This paper presents an approach to enhance electronic traveling aids (ETAs) for people who are blind and severely visually impaired (BSVI) using indoor orientation and guided navigation by employing social outsourcing of indoor route mapping and assistance processes. This type of approach is necessary because GPS does not work well, and infrastructural investments are absent or too costly to install for indoor navigation. Our approach proposes the prior outsourcing of vision-based recordings of indoor routes from an online network of seeing volunteers, who gather and constantly update a web cloud database of indoor routes using specialized sensory equipment and web services. Computational intelligence-based algorithms process sensory data and prepare them for BSVI usage. In this way, people who are BSVI can obtain ready-to-use access to the indoor routes database. This type of service has not previously been offered in such a setting. Specialized wearable sensory ETA equipment, depth cameras, smartphones, computer vision algorithms, tactile and audio interfaces, and computational intelligence algorithms are employed for that matter. The integration of semantic data of points of interest (such as stairs, doors, WC, entrances/exits) and evacuation schemes could make the proposed approach even more attractive to BVSI users. Presented approach crowdsources volunteers’ real-time online help for complex navigational situations using a mobile app, a live video stream from BSVI wearable cameras, and digitalized maps of buildings’ evacuation schemes.

The e-government as a result of innovations, emerging technology and internet expansion is a reality today and became a necessity for any country wishing to enter the 21st century as a competitive nation in the world arena. The processes are constantly changing and continue to drive and provide opportunities and open new possibilities for e-government development.The evolution of society requires public administrations to tackle many new challenges and changes. All these evolutionary changes demand the further development of government solutions to meet the challenges and new adequate requirements. After the solution is developed, it must be assessed whether those requirements have been met. There are a number of published research papers on models that aim to evaluate e-government but most of them are focused on some particular purposes and objectives, types of evaluation perspectives. However, there is no evaluation model that could be directly adapted to e-government development in each country or each organization or each service in the country.In this paper, a reference model for e-government monitoring, evaluation and benchmarking is proposed. The model is not associated with any particular e-government definition and/or model, evaluation purpose, dimension or criterion. It could be adapted to many specific cases in the process of design of specific models for monitoring, evaluation or benchmarking of e-government or e-government service.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.ee.26.3.8128

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms have demonstrated significant potential in showcasing robotic capabilities within virtual environments. However, applying DRL for practical robot development in realistic simulators like Webots remains challenging due to limitations in existing frameworks, such as complex dependencies and reliance on unrealistic control paradigms like a ‘supervisor’. This study introduces an open-source framework and a novel pattern-based method designed to facilitate the exploration of robot learning capabilities through reinforcement learning algorithms in specialized virtual testing environments built on Webots. Our approach simplifies setup by avoiding burdensome external package installations and, crucially, removes the dependency on an unrealistic ‘supervisor’ entity, offering a more practical and real-world-aligned solution. Designed to leverage Webots’ realistic simulation capabilities, the proposed method and system are validated through various examples, ranging from the classic inverted pendulum scenario to a production robot utilized in an actual assembly line. The developed code and examples are publicly accessible on GitHub for the deep reinforcement learning research community.

The shift toward remote and automated admission processes in higher education introduces new challenges, including evaluator subjectivity and risks of applicant fraud. The FAIR-VID project addresses these issues by developing an artificial intelligence system that integrates multimodal data fusion with semi-supervised deep learning to assess applicant video interviews, submitted documents, and form data. This paper presents the project’s data preprocessing pipeline, designed to fuse heterogeneous modalities and to support seamless interaction between AI agents and human decision-makers throughout the admission workflow. The proposed process is intentionally general, making it applicable not only to international university admissions but also to broader human resource management and hiring contexts. Emphasis is placed on the need for robust and transparent AI adoption in admission and recruitment, supported by open-source modules and models at every stage of interaction between applicants and institutions. As a proof of concept, we provide open-source solutions for the analysis of video interviews, images, and documents enriched with semantic descriptions generated by large multimodal and complementary AI models. The paper details the multi-phase implementation of this pipeline to create structured, semantically rich datasets suitable for training advanced deep learning systems for comprehensive applicant assessment and fraud detection.

This paper presents a new method for semantic parsing with upper ontologies using FrameNet annotations and BERT-based sentence context distributed representations. The proposed method leverages WordNet upper ontology mapping and PropBank-style semantic role labeling and it is designed for long text parsing. Given a PropBank, FrameNet and WordNet-labeled corpus, a model is proposed that annotates the set of semantic roles with upper ontology concept names. These annotations are used for the identification of predicates and arguments that are relevant for virtual reality simulators in a 3D world with a built-in physics engine. It is shown that state-of-the-art results can be achieved in relation to semantic role labeling with upper ontology concepts. Additionally, a manually annotated corpus was created using this new method and is presented in this study. It is suggested as a benchmark for future studies relevant to semantic parsing.