Animal welfare is a daily concern for livestock farmers. It is known that the activity of cows characterizes their general physiological state and deviations from the normal parameters could be an indicator of different kinds of diseases and conditions. This pilot study investigated the application of machine learning for identifying the behavioral activity of cows using a collar-mounted gyroscope sensor and compared the results with the classical accelerometer approach. The sensor data were classified into three categories, describing the behavior of the animals: “standing and eating”, “standing and ruminating”, and “laying and ruminating”. Four classification algorithms were considered—random forest ensemble (RFE), decision trees (DT), support vector machines (SVM), and naïve Bayes (NB). The training relied on manually classified data with a total duration of 6 h, which were grouped into 1s, 3s, and 5s piles. The obtained results showed that the RFE and DT algorithms performed the best. When using the accelerometer data, the obtained overall accuracy reached 88%; and when using the gyroscope data, the obtained overall accuracy reached 99%. To the best of our knowledge, no other authors have previously reported such results with a gyroscope sensor, which is the main novelty of this study.

This article describes a remote lab for fruit and vegetable drying, and discusses feedback from students who used the lab in their training. A major conclusion of the survey was that there is interest in the remote laboratory because it provides practical experience in the training of an automation and control engineer. It can be concluded that the remote laboratory has a positive effect on the students' perception and understanding of the real manufacturing process.

The generation of realistic electrical load profiles is essential for advancing smart grid analytics, demand forecasting, and privacy-preserving data sharing. Traditional approaches often rely on large, high-resolution datasets and complex recurrent neural architectures, which can be unstable or ineffective when training data are limited. This paper proposes a data-driven framework based on a lightweight 1D Convolutional Wasserstein GAN with Gradient Penalty (Conv1D-WGAN-GP) for generating high-fidelity synthetic 24 h load profiles. The model is specifically designed to operate on small- to medium-sized datasets, where recurrent models often fail due to overfitting or training instability. The approach leverages the ability of Conv1D layers to capture localized temporal patterns while remaining compact and stable during training. We benchmark the proposed model against vanilla GAN, WGAN-GP, and Conv1D-GAN across four datasets with varying consumption patterns and sizes, including industrial, agricultural, and residential domains. Quantitative evaluations using statistical divergence measures, Real-vs-Synthetic Distinguishability Score, and visual similarity confirm that Conv1D-WGAN-GP consistently outperforms baselines, particularly in low-data scenarios. This demonstrates its robustness, generalization capability, and suitability for privacy-sensitive energy modeling applications where access to large datasets is constrained.

Digital energy systems rely on actual data about power consumption and generation, which are not always available and, in certain situations, can be replaced with synthetic forms. This study presents a methodology for generating synthetic time-series data of electrical power consumers. It is based on the Markov chains theory, and unlike previous studies, the data are divided into hourly and hour-change monthly records, which leads to the generation of 48 transition matrices for each month. This study aimed to ensure statistical and probabilistic similarity between the original and synthetic data, which was assessed using the Frobenius distance, the coefficient of determination, variance, and standard deviation. The methodology was applied to three load profiles obtained from different types of consumers—domestic, agricultural, and industrial. In all three cases, the statistical and probabilistic characteristics of the generated data were very similar to those of the original datasets; however, the visual comparison showed that it is recommended to increase the number of states to lower the data scattering. Based on the results, recommendations are proposed on choosing the number of states for the transition matrices to optimize the statistical and probabilistic similarity. The described methodology can be used by experts involved in the design of systems with renewable energy sources and by scientists dealing with long-term studies.

The paper describes our experience with using social networks and especially Facebook as a learning environment. During the last five years we have collected statistical data from surveys with all students of our courses. The survey results show that the use of Facebook group improves learning process by extending the communication outside classes and helps students increase their interest and motivation. Most of the students are satisfied. They have better results and achieve more than they expected. There are more inconveniences for the lecturers, because they have to re-publish their materials (for each group) and follow the discussions in all groups.