The lines are blurring between online (eCommerce), and offline retail. But, eCommerce has the advantage that the sellers can see the customers' feedback easily because many of them post reviews on most of the products' website like amazon.com or ebay.com making the whole process faster. The purpose of the article is to analyze several technologies which can be implemented for indoor shopping and for improving customers' experience. Therefore, we aim to explore several methods which can help reduce the time that customers spend to pay for the products and to customize their shopping experience by analyzing their feelings towards shops and products. We propose an online platform which identifies the customer's opinion. The retail organizations must correctly understand their customers' wishes and expectations through NLP (Natural Language Processing), a form of Artificial Intelligence (AI), namely analyzing an encoded sentiment data based on feedbacks considering the context and the environment. One of the methods approached to obtain the customer's related to the Speech-to-Text technologies so that the client will not spend so much time writing full sentences, products reviews, etc. This Speech-to-Text application is developed based on a vocabulary composed of words which express and highlight strong emotions such as "good", "bad", "horrible" but also analyze if the sentence is affirmative or negative, and if the sentence is negative to notice if the customer said "not good", "not bad" and so on. By implementing smart shop solutions, we can manage some of the issues mentioned above, such as monitoring the shop facility hot areas, update product prices and locate products easily, all with the objective to improve the customers' shopping experience.

I. Rogojanu, G. Suciu, M. Ditu and A. Pasat, "Smart Shopping Technologies for Indoor Markets," In: 2018 IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE), Bucharest, 2018, pp. 99-103, doi: 10.1109/CSE.2018.00020. »»»
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Modern buildings require different IT facilities, therefore integrated communication services have become a must. Although there are already commercial products on the market, most of them need well trained operators, while others require manual and time-consuming operations. The present paper introduces an intelligent displaying and alerting system (SICIAD), implemented over a communication infrastructure with support for wireless ePaper and iBeacon technologies to enhance displaying static and dynamic information, as well as to ease the indoor orientation of guests using smartphones. An Android mobile application is developed which enables indoor user location and guidance. Possible beneficiaries of such systems are educational and research institutions due to remote authentication support in research facilities through Eduroam technology. The paper gives functional validation and performance evaluation aspects are presented for the indoor positioning component of the proposed system.

Vochin M., Vulpe A., Marcu I., Suciu G. (2019) Low-Power Intelligent Displaying System with Indoor Mobile Location Capability. In: Poulkov V. (eds) Future Access Enablers for Ubiquitous and Intelligent Infrastructures. FABULOUS 2019. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 283. Springer, Cham. »»»
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The recent digital development forced many market leaders to adopt advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies to facilitate the transition from rigid processes to more flexible, outcome- driven approaches. The use of AI presents numerous benefits. First of all, the AI technology helps enable the analysis of unstructured data from a variety of sources across social media channels. Also, AI allows companies not only to automate certain processes but also to reconfigure them to complement and, more importantly, augment the skills and expertise of employees. The new era of artificial intelligence-systems gather information, analyze, recommend, plan and more importantly, learn. This paper presents an innovative approach to recruitment. According to recent studies, business intelligence and analytics showed to be the most crucial area that AI can deliver results. We analyze how software companies are more prone to integrate AI applications in marketing because of the new market trend - digital marketing. Services companies, on the other hand, are more interested in the use of AI in human resources. Our case study applies Sentiment Analysis (SA) techniques to improve the recruitment processes aiming to increase the efficiency of internship campaigns by ensuring a better match between the candidates' professional skills and the hiring company fields of activity. We demonstrate that AI can improve the recruitment process and assist in hiring the right persons. Thus, the HR staff has the opportunity to select the internship candidates based on their skills and determine the right position where abilities of an individual candidate are most needed. This novel approach not only increases the company productivity but also motivates candidates to improve their skills.

Suciu, George, PhD; Pasat, Adrian; Vasilescu, Cristian. The International Scientific Conference eLearning and Software for Education; Bucharest Vol. 3, : 232-239. Bucharest: "Carol I" National Defence University. (2019) DOI:10.12753/2066-026X-19-169. »»»
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Integrated communication infrastructure has become a must-have facility for modern public buildings and offices. To cover this need, several commercial products exist on the market, but most of them require advanced technical skill to operate, while others require manual and time-consuming operations. This work proposes an intelligent displaying and alerting system (called SICIAD), implemented over an integrated communication infrastructure with support for wireless ePaper and iBeacon technologies to enhance displaying static and dynamic information, as well as to ease the indoor orientation of guests. A centralized display management console is implemented, as well as procedures for automatically displaying different types of notifications. An Android mobile application is developed which enables indoor user location and guidance. The system targets educational and research institutions but could also cope with public institutions such as museums and hospitals. Remote authentication is supported in research facilities through eduroam technology, access being provided by the user’s distant institution of affiliation. Secure multiple-level access to the system is provided to users, from guests to system administrators, based on locally defined policies. Functional validation and performance evaluation aspects are presented for the proposed system.

Vochin M, Vulpe A, Boicescu L, Obreja SG, Suciu G. An Intelligent Low-Power Displaying System with Integrated Emergency Alerting Capability. Sensors. 2019; 19(3):666. »»»
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Social Media platforms are becoming a big part of our life and are used frequently by the citizens in the context of smart cities, from people browsing and interacting with friends, to companies promoting their products and services. Considering that the most of world’s population lives today in urban zones, and Social Media could be a source of valuable data, urban planners must think about analyzing users’ opinions and their data in the process of managing cities. This paper presents the importance of using Social Media data in developing a Smart City. Urban planners have the task of accommodating population growth, keeping resources available for all citizens while optimizing their consumption. For analyzing opinions and transforming them into valuable data for city planners, data mining and sentiment analysis tools can be used. Also, tracking check-ins at various locations help to better understand concentration zones, making resource allocation much easier.

Gabriela BUCUR, George SUCIU, Radu Conu. The importance of social media in smart cities. INCD URBAN-INCERC 2019. »»»
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In a world running out of resources, innovation is the only key for survival. One of the biggest domains affected by the expansion process is the global automotive industry. Sales have reached 90 million automobiles last year, counting a 5% increase compared to year 2016. The real problem comes when parking the car somewhere, at peak hours, when in a big hurry. One of the first solutions adopted and implemented by architects consists in building a parking space on different levels. Thus, occupying the same surface as a flat parking, the capacity can be increased by about 100% for each extra level built. Still such implementation depends on the geographical position and requires a lot of money and time to build. Another solution, relying on storing several cars vertically, similar to the Ferris wheel, is very expensive and only few can afford it. The aim of this paper is to present a Smart-Parking solution having 4 important characteristics: implementation with minimal financial investment, execution within a very short time, usage of the same surface as a classic one-level parking and significantly increased capacity. We demonstrate that the proposed solution brings an improvement of 31.66% increase in parking capacity.

Marcu, I. M., Ţigănuş, A., Drăgulinescu, A. M., & Suciu Jr, G. (2019, September). A new approach on Smart-Parking concept. In: Proceedings of the 6th Conference on the Engineering of Computer Based Systems (pp. 1-9). »»»
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The retail industry has come to a consensus on the use of new ICT technologies, such as Cloud Computing, Big Data, IoT and Artificial Intelligence (AI), to create innovative operational models. Customer targeting has been one of the main marketing dilemmas in the past years, and one of the solutions seems to rely on recent IoT advancement. This paper presents a smart shopping solution architecture that covers image processing techniques used for digital maps generation, smartphone indoor localization using BLE beacons, and indoor routing techniques for finding stores in a shopping center. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using BLE technology for indoor localization and the results after experimenting with several BLE devices and mobile application SDKs. Our objective was to advance an innovative solution based on computer vision techniques meant to ease the process of creating indoor maps by hand. Also, we focused on the development of best practices guide for using mobile applications in the retail industry and education of buyers, including an interactive questionnaire for getting feedback regarding improvement of Android application design. Furthermore, the solution can be used to orient and educate customers during their shopping activities for using smart mobile applications. Thus, our smart shopping platform is based on an enriched mobile application (MARA - Mobile Augmented Reality Applications) that offers a range of services and functions based on augmented reality through the implementation of communication interfaces with various IoT devices - beacons or smart parking sensors. WSNs plays a central role in the IoT environment, especially to the advancement of energy-efficient and low latency communications. Our smart shopping solution advances the integration of intelligent parking sensors based on LoRa communication. We will describe the integration of these sensors with TTN (The Things Network) global network and the methodology for LoRa data packages decoding and further integration with a WEB application.

Suciu George, Pasat Adrian, Istrate Cristiana, Balanean Cristian. Smart shopping platform based on digital map generation and indoor localization services. eLearning sustainment for never-ending learning: Proceedings of the 16th International Scientific Conference "eLearning and Software for Education" Bucharest, April 23-24, 2020, Volume 2 | DOI: 10.12753/2066-026X-20-117 | Pages: 253-260. »»»
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There are emergency situations which affect a smaller number of households (fires, gas leakages, floods) but which are prone to extend and damage furthermore adjacent areas (neighbourhoods, large buildings) and increase the life and material losses. An efficient solution proposed in this paper comprises a collaborative IoT platform that monitors each neighbourhood and alerts the inhabitants and the response teams when a danger occurs either in their households or in other neighbouring buildings. In order to cover a large area and to reduce the costs related to energy consumption, the solution described uses LoRa technology for monitoring and WiFi communication only for alerting purposes. In this paper, a testbed was also proposed and fire scenarios were investigated.

A. Dragulinescu, A. Dragulinescu, C. Zamfirescu, S. Halunga and G. Suciu, "Smart Neighbourhood: LoRa-based environmental monitoring and emergency management collaborative IoT platform," 2019 22nd International Symposium on Wireless Personal Multimedia Communications (WPMC), Lisbon, Portugal, 2019, pp. 1-6, doi: 10.1109/WPMC48795.2019.9096192. »»»
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