International Student Projects and Sustainable Development Goals: A Perfect Match

Engineering Education is currently going through a transformation, driven by the need for educating better engineers and more engineers, and largely build on elements such as problem orientation, interdisciplinarity, internationalization, digitalization and sustainability. In 2020, the Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership EPIC (Improving Employability Through Internationalization and Collaboration) has combined all these elements, and demonstrated how international and interdisciplinary student projects, focusing on solving real-world problems related to sustainability, can be carried out in a setting where students mainly work together online. A total of 56 students from 7 EU and 2 international universities, with backgrounds ranging from Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering to Textile Technologies and Business Informatics were working on 9 different projects throughout the spring of 2020. The paper presents the experiences from the setup and discusses some general recommendations for setting up this type of projects. The paper goes through the stages of defining and carrying out the projects: Defining the overall framework, identifying problems/project proposals in collaboration with relevant stakeholders, identifying the students and assigning students to projects, preparing students and supervisors, organising the physical kick-off seminar, and supporting the online collaboration. We also discuss evaluation and hand-over of the solutions, to ensure the projects have a lasting impact. We conclude that the sustainable development goals provide a highly motivating framework for interdisciplinary, international student projects based on problem-based learning. We also note that a careful design and execution of the all the preparatory stages are crucial in order for the projects to succeed, and discuss specific recommendations for these.</p

PBL Student Projects and Sustainable Development Goals: A Case Study

Working with the Sustainable Development Goals can be a highly motivating factor in Problem Based Learning, especially if the solutions produced can be used afterwards and have an actual impact on people and communities. This paper describes how three engineering students from Aalborg University, Denmark, collaborated with the South African Organisation Green Shoots on bringing IT-supported Math education out to some of the most disadvantaged learners from townships and rural areas of the Western Cape. The project provided the Danish students with a unique learning experience and have a lasting impact on the communities involved. While the content of the project focused on bringing IT-supported Math education to learners in previously disadvantaged areas around the Western Cape, the project also provided valuable insight into how such students’ projects, where the outcomes benefit people and communities suffering from socio-economic challenges e.g. poverty, can be carried out. In addition to demonstrate that such projects are actually possible, we studied three critical aspects: How to ensure a good fit between learning objectives and project outcome, how to ensure that the project creates value for the partner organisation and communities, and how to ensure that the projects can be conducted without overloading the university supervisors. We believe that student projects focusing on SDGs have a big potential in terms of providing highly motivating student projects yet at the same time contribute to a better world through solutions that are being used even afterwards. However, our study was just a single case with one group of three students. We hope it will serve as inspiration for larger studies, where more quantitative data could be gathered in terms of how to establish a good framework around such projects, and in order to demonstrate the value for students and societies

CharBot : a simple and effective method for evading DGA classifiers

Domain generation algorithms (DGAs) are commonly leveraged by malware to create lists of domain names, which can be used for command and control (C&C) purposes. Approaches based on machine learning have recently been developed to automatically detect generated domain names in real-time. In this paper, we present a novel DGA called CharBot, which is capable of producing large numbers of unregistered domain names that are not detected by state-of-the-art classifiers for real-time detection of the DGAs, including the recently published methods FANCI (a random forest based on human-engineered features) and LSTM.MI (a deep learning approach). The CharBot is very simple, effective, and requires no knowledge of the targeted DGA classifiers. We show that retraining the classifiers on CharBot samples is not a viable defense strategy. We believe these findings show that DGA classifiers are inherently vulnerable to adversarial attacks if they rely only on the domain name string to make a decision. Designing a robust DGA classifier may, therefore, necessitate the use of additional information besides the domain name alone. To the best of our knowledge, the CharBot is the simplest and most efficient black-box adversarial attack against DGA classifiers proposed to date

Conservation of modernist architecture through the visual analysis of physical decay

Dissertação (mestrado)—Universidade de Brasília, Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Arquitetura e Urbanismo, 2019.A maior parte da arquitetura moderna brasileira tem passado por algum grau de deterioração. A conservação da herança nacional arquitetônica é constantemente ameaçada pela ineficiência, ou até mesmo falta, de programas de conservação, manutenção e restauração, assim como o fim iminente da vida útil projetada para as primeiras construções modernistas. Para esse cenário, a Análise Visual pode se tornar uma ferramenta poderosa nas mãos de um gerente das edificações. Seu propósito é de acelerar uma percepção rápida dentro da estrutura interna de dados e relações causais internas, através do uso de representações e interações, e permitir descobertas, explicações e facilitar tomadas de decisão. As capacidades de visualização do BIM e a sua habilidade de incorporar informações de performances através do tempo o torna a ferramenta mais forte para a análise de construções atualmente. Assim, almeja-se demonstrar como uma simulação de previsão pode contribuir para o processo de tomada de decisão para o gerenciamento de instalações históricas. A fusão dessas três áreas – análise de deterioração e depredação em gerenciamento do patrimônio, suporte para tomada de decisões no gerenciamento das edificações e a Análise Visual do BIM – vai permitir não apenas registrar o status presente e futuro de herança, mas prever o impacto de decisões de gerenciamento futuras. A presente pesquisa propõe uma metodologia híbrida da compilação de três métodos – o método de deterioração física GDE-UnB, o Método Holandês de criticidade da patologia e o método de depreciação financeira Ross-Heidecke – no mapeamento de uma seção do Instituto Central de Ciências da Universidade de Brasília. Os resultados foram subdivididos em quatro estágios principais: a inspeção e mapeamento de patologias elementares através de inspeção física e evidências fotográficas; a criação de scripts, comparação e análises de diferentes métodos de degradação e depreciação, dos quais originou-se uma metodologia híbrida; o mapeamento gráfico, a análise visual e a representação da metodologia original no uso do estudo de caso e das simulações de cenários para a tomada de decisão.Most modernist architecture in Brazil have experienced some degree of decay. The conservation of our national architectural heritage is constantly threatened by the inefficiency, or even lack of, conservation, maintenance and restoration programmes, as well as the imminent end of the projected lifespan for the first modernist constructions. For this scenario, Visual Analytics can become a powerful tool in the hands of a facilities manager. Its purpose is to accelerate rapid insight into the internal structure of data and causal relationships therein, through the use of visual representations and interactions, and to enable discoveries, explanations and facilitate decision making. The visualisation capabilities of Building Information Modelling and its ability to incorporate performance-over-time data make it the strongest tool for construction building analytics today. As such, this research project will demonstrate how predictive simulation can contribute to the decision-making process for Historical Facilities Management. The merging of these three areas – deterioration and depreciation analysis in heritage management, decision support in facilities management and the visual analytics of building information modelling – will allow us to not only register current and future heritage status, but predict the impact of future management decisions. The current research proposes a hybrid methodology from the compilation of three methods – the parametric GDE-UnB physical deterioration method, the parametric Dutch Standard for defect importance and the Ross-Heidecke financial depreciation method – in mapping a section of the University of Brasilia Central Science Institute. The results were subdivided into four main stages: the inspection and mapping of element pathologies through physical inspection and photographic evidence; the scripting, comparison and analysis of different degradation and depreciation methods, from which originated a hybrid methodology; the graphic mapping, representation and visual analytics of the original methodology on the use case model and the scenario simulations for decision making

The Computer question in Brazil : high technology in a developing society : papers

"July 1985."Includes bibliographical referencesIntroduction / Antonio Botelho and Peter H. Smith -- High Technology or Self Reliance? : Brazil Enters the Computer Age / Simon Schwartzman -- Varieties of Nationalism : The Politics of the Brazilian Computer Industry / Peter Evans -- The Brazilian Computer Industry : Performance and Perspectives / Paulo Bastos Tigr

Towards (R)evolving Cities Urban fragilities and prospects in the 21st century

Towards (R)evolving Cities: Urban Fragilities and Prospects in the 21st century first questions how we perceive the ‘intelligence’ of a city. The New Frontier of development for urban civilisations certainly includes digital and technological evolution, but it does not consider technology to be the final answer to all contemporary cities’ problems. The formidable challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic have thrown existing urban fragilities into stark relief. At the same time however they have highlighted the potential of digital solutions for reaching a new level of interconnected civility. (R)evolving cities evolve by adopting the principles of the circular economy in the higher interest of their citizens’ well-being: they consume therefore without devouring, recycle as much as possible what they metabolize, limit the effects of their ecological footprint and ultimately lead their inhabitants, with maternal guidance and care, to a new idea of citizenship. As protagonists of this evolutionary leap, the citizens of (R)evolving cities will abandon their predatory approach, reaching a higher stage of integration in the ecosystem and becoming more respectful of reciprocal relationships. (R)evolving cities are above all ‘polite’ cities, or rather cities whose citizens are consciously educated in the principles of sustainable development, the essential basis for contemporary civil coexistence