PILAR: a Federation of VISIR Remote Laboratory Systems for Educational Open Activities

Social demands have promoted an educational approach based on an “anywhere and anytime” premise. Remote laboratories have emerged as the answer to the demands of technical educational areas for adapting themselves to this scenario. The result has not only benefit distance learning students but has provided new learning scenarios both for teachers and students as well as allowing a flexible approach to experimental topics. However, as any other solution for providing practical scenarios (hands-on labs, virtual labs or simulators), remote labs face several constraints inherited from the subsystems of its deployment hardware (real instruments, equipment and scenario) and software (analog/digital conversions, communications, workbenches, etc.). This paper describes the Erasmus+ project Platform Integration of Laboratories based on the Architecture of visiR (PILAR) which deals with several units of the federation installed in different educational institutions and devoted to analog electronics and electrical circuits. Based on the limitations of remote labs, the need for the federation will be justified and its benefits will be described by taking advantage of its strengths. The challenges that have come up during the different stages and the different approaches to design are also going to be described and analyzedinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Different Uses for Remote Labs in Electrical Engineering Education: Initial Conclusions of an Ongoing Experience

Laboratories are a fundamental part of engineering education due to the very nature of the engineering profession. This is a characteristic of all en-gineering courses, though it may vary from one curriculum to the other and even in the same curriculum. This paper is dedicated to the analysis of different applications of a remote lab in an Electrical Engineering curriculum. If the types of experiments it offers are concerned, it is classified as an Electric and Electronic Circuits lab; one in a set that also has Digital Electronics, Analog Electronics, Electrical Machines, Control Systems, etc. But it is not a traditional lab – it is a remote lab, with traditional components remotely accessed over the Internet. This work presents the preliminary results of the deployment of VISIR – a remote lab for Electric and Electronic Circuits in some courses. It discusses the different course contexts and how the use of VISIR was adapted to each one. Results of students’ opinions are presented and discussed.N/

Optical Signatures of Plankton in the Open Ocean: From Individual Cells to Global Patterns

Marine plankton ecosystems play a major role on Earth, having implications for the global carbon cycle and the food-web structures. Ocean color satellites and networks of autonomous platforms equipped with optical sensors are the primary tools used to study phytoplankton dynamics. They provide long term records while offering a synoptic view of our oceans, enabling to study impact of climate variability on planktonic ecosystems. Interpretation of these observations rely heavily on optical theory and how light propagating through the water is affected by particles who absorb and scatter light (e.g. phytoplankton, sediments). However, the complexity of the optical properties of natural seawater often obscures their interpretation. I address some of the current challenges in optical theory by analyzing measurements of inherent optical properties and phytoplankton size distribution (PSD). The PSD built spans four seasons across regions of the western North Atlantic, including large variability which highlight the dynamic annual cycle of phytoplankton of this area. Previously established algorithms used to estimate phytoplankton size algorithms based of optical properties are assessed as to date they have not been validated with actual size measurements. Additionally, the contribution of phytoplankton to particulate attenuation and backscattering and its efficiency to absorb light are computed for the upper ocean. The PSDs revealed that phytoplankton dominate attenuation and backscattering signals ( 75 %) reinforcing the idea that these properties are good predictors of phytoplankton biomass. Additionally, spectral slopes of attenuation and backscattering also correlate well with the PSD. This suggests that ocean color algorithms should focus on improved retrieval of backscattering spectra. A data logger was developed to improve current recording of optical data during long term deployment on research vessels. It was successfully deployed \u3e650 days at sea. Finally, I proposed a novel method to detect a subset of diel migrating organisms (SDMO) responsible for anomalies in particulate backscattering and ultra-violet fluorescent profiles from autonomous platforms. This method demonstrates the seasonality of SDMO in the world’s ocean in regions where such data has been lacking and provides the distribution of SDMO which play an important role in the biological pump, extending observations beyond “classical” methodology

Chemical applications of escience to interfacial spectroscopy

This report is a summary of works carried out by the author between October 2003 and September 2004, in the first year of his PhD studie

A cloud based WSN remote laboratory for user training

This paper presents a WSN remote laboratory prototype aimed at user training. The prototype has been deployed on a Cloud Computing infrastructure, in order to take advantage of the benefits that this technology can provide to remote laboratories. An analysis of the state of the art allows to specified the features required for a remote laboratory intended to be applyed in user training. In this paper, the main results of this analysis are presented. Then, the implementation of the main modules that compose the remote laboratory, and the analysis that led to chose a deployment based on Cloud Computing are presented. Some proof of concept experiments to test the applicability to user training were performed and the results are presented in this paper.Área: Tecnología en Educación.Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

A cloud based WSN remote laboratory for user training

This paper presents a WSN remote laboratory prototype aimed at user training. The prototype has been deployed on a Cloud Computing infrastructure, in order to take advantage of the benefits that this technology can provide to remote laboratories. An analysis of the state of the art allows to specified the features required for a remote laboratory intended to be applyed in user training. In this paper, the main results of this analysis are presented. Then, the implementation of the main modules that compose the remote laboratory, and the analysis that led to chose a deployment based on Cloud Computing are presented. Some proof of concept experiments to test the applicability to user training were performed and the results are presented in this paper.Área: Tecnología en Educación.Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Remote Laboratory for E-Learning of Systems on Chip and Their Applications to Nuclear and Scientific Instrumentation

Configuring and setting up a remote access laboratory for an advanced online school on fully programmable System-on-Chip (SoC) proved to be an outstanding challenge. The school, jointly organized by the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), focused on SoC and its applications to nuclear and scientific instrumentation and was mainly addressed to physicists, computer scientists and engineers from developing countries. The use of e-learning tools, which some of them adopted and others developed, allowed the school participants to directly access both integrated development environment software and programmable SoC platforms. This facilitated the follow-up of all proposed exercises and the final project. During the four weeks of the training activity, we faced and overcame different technology and communication challenges, whose solutions we describe in detail together with dedicated tools and design methodology. We finally present a summary of the gained experience and an assessment of the results we achieved, addressed to those who foresee to organize similar initiatives using e-learning for advanced training with remote access to SoC platforms

Distributed environmental monitoring

With increasingly ubiquitous use of web-based technologies in society today, autonomous sensor networks represent the future in large-scale information acquisition for applications ranging from environmental monitoring to in vivo sensing. This chapter presents a range of on-going projects with an emphasis on environmental sensing; relevant literature pertaining to sensor networks is reviewed, validated sensing applications are described and the contribution of high-resolution temporal data to better decision-making is discussed