; and for IT students in developing the Web application and also on adopting Blockchain technologies for the distributed reports which need to have a consensus of all teams included in the simulation. The proposed solution includes the design of business logic simulation and using four main digital marketing tools - social networking, content creating and sharing, search engine marketing, and display advertising in use of such application for hands-on online class exercises.

This paper presents a case of collaboration between the International Business (IB) program and Web and Mobile Computing (WMC) program students, facilitated and managed by their respective instructors. In order to improve student user experience and provide them with a learning-by-doing opportunity, development of web-based Internet marketing simulation application has been initiated at our University. While WMC students are responsible for coding and application development, IB students will act as clients, but also have a partial role in the simulation’s business logic development. Collaboration with IB students will provide WMC students with valuable feedback that will be taken into account in the refinement stage. With the potential to replace available commercial Internet marketing simulations due to its high level of customization and adaptation to specific market conditions, the student developed Internet marketing simulation will also be offered to other international University campuses for further development and adaptation.

Conducting a single course across international boundaries impacts both the students and the instructors. Interestingly, many of the impacts are the same. In essence, while the international team of students is working on their project, the international team of instructors is working on their own project-the course itself. In our case we deliver a joint course for more than 100 students spread across three international campuses on three different continents with three different business cultures. The main course goal is to prepare students for real IT projects that are based on distributed software development, covering all project phases: short definition of project task, gathering the data and creating the requirements list, dividing the team roles, creating the project plan along with time-line and budget-line, developing, testing and deploying the final project, documenting the project and proposing plans for maintenance and further support. At the end of the course students need to peer-review their team members; these evaluations are a significant part of the students' final grades. Our past experience showed that as a whole, students were very satisfied with the experience and knowledge they gained during our Capstone course. This was particularly evident with anecdotal comments by alumni.

Bio-medical image processing in the field of telemedicine, and in particular the definition of systems that allow medical diagnostics in a collaborative and distributed way is experiencing an undeniable growth. Due to the high quality of bio-medical videos and the subsequent large volumes of data generated, to enable medical diagnosis on-the-go it is imperative to efficiently transcode and stream the stored videos on real time, without quality loss. However, online video transcoding is a high-demanding computationally-intensive task and its efficient management in Multiprocessor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoCs) poses an important challenge. In this work, we propose an efficient motion- and texture-aware frame-level parallelization approach to enable online medical imaging transcoding on MPSoCs for next generation video encoders. By exploiting the unique characteristics of bio-medical videos and the medical procedure that enable diagnosis, we split frames into tiles based on their motion and texture, deciding the most adequate level of parallelization. Then, we employ the available encoding parameters to satisfy the required video quality and compression. Moreover, we propose a new fast motion search algorithm for bio-medical videos that allows to drastically reduce the computational complexity of the encoder, thus achieving the frame rates required for online transcoding. Finally, we heuristically allocate the threads to the most appropriate available resources and set the operating frequency of each one. We evaluate our work on an enterprise multicore server achieving online medical imaging with 1.6x higher throughput and 44% less power consumption when compared to the state-of-the-art techniques.

Distance and collaborative education has many potential benefits, most notably is the ability to overcome the temporal and spatial restrictions of traditional educational settings, but changes in general communication processes between educators and students, educators themselves and students themselves are also predominant. With both business and personal life becoming more collaborative and less geo-centric (just consider examples of social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn, or examples of collaborative economy like Uber or Airbnb), the authors' institution, with its international campuses in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, is setting a new level of distance and collaborative education that enables students form different cultures and time zones to work together on real projects in a controlled, academic setting, but in a manner that mirrors business and industry projects to a very significant degree. Three instructors and more than 50 students are working jointly on the same projects and relying greatly on effective communication. In this work, the authors address and describe their experiences and challenges in communication and collaborative education from both their perspective and the students' perspective. The main intention is to make the educational process more efficient and to introduce more interaction between the students and their teachers, who act more as project advisors.

Provided unified learning platform, which is developed as a main goal of our ICT FP7 - Collaborative Project: Embedded Computer Engineering Learning Platform enables modular approach in education of computer engineers. It helps engineering education personnel to transform passive listener's students into active learners, thus stimulating students to actively participate in the learning process. Furthermore, this platform shall introduce a flexible and extendable learning environment for upcoming technologies in embedded systems, thus providing a long lasting educational solution for academia. This work in progress article describes capabilities of our learning platform.

To overcome a complex and multidisciplinary approach which includes understanding of various systems based on different technologies and system solution optimizations in engineering education for embedded systems at university level and provide a complex and multidisciplinary approach, the first cycle of the design of a unified, multiple-target platform that will enable integrated approach to computer engineering and embedded systems learning has been finished so far. This work shows results of current research, preliminary conclusions and future focuses.