The habilitation thesis presents two main directions: 1. Exploiting data from social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc.) - creating resources for text and image processing (classification, retrieval, credibility, diversification, etc.); 2. Creating applications with new technologies: augmented reality (eLearning, games, smart museums, gastronomy, etc.), virtual reality (eLearning and games), speech processing with Amazon Alexa (eLearning, entertainment, IoT, etc.). The work was validated with good results in evaluation campaigns like CLEF (Question Answering, Image CLEF, LifeCLEF, etc.), SemEval (Sentiment and Emotion in text, Anorexia, etc.).

1. Exploiting Social Networks.
Technological Trends
Habilitation Thesis
Adrian Iftene
adiftene@info.uaic.ro
Iasi, 13 January, 2020
“Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași, Romania
Faculty of Computer Science
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2. Content
 PhD Thesis
 Artificial Intelligence
 Distributed Systems
 Results
 Habilitation Thesis
 Exploiting Social Networks
 Technological Trends
 Results
 Future Work
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3. PhD Thesis - March 2009
 Artificial Intelligence
 Textual Entailment
 Question Answering
 Answer Validation Exercise
 Distributed Systems
 P2P Networks
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4. Artificial Intelligence – Textual Entailment
 (Dagan et al., 2005) We say that a text T entails a hypothesis H if, typically, a human
reading T would infer that H is most likely true
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 Iftene, A., Balahur-Dobrescu, A. 2007. Hypothesis Transformation and Semantic Variability Rules Used in Recognizing
Textual Entailment. In Proceedings of the ACL-PASCAL Workshop on Textual Entailment and Paraphrasing. Pp.125-130.
28-29 June, Prague, Czech Republic. – workshop rang A*
 Iftene, A., Balahur-Dobrescu, A. 2008. Named Entity Relation Mining Using Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the Sixth
International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08). ISBN: 2-9517408-4-0, EAN: 9782951740846. 28-30 May,
Marrakech, Morocco. – rang C

5. Artificial Intelligence – Question Answering
 Question Answering (QA) can be defined as the task which takes a question in natural
language and produces one or more ranked answers from a collection of documents.
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6. Distributed System – P2P Network
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 Iftene, A., Balahur-Dobrescu, A. and Matei, D. 2007. A Distributed Architecture System for Recognizing Textual Entailment. In Proceedings of 9th International Symposium
on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing (SYNASC 2007). Pp. 219-226. Published by the IEEE Computer Society. ISBN 0-7695-3078-8. September 26-29,
Timişoara, România. – rang C
 Iftene, A. 2008. Building a Textual Entailment System for the RTE3 Competition. Application to a QA System. In Proceedings of 10th International Symposium on Symbolic
and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing (SYNASC 2008), Published by the IEEE Computer Society, ISBN 978-0-7695-3523-4, Pp. 118-124. September 26-29,
Timişoara, România. – rang C

7. PhD Thesis Publications and Research Projects
 Between 2006 and 2009 – 35 papers
 Rang C – 3 publications at Synasc, 5 publications indexed in LNCS (CLEF), 1 publication
at LREC
 Workshop at ACL Conference of Rang A* - 1 publications (with 52 citations)
 ConsILR, TAC, ECIT, SACC, RANLP, CLEF
 Journal Computer Science Journal of Moldova, Journal "Research in Computing
Science“, International Journal of Computers, Communications & Control
 Member in 11 Research Projects
 NLP, Computational Optimization, Software Engineering
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8. Habilitation Thesis
 Exploiting Social Networks
 Social Media Credibility
 Sentiment Analysis
 Image Retrieval
 Graphic View of Information on Twitter
 Participation in Evaluation Campaigns
 Technological Trends
 Augmented Reality
 Virtual Reality
 Amazon Alexa
 Future Work
 Social Networks
 Medical Domain
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9. Social Networks
 Free resources for our applications: textual information and multimedia
content (images, movies, audio files)
 MUCKE project – create a resource with ~ 90 million annotated images (from
Flickr network), image retrieval, image results diversification
 User profiling and managing crisis situations
 Opinion mining and sentiment identification
 Fake news and users identification
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10. Motivation
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11. MUCKE Project
 Multimedia and User Credibility Knowledge Extraction
 Project type: ERA-NET CHIST-ERA
 Project number: 2 CHIST-ERA/01.10.2012
 Vienna University of Technology, Austria
 Bilkent University, Turkey
 “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University, Iasi, Romania
 Center for Alternative and Atomic Energy, France
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12. Concept – “Bottle”
 Bottle
 Sticlă
 бутылка
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13. MUCKE Project – Architecture
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14. MUCKE Publications
 Iftene, A. 2017. Using Text Processing in a Multimedia Environment. UAIC Activities in MUCKE Project. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. Craiova, 11-12 September 2017.
 Micu, A., Iftene, A. 2016. Semantic diversification of text search results. In 8th International Conference on Computational Collective Intelligence. Vol. 9876, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), ISSN 0302-9743,
Springer International Publishing, Pp. 78-88. 28-30 September 2016, Halkidiki, Greece. – rang C
 Iftene, A., Baboi, A.M. 2016. Using semantic resources in image retrieval. 20th International Conference on Knowledge Based and Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, KES2016, Vol. 96, Pp. 436-445, Elsevier. 5-7
September 2016, York, United Kingdom. – rang B
 Șerban, C., Alboaie, L., Iftene, A. 2016. Image and user profile-based recommendation system. In Workshop on Social Media and the Web of Linked Data (RUMOUR 2015) at EUROLAN 2015 Summer School on Linguistic Linked
Open Data. 18 July 2015, Sibiu, Romania. Springer International Publishing Switzerland. D. Trandabăț and D. Gîfu (Eds.): EUROLAN 2015, CCIS 588, pp. 1-16, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-32942-0_5.
 Bejan, I. M., Iftene, A., Gifu, D. 2015. A lexical discourse analysis framework. The 11th International Conference on Linguistic Resources and Tools for Processing the Romanian Language, 26-27 November, Iasi. Pp. 111-124
 Neamțu, C., Iftene, A. 2015. Diversifying Search Results Using Semantic Resources. Revista Română de Interacțiune Om-Calculator, ISSN 2344-1690, pp. 133-136, 24-25 Septembrie, Bucuresti
 Gînscă, A. L., Popescu, A., Lupu, M., Iftene, A., Kanellos, I. 2015. Evaluating User Image Tagging Credibility. In CLEF 2015 Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum. Experimental IR meets Multilinguality, Multimodality,
and Interaction. 8-11 September 2015, Toulouse, France.
 Calfa, A., Silion, D., Bursuc, A. C., Acatrinei, C. P., Lupu, R. I., Cozma, A. E., Pădurariu, C., Iftene, A. 2015. Using Textual and Visual Processing in Scalable Concept Image Annotation Challenge. In Notebook Paper for the
CLEF 2015 LABs Workshop - ImageCLEF2015. 8-11 September 2015, Toulouse, France.
 Breabăn, M., Iftene, A. 2015. Dynamic Objective Sampling in Many-objective Optimization. In Knowledge-Based and Intelligent Information & Engineering Systems 19th Annual Conference, KES-2015, Singapore, September 2015
Proceedings. Elsevier. Procedia Computer Science, vol. 60, pp. 178-187. – rang B
 Șerban, C., Alboaie, L., Iftene, A. 2015. Image and user profile-based recommendation system. In Workshop on Social Media and the Web of Linked Data (RUMOUR 2015) at EUROLAN 2015 Summer School on Linguistic Linked
Open Data. 18 July 2015, Sibiu, Romania.
 Micu, A., Iftene, A. 2015. Semantic diversification of text search results. In Doctoral Consortium at EUROLAN 2015 Summer School on Linguistic Linked Open Data. 18 July 2015, Sibiu, Romania.
 Epure, C., Iftene, A. 2015. Semantic Analysis of Source Code in Object Oriented Programming. A Case Study for C#. In Doctoral Consortium at EUROLAN 2015 Summer School on Linguistic Linked Open Data. 18 July 2015, Sibiu,
Romania.
 Laic, A., Gherasim, L., Iftene, A. 2015. Big Collection of Annotated Images. In Doctoral Consortium at EUROLAN 2015 Summer School on Linguistic Linked Open Data. 18 July 2015, Sibiu, Romania.
 Sirițeanu, A., Iftene, A. 2014. Folosirea resuselor semantice Într-un sistem ce permite căutarea de imagini. Revista Română de Interacțiune Om-Calculator 7(4). ISSN 1843-4460.
 Laic, A. A., Iftene, A. 2014. Automatic Image Annotation with Romanian Keywords. In BringITon! 2014 Catalogue. Pp. 46-47, ISSN 2285-0929, 14-15 November, 2014, Iasi.
 Sirițeanu, A., Iftene, A. 2014. Image Search Results Diversification. In BringITon! 2014 Catalogue. Pp. 48-49, ISSN 2285-0929, 14-15 November, 2014, Iasi.
 Gherasim, L., Iftene, A. 2014. Extracting Background Knowledge about the World from the Text. In BringITon! 2014 Catalogue. Pp. 50-51, ISSN 2285-0929, 14-15 November, 2014, Iasi.
 Iftene, A., Alboaie, L. 2014. Diversification in an image retrieval system based on text and image processing. In Computer Science Journal of Moldova, vol.22, no.3(66), pp. 339-348, ISSN 1561-4042.
 Iftene, A., Sirițeanu, A., Petic, M. 2014. How to Do Diversification in an Image Retrieval System. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference "Linguistic Resources and Tools for Processing the Romanian Language",
Craiova, 18-19 September 2014, ISSN 1843-911X, pp. 153-162.
 Laic, A., Iftene, A. 2014. Automatic Image Annotation. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference "Linguistic Resources and Tools for Processing the Romanian Language", Craiova, 18-19 September 2014, pp. 143-152.
 Gherasim, L. M., Iftene, A. 2014. Extracting Background Knowledge about World from Text. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference "Linguistic Resources and Tools for Processing the Romanian Language", Craiova,
18-19 September 2014, ISSN 1843-911X, pp. 199-208.
 Iftene, A., Alboaie, L., Șerban, C., Sirițeanu, A. 2014. Căutarea de imagini pe baza conținutului și a metadatelor asociate. In a 11a Conferință Națională Om-Calculator - RoCHI 2014. Constanța, 4-5 Septembrie 2014.
 Iftene, A., Alboaie, L. 2014. Diversification in an image retrieval system. IMCS-50. The Third Conference of Mathematical Society of the Republic of Moldova dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the Institute
of Mathematics and Computer Science. August 19-23, 2014, Chisinau, Republic of Moldova.
 Petrea, T., Iftene, A. 2013. Criminal detection. An aplication for criminal identification. Revista Romana de Interactiune Om-Calculator, Vol. 6, No. 4, Pp. 357-376, ISSN 1843-4460.
 Epure, C., Sirițeanu, A., Iftene, A. 2013. Image search results diversification. In Studia Universitatis, Babes Bolyai, Volume LVIII, Number 4, 2013, Pp. 49-64, Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
 Iftene, A. Moruz, A., Ignat, E. 2013. Using Anaphora resolution in a Question Answering system for Machine Reading Evaluation. Notebook Paper for the CLEF 2013 LABs Workshop - QA4MRE, 23-26 September, Valencia, Spain.
 Șerban, C., Sirițeanu, A., Gheorghiu, C., Iftene, A., Alboaie, L., Breabăn, M. 2013. Combining image retrieval, metadata processing and naive Bayes classification at Plant Identification 2013. Notebook Paper for the CLEF 2013
LABs Workshop - QA4MRE, 23-26 September, Valencia, Spain.
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15. Search Images using Google
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16. Search Images using Semantic Resources
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17. Querying the YAGO ontology
 Simple query – only extract concepts from Yago (Example: Museum)
 Complex query – we extract S-V-O and we use the subject to extract
concepts from Yago (Example: tennis players born after 1980)
 We search connections between subject and WordNet concepts or Wikipedia
categories
 Then, verb and object are used in filtering process
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 Iftene, A., Baboi, A.M. 2016. Using semantic resources in image retrieval. In 20th International Conference on
Knowledge Based and Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, KES2016, Vol. 96, Pp. 436-445, Elsevier.
5-7 September 2016, York, United Kingdom. – rang B

18. Choosing which YAGO entities to use in
crawling Flickr database
 The problem: in YAGO ontology we have thousands of instances for
concepts. So, which instances to select from these?
 Solution 1: we use Google and performed parallel searches for every
concept and select the concepts using “number of pages returned” – time
consuming
 Solution 2: we use a parameter from YAGO which keep the size of
Wikipedia page for a specific instance – very fast and very good quality
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19. Concept Identification in YAGO
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20. Image Retrieval – Diversification with YAGO
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21. News on Twitter https://youtu.be/wWscv21UiPc
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 Atodiresei, C. S., Tănăselea, A., Iftene, A. 2018. Identifying Fake News and Fake Users on Twitter. In Proceedings of International Conference on Knowledge Based and
Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, KES2018, 3-5 September 2018, Belgrade, Serbia. Procedia Computer Science Vol. 126, 2018, pp. 451-461. – rang B
 Cușmuliuc, C. G., Coca, L. G., Iftene, A. 2018. Identifying Fake News on Twitter using Naive Bayes, SVM and Random Forest Distributed Algorithms. Proceedings of The
13th Edition of the International Conference on Linguistic Resources and Tools for Processing Romanian Language (ConsILR-2018). ISSN: 1843-911X, pp. 177-188

22. Twitter – Tweets and users credibility
 Tweets credibility (retweet score, favorite score, ratio of relevant words, sentiment score)
 Users credibility (location, URL, description, verified, geolocation, creation date, last 20 tweets)
 Neural networks
 five input neurons for: (1) the retweet score, (2) the favorite score, (3) the relevant words ratio, (4)
the number of hashtags and (5) the number of hashtags characters
 one output neuron that produces a value between 0 and 1 (> 0.6 is credible)
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23. Twitter - Users Monitoring - Donald Trump
 one of his tweets that causes divided opinions
through his supporters
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24. Comparison between Twitter users
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25. Twitter - Sentiment Analysis
 Opinions about products, politicians, events, organizations, diseases
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26. Twitter – Event Detection
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 Iftene, A., Dudu, M. Ş., Miron, A. R. 2017. Scalable system for opinion mining on Twitter data. Dynamic visualization for data related to
refugees' crisis and to terrorist attacks. In 26th International Conference on Information Systems Development, ISBN: 978-9963-2288-3-6.
Larnaca, Cyprus, September 6-8, 2017. – rang A

27. Participating in Evaluation Campaigns
 CLEF evaluation campaigns
 ImageCLEF (PlantIdentification, Tuberculosis, Scalable Concept Image Annotation Challenge)
 CheckThat!, QA4MRE, GeoLife, Machine Reading Evaluation
 SemEval evaluation campaigns
 Contextual Emotion Detection in Text, Discovering Humorous Tweets, Discover Word
Similarity and Identification of Sentiments in Tweets
 Good results, participation at CLEF conferences, collaborations (MUCKE project
is result of such collaborations)
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28. Habilitation Thesis
 Exploiting Social Networks
 Social Media Credibility
 Sentiment Analysis
 Image Retrieval
 Graphic View of Information on Twitter
 Participation in Evaluation Campaigns
 Technological Trends
 Augmented Reality
 Virtual Reality
 Amazon Alexa
 Future Work
 Social Networks
 Medical Domain
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29. What is “augmented reality”?
 Augmented Reality (AR) content can be accessed by scanning or viewing a trigger image with a
mobile device that creates a subsequent action [1]
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30. Augmented Reality Domains
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31. Virtual Reality Domains
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32. 32

33. Publications (AR/VR)
 Iftene, A. 2019. Folosirea realității virtuale în educație. In Lucrările Simpozionului Interdiciplinar "Noi Perspective ale Educației
în Era Digitală", nr. 1, ediția I, ISSN 2668-473X, Iasi, Romania, 2019.
 Porfireanu, A., Ungurean, A., Dascălu, A., Iftene, A., Gîfu, D. 2019. Smart Museums with Augmented Reality. In 5th Proceedings
of the Conference on Mathematical Foundations of Informatics. Pp. 285-294. 3-6 July 2019, Iasi, Romania.
 Gușă, D. E., Iftene, A., Gîfu, D. 2019. Solar System Explorer. In 5th Proceedings of the Conference on Mathematical Foundations
of Informatics. Pp. 295-304. 3-6 July 2019, Iasi, Romania.
 Chițaniuc, M., Iftene, A. 2018. GeoAR-An Augmented Reality Application to Learn Geography. In Romanian Journal of Human-
Computer Interaction, vol. 11, issue 2, pp. 93-108.
 Macariu, C., Iftene, A. 2018. ARChemistry Learn - Augmented reality. In BringITon! 2018 Catalogue. Pp. 36-37, ISSN 228-0926,
13-14 December, 2018, Iasi.
 Chițaniuc, M., Miron, B., Iftene, A. 2018. Using Augmented Reality in Gastronomy. In BringITon! 2018 Catalogue. Pp. 40-41, ISSN
228-0926, 13-14 December, 2018, Iasi.
 Gușă, D. E., Iftene, A. 2018. Solar System Explorer - Virtual Reality. In BringITon! 2018 Catalogue. Pp. 32-33, ISSN 228-0926, 13-
14 December, 2018, Iasi.
 Chițaniuc, M., Miron, B., Iftene, A. 2018. FoodAR - An Augmented Reality Application used in Gastronomy. Proceedings of the
15th Conference on Human Computer Interaction - RoCHI 2018, pp. 18-23, 3-4 September 2018, Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
 Iftene, A., Trandabăț, D. 2018. Enhancing the Attractiveness of Learning through Augmented Reality. In Proceedings of
International Conference on Knowledge Based and Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, KES2018, 3-5 September
2018, Belgrade, Serbia. Procedia Computer Science Vol. 126, 2018, pp. 166-175. – rang B
 Păduraru, B. M., Iftene, A. 2017. Tower Defense with Augmented Reality. Proceedings of the 14th Conference on Human
Computer Interaction - RoCHI 2017, ISSN 2501-9422, ISSN-L 2501-9422, pp. 113-118, 11-12 September 2017, Craiova, Romania.
 Pinzariu, M.N., Iftene, A. 2016. Sphero - Multiplayer Augmented Game (SMAUG). In International Conference on Human-
Computer Interaction, Pp. 46-49, 8-9 September 2016, Iasi, Romania.
 Arusoaie, A., Cristei, A. I., Chircu, C., Livadariu, M. A., Manea, V., Iftene, A. 2010. Augmented Reality. In Proceedings of 12th
International Symposium on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing (SYNASC 2010), Published by the IEEE
Computer Society, ISBN 978-0-7695-4324-6, Pp. 502-509. September 23-26, Timişoara, România. – rang C
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34. Amazon Alexa – Voice control
 Learn Geography and Music History
 Iasi City Explorer
 Smart Home
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 Filimon, M., Iftene, A., Trandabăț, D. 2019. Using Games and Smart Devices to Enhance Learning
Geography and Music History. In 28th International Conference on Information Systems Development
(ISD2019), August 28-30, Toulon, France. – rang A
 Miluț, C., Iftene, A., Gîfu, D. 2019. Iasi City Explorer - Alexa, what we can do today? In Proceedings
of the 16th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction RoCHI 2019, pp. 139-144, ISSN
2501-9422, ISSN-L 2501-9422, 17-18 October, Politehnica University of Bucharest, Romania

35. 35

36. Eyes and Gestures control
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37. Publications and Research Projects after PhD Thesis
 After March 2009 – 173 papers
 Rang A – 4 publications ISD, 1 in Journal Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation (Impact Factor 4.198)
 Rang B – 7 KES, 1 Cicling
 Rang C – 2 publications at Synasc, 9 publications indexed in LNCS (CLEF, ICCC), 1 publication at ICCP
 Workshop at ACL Conference of Rang A* - 1 publications (with 23 citations)
 ConsILR, CLEF, ROCHI, MFOI, SemEval, BringItOn, RoEduNet, Sped, etc.
 Journal Computer Science Journal of Moldova, International Journal of Computers, Communications
& Control, Romanian Journal of Human-Computer Interaction
 Coordinator in 3 Research Projects (MUCKE, Evalsys, CompetIt&C), Member in 10 Research
Projects, Scientific Advisor (STAGES)
 NLP, Computer Vision, Computational Optimization, Software Engineering, AR/VR
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38. Habilitation Thesis
 Exploiting Social Networks
 Social Media Credibility
 Sentiment Analysis
 Image Retrieval
 Graphic View of Information on Twitter
 Participation in Evaluation Campaigns
 Technological Trends
 Augmented Reality
 Virtual Reality
 Amazon Alexa
 Future Work
 Social Networks
 Medical Domain
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39. Future Work – Social Networks
 Identification of Fake News in Real Time
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40. Future Work
 Medical Domain
 Social Networks
 Atrial Fibrillation
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41. Future Work – Medical Domain - AVC
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42. Future Work – Image Processing
 Crack Identification
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43. Future Work – Botanical Garden
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44. Mulțumesc!
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45. Bibliography
[1] https://www.edsurge.com/news/2015-11-02-how-to-transform-your-classroom-with-augmented-reality
[2] http://www.augment.com/blog/5-reasons-use-augmented-reality-education/
[3] http://www.extremetech.com/tag/oculus-rift
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass
[5] https://www.iinteractive.com/notebook/2014/03/21/leap.html
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