Informatica 40 (2016) 375–376 375 
Editors' Introduction to the Special Issue on ‟Applications in 
Information Technology” 
Towards Better Human-Centric Solutions in Information Technology Applications 
 
This special issue includes five revised and extended 
papers presented at the 2nd Conference on Applications 
in Information Technology (ICAIT-2016) held in Aizu-
Wakamatsu (Japan) between October 6th to 8th, 2016. 
This conference was organized by the University of Aizu 
in collaboration with international academic partners 
from Peter the Great Saint-Petersburg Polytechnic 
University, Saint-Petersburg State University, and 
Novosibirsk State University. The primary objective of 
the conference was to foster rich creativity of students 
and young scientists and to encourage them to participate 
actively in open discussions with their colleagues, 
advancing the design, development, use, and evaluation 
of information technology applications from many 
respected research institutions all around the world. 
ICAIT-2016 accumulated good traditions established 
in the past conferences organized by the University of 
Aizu including The Conference on Humans and 
Computers in 1998-2010, its successor, The 2012 Joint 
International Conference on Human-Centered Computer 
Environments and The 2015 International Workshop on 
Applications in Information Technology. After event 
completion we are assured that the conference meetings 
and discussions facilitated significantly numerous 
partnership research activities. As guest editors, we 
particularly thank Informatica journal for giving us an 
excellent opportunity to publish the extended versions of 
the distinguished conference papers in the Special Issue 
on Applications in Information Technology. 
For this issue we selected a number of works which 
pay particular attention to advancing human-centric 
solutions in the huge domain of information technology 
applications. Our authors address such important areas as 
developing approaches for computer-assisted learning in 
mathematics, data acquisition and visualization for the 
purpose of human emotion analysis, improving models 
and algorithms used in urban computing, enhancing 
quality of current recommendation systems, as well as 
modeling, design and verification of power efficient 
hardware systems. All the presented works are in strong 
connection to the current trends in developing better 
social and technology environments used in a wide range 
of present day human-centric systems. 
The authors of the article “Mathematical Equation 
Structural Syntactical Similarity Patterns: A Tree 
Overlapping Algorithm and Its Evaluation” (Evgeny 
Pyshkin and Mikhail Ponomarev) investigate possible 
improvements of tree overlapping algorithms for the case 
of mathematical equations structural syntactical 
similarity. The work addresses the case of using such 
algorithms for educational purposes, particularly, for 
finding appropriate test and exam preparation exercises. 
The article “Analysis of Emotions in Real-time Twitter 
Streams” (Yuki Kobayashi, Myriam Munezero, and 
Maxim Mozgovoy) presents a system for visualizing 
discussions and emotions of Twitter users in real time 
over a specific geographical location. The authors 
describe the existing implementation by using a couple 
of examples illustrating the process of exploring and 
comparing ongoing discussions. The article “OD-Matrix 
Estimation based on a Dual Formulation of Traffic 
Assignment Problem” (Alexander Yu. Krylatov, 
Anastasiia P. Shirokolobova, and Victor V. Zakharov) is 
devoted to problems of improving traffic assignment 
algorithms used in modern urban computing systems. 
Particular attention is paid to the process of decision 
making while processing big volumes of transportation 
data describing travel demands between travel origins 
and destinations. The focus of the article “Design of an 
Asynchronous Processor with Bundled-Data 
Implementation on a Commercial Field Programmable 
Gate Array” is on improving design and modeling tools 
for developing hardware systems using asynchronous 
control circuits. The authors specifically address the 
aspects of increasing computational performance with 
making significant efforts in reducing energy 
consumption which is one of urgent needs in advancing 
smart and environment friendly systems. Finally, the 
authors of the paper “Performance Comparison of 
Featured Neural Network Trained with Backpropagation 
and Delta Rule Techniques for Movie Rating Prediction 
in Multi-Criteria Recommender Systems” (Mohammed 
Hassan and Mohamed Hamada) examine current trends 
in the area of recommendation systems and describe a 
multi-criteria recommendation technique using 
feedforward neural network for model user preference 
modeling. 
We are pleased to acknowledge the great efforts of 
ICAIT-2016 organizers. We would like specially 
mention the conference honorary chairs Prof. Ryuichi 
Oka, President of the University of Aizu, Prof. Leon 
Petrosjan, Dean of the Faculty of Applied mathematics – 
Control Processes of Saint-Petersburg State University, 
Prof. Vladimir Zaborovsky, Director of the Institute of 
Computer Science and Technology of Saint-Petersburg 
Polytechnic University, and Prof. Mikhail M. Lavrentiev, 
Dean of the Faculty of Information Technologies of 
Novosibirsk State University. 
We would like to express our great appreciation to 
the program committee members who reviewed the 
conference submissions and ensured high quality of 
published papers. Among them we thank Thomas Baar 
(Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin, 
Germany), Natalia Bogach (Peter the Great Saint- 
Petersburg Polytechnic University, Russia), Paolo 
Bottoni (University of Rome, Italy), John Brine 
(University of Aizu, Japan), Alfredo Capozucca 
(University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg), Hapugahage 
376 Informatica 40 (2016) 375–376 E. Pyshkin et al. 
 
Thilak Chaminda (Informatics Institute of Technology, 
Sri Lanka), Ruth Patricia Cortez (Simulatio, Japan), 
Vlatko Davidovski (Cognizant Business Consulting, 
Switzerland), Vladimir Dobrynin (Saint-Petersburg State 
University, Russia), Mikhail Glukhikh (JetBrains, Peter 
the Great Saint-Petersburg Polytechnic University, 
Russia), Nicolas Guelfi (University of Luxembourg, 
Luxembourg), Mohamed Hamada (University of Aizu, 
Japan), Yannis Haralambous (Institut Mines-Télécom, 
Télécom Bretagne, France), Houcine Hassan (Universitat 
Politècnica de València, Spain), Vladimir Itsykson (Peter 
the Great Saint-Petersburg Polytechnic University, 
Russia), Qun Jin (Waseda University, Japan), Sergei 
Krutolevich (Belarusian Russian University, Belarus), 
Andrey Kuznetsov (Motorola Solutions Inc., Russia), 
Petri Laitinen (Karelia University of Applied Sciences, 
Finland), Ruediger Lunde (Ulm University of Applied 
Sciences, Germany), Viacheslav Marakhovsky (Peter the 
Great Saint- Petersburg Polytechnic University, Russia), 
Calkin Suero Montero (University of Eastern Finland, 
Finland), Maxim Mozgovoy (University of Aizu, Japan), 
Kendall Nygard (North Dakota State University, USA), 
Kohei Ohno (Meiji University, Japan), Mikhail 
Okrepilov (Peter the Great Saint-Petersburg Polytechnic 
University, Russia), Vladimir Oleshchuk (University of 
Adger, Norway), Benoît Ries (University of 
Luxembourg, Luxembourg), Alexey Romanenko 
(Novosibirsk State University, Russia), Hiroshi Saito 
(University of Aizu, Japan), Roman Shtykh (CyberAgent 
Inc, Japan), Nikolay Smirnov (Saint-Petersburg State 
University, Russia), Kari Smolander (Aalto University, 
Finland), Senzhang Wang (Nanjing University of 
Aeronautics and Astronautics, China), Ying-Hong Wang, 
(Tamkang University, Taiwan, China), Yang Zhibin 
(Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 
China). 
We also thank Prof. Matjaz Gams (managing editor 
of Informatica) for his support and very valuable 
comments which helped to improve this special issue 
significantly. 
This year, we are organizing a special session on 
Information Management in Human-Centric Systems 
(IMHCS’17) as an event of the 3rd IEEE International 
Conference on Cybernetics (IEEE CYBCONF 2017) to 
be held in Exeter, UK on June 21 – 23, 2017. We expect 
to continue our efforts in organizing high quality 
discussions of current trends in information acquisition, 
representation and processing in human-centric systems 
and applications. 
       
Evgeny Pyshkin 
Vitaly Klyuev 
Alexander Vazhenin