In 1965 Lotfi A. Zadeh published "Fuzzy Sets", his pioneering and controversialpaper, that now reaches almost 100,000 citations. All Zadeh’s papers were citedover 185,000 times. Starting from the ideas presented in that paper, Zadeh foundedlater the Fuzzy Logic theory, that proved to have useful applications, from consumerto industrial intelligent products. We are presenting general aspects of Zadeh’s contributionsto the development of Soft Computing(SC) and Artificial Intelligence(AI),and also his important and early influence in the world and in Romania. Severalearly contributions in fuzzy sets theory were published by Romanian scientists, suchas: Grigore C. Moisil (1968), Constantin V. Negoita & Dan A. Ralescu (1974), DanButnariu (1978). In this review we refer the papers published in "From Natural Languageto Soft Computing: New Paradigms in Artificial Intelligence" (2008, Eds.: L.A.Zadeh, D. Tufis, F.G. Filip, I. Dzitac), and also from the two special issues (SI) of theInternational Journal of Computers Communications & Control (IJCCC, founded in2006 by I. Dzitac, F.G. Filip & M.J. Manolescu; L.A. Zadeh joined in 2008 to editorialboard). In these two SI, dedicated to the 90th birthday of Lotfi A. Zadeh (2011), andto the 50th anniversary of "Fuzzy Sets" (2015), were published some papers authoredby scientists from Algeria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, Hungary, Greece, Germany,Japan, Lithuania, Mexico, Pakistan, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Spain,Taiwan, UK and USA.

This paper describes our experience in using e-learning platforms to support face to face instruction in academic field. We used Moodle as interactive e-learning tool to motivate students and involve them in resolving single and collaborative homework tasks. However, while many universities in the world use e-learning platforms, in our case this was for the first time used and it was a great teaching/learning experience. This paper aims to be easy to read and understand by proving the importance of using e-learning platforms in higher education

Web-based adaptive collaborative learning environments are more often used to support face to face teaching activities. This paper describes how the educational process may be improved and students may be motivated to do homework tasks and to attend classes in higher education. We describe the implementation and use of e-learning platforms and present our experience in using such platforms in our faculty. The performance of two groups of students is analyzed. The analysis focuses on two aspects: attendance on classes and homework tasks submission. Therefore, the first group had no contact with e-learning environment and they had to attend classes in a traditional way (face-to-face interaction) and to submit their homework via e-mail. The second group had to attend classes and also to use an e-learning platform where they could access course resources and homework tasks. They had also to submit their homework via the platform, while respecting a strict deadline and using the professors’ feedback to improve their homework quality. This paper highlights the importance and the benefits of using collaborative e-learning platforms in higher education to support face to face teaching

Flexibility of manufacturing systems is an essential factor in maintaining the competitiveness of industrial production. Flexibility can be defined in several ways and according to several factors, but in order to obtain adequate results in implementing a flexible manufacturing system able to compete on the market, a high level of autonomy (free of human intervention) of the manufacturing system must be achieved. There are many factors that can disturb the production process and reduce the autonomy of the system, because of the need of human intervention to overcome these disturbances. One of these factors is tool wear. The aim of this paper is to present an experimental study on the possibility to determine the state of tool wear in a flexible manufacturing cell environment, using image acquisition and processing methods.