The Place of Descriptive Geometry in the Face of Industry 4.0 Challenges

Industrial process automation has long been the main goal in production lines that seek to decrease human involvement. However, it is broadly agreed that a collaboration between humans and technologies must still exist as human capital is required to provide certain skills and abilities that machines cannot offer yet. For instance, in the context of design and simulation, CAD, CAM, and CAE professionals must count not only on a deep knowledge of the technology employed but also on specific skills that make the human factor an integral piece of the transition. These abilities are considered fundamental to achieving sustainable development in the industrial sector. This work focuses on analyzing through four study cases where whether specular o bilateral symmetry, a.k.a. planar symmetry is present, the weaknesses found in the human factor related to CAD training of future industrial engineers. The most common mistakes found when developing the different symmetric pieces proposed are thoroughly examined in order to define their origin, which mainly lies in students’ lack of descriptive geometry (DG) understanding. This is aggravated in some cases by the lack of spatial visualization abilities. The unstoppable and fast advances in design and simulation tools and technologies require humans to update their capabilities almost in real time. However, results show that this should not threaten the need for the human mind to spatially understand the changes being made on the screen. Otherwise, humans are at risk of ending up at the service of machines and technologies instead of the opposite

Comparative study between mechanical properties of silicone catalyzed by tin or platinum and the more effective section.

Nowadays, there is the need and the technical capability to constantly collect data from multiple daily situations to improve measurable activities. An example of this, is the incorporation of sensors over the human body to collect bodily data, whether it be in devices for general activities as running or for specific purposes such as monitoring certain pathologies like diabetes or registering variables in gait. These measurements are provided by sensors adapted to the controlled bodily zone, being able to adapt itself to the organic shape of the body. One of the materials that meets the requirements of strength and malleability is silicone, specifically the one intended for molds. This study questions the viability of the mechanical capabilities of different types of this material through tests of resistance and flexibility, as well as which type of structure is better for its use as a sensor. The collected results indicate which section is most favorable for using silicone in the form of threads and the optimal functions for each type of tested silicone.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Linking Engineering and the Humanities: new ways for professional development.

The European Higher Education Area (EHEA), the changes in the regulations that structure the Spanish University System and the new organization of degree programs, have brought about a new concept of university in which it is especially necessary to optimize resources and control their return to society. As a consequence of this vision, the universities must guarantee in their actions the fulfilment of the objectives associated with the courses they teach, also seeking their continuous improvement. University education represents a significant investment of public resources, the ultimate aim of which is to create professionals who respond to the labor demands of the socio-economic fabric of their environment. In accordance with these premises, the University of Malaga is developing a 1st Employability Plan, which constitutes a guiding instrument that includes the measures and actions to be implemented to improve the visibility of our graduates in the labor market. The School of Telecommunications Engineering (ETSIT) participates in this initiative through a proposal that aims to encourage students to change their vision and see the importance of the relationship between Technology and Humanities.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Pedagogical strategy for lifelong learning.

Based on one of the fundamental principles of the educational model of the European Higher Education Area concerning the development of the capacity to achieve lifelong learning, this project has been carried out in which a set of active teaching activities have been implemented for the acquisition of key competences in the challenge of achieving one of the most important objectives that any educational system must provide: lifelong learning. The aim of this model is to facilitate the incorporation of new university graduates into the world of work. This project has been developed in the context of subjects in the field of Electronics. However, in order to facilitate transfer to other subjects, the catalogue of active teaching activities is sufficiently varied to facilitate their extrapolation and use in other subjects, thanks to the fact that teachers have a wide variety of activities to choose from. Finally, a survey has been carried out to evaluate the satisfaction, impact and improvement of this new active methodology in order to find out the students' perspectives once they have worked with this catalogue of activities.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Robust fitting of ellipsoids with adaptive step size control

Fitting geometric or algebraic surfaces to 3D data is a pervasive problem in many fields of science and engineering. In particular, ellipsoids are some of the most employed features in computer graphics and sensor calibrations. They are also useful in pattern recognition, computer vision, body detection and electronic device design. Standard ellipsoid fitting techniques to solve this problem involve the minimization of squared errors. However, most of these procedures are sensitive to noise. Here, we propose a method based on the minimization of absolute errors. Although our algorithm is iterative, an adaptive step size is used to achieve a faster convergence. This leads to a substantial improvement in robustness against outlier data. The proposal is demonstrated with several computational examples which comprise synthetic data and real data from a 3D scanner and a stereo camera

Ellipse fitting by spatial averaging of random ensembles

Earlier ellipse fitting methods often consider the algebraic and geometric forms of the ellipse. The work presented here makes use of an ensemble to provide better results. The method proposes a new ellipse parametrization based on the coordinates of both foci, and the distance between them and each point of the ellipse where the Euclidean norm is applied. Besides, a certain number of subsets are uniformly drawn without replacement from the overall training set which allows estimating the center of the distribution robustly by employing the L1 median of each estimated focus. An additional postprocessing stage is proposed to filter out the effect of bad fits. In order to evaluate the performance of this method, four different error measures were considered. Results show that our proposal outperforms all its competitors, especially when higher levels of outliers are presented. Several synthetic and real data tests were developed and confirmed such finding.This work is partially supported by the Ministry of Economy and Compet- itiveness of Spain [grant numbers TIN2016-75097-P and PPIT.UMA.B1.2017]. It is also partially supported by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Univer- sities of Spain [grant number RTI2018-094645-B-I00], project name Automated detection with low-cost hardware of unusual activities in video sequences. It is also partially supported by the Autonomous Government of Andalusia (Spain) under project UMA18-FEDERJA-084, project name Detection of anomalous behavior agents by deep learning in low-cost video surveillance intelligent sys- tems. All of them include funds from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). The authors thankfully acknowledge the computer resources, technical expertise and assistance provided by the SCBI (Supercomputing and Bioinfor- matics) center of the University of Málaga. They also gratefully acknowledge the support of NVIDIA Corporation with the donation of two Titan X GPUs used for this research. The authors acknowledge the funding from the Universi- dad de Málaga. Karl Thurnhofer-Hemsi is funded by a Ph.D. scholarship from the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport under the FPU program [grant number FPU15/06512

Criterios organicistas en el diseño del mobiliario urbano del Jardín Botánico El Cerro

El Jardín Botánico El Cerro, situado en el municipio del Rincón de la Victoria de Málaga, tiene previsto su próxima apertura en breve. A la hora de diseñar un jardín no sólo son importantes las especies que va a acoger, sino también son imprescindibles otros elementos que contribuyen a la satisfacción de las necesidades de los usuarios. Este es el caso del mobiliario, que está íntimamente relacionado con las visitas y el tránsito que va a soportar, haciendo más agradable y confortable el entorno. El papel del diseñador industrial es fundamental en estas tareas relacionadas con el diseño del mobiliario. Es por ello, que en este artículo se muestra y analiza un caso práctico real de Diseño Industrial. Para tal fin, se desarrollan los diseños de bancos, papeleras y fuentes de agua potable, como elementos primordiales para cubrir las necesidades del público visitante del Jardín Botánico basados en las especies del mismo

A fast robust geometric fitting method for parabolic curves.

Fitting discrete data obtained by image acquisition devices to a curve is a common task in many fields of science and engineering. In particular, the parabola is some of the most employed shape features in electrical engineering and telecommunication applications. Standard curve fitting techniques to solve this problem involve the minimization of squared errors. However, most of these procedures are sensitive to noise. Here, we propose an algorithm based on the minimization of absolute errors accompanied by a normalization of the directrix vector that leads to an improved stability of the method. This way, our proposal is substantially resilient to noisy samples in the input dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the good performance of the algorithm in terms of speed and accuracy when compared to previous approaches, both for synthetic and real data.This work is partially supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain [grant number TIN2014-53465-R], project name Video surveillance by active search of anomalous events. It is also partially supported by the Autonomous Government of Andalusia (Spain) [grant number TIC-6213], project name Development of Self-Organizing Neural Networks for Information Technologies; and [grant number TIC-657], project name Self-organizing systems and robust estimators for video surveillance. All of them include funds from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). The authors thankfully acknowledge the computer resources, technical expertise and assistance provided by the SCBI (Supercomputing and Bioinformatics) center of the University of Málaga. They have also been supported by the Biomedic Research Institute of Málaga (IBIMA). They also gratefully acknowledge the support of NVIDIA Corporation with the donation of the Titan X GPU. Karl Thurnhofer-Hemsi is funded by a Ph.D. scholarship from the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport under the FPU program [grant number FPU15/06512]

Sustainability at HEIs: mapping good practices

Global climate change is a cognitive challenge for many people and often evokes negative associations due to its complexity and interactions with politics, social movements and economic developments. Therefore, the possession of green skills becomes central to the fight against climate change. The European Council conclusions recognize this urgency and underline the need for a transition to green skills. This recognition also extends to higher education, where institutions have a crucial role to play in tackling the climate crisis. Personal Green Skills in Higher Education (PeGSinHE) is an Erasmus+ KA2 project coordinated by Kauno Kolegija (KK, Lithuania), Tampere University of Applied Sciences (TAMK, Finland), Hochschule für Agrar- und Umweltpädagogik (HAUP, Austria), Universidad de Málaga (UMA, Spain) and Technical University of Applied Sciences Würzburg Schweinfurt (THWS, Germany). The strategically designed project aims not only to promote green skills among students and encourage personal behavioral change in line with the Sustainable Development Goals, but also to instill a sense of social responsibility in the partner institutions. The focus is on empowering lecturers at partner universities through innovative teaching and learning methods to effectively impart green skills to students. This report describes the objectives and methodology used to assess environmental and sustainability competencies in the higher education institutions involved in the project. Methodologically, the report uses an assessment template designed to provide a comprehensive overview of best practice and baseline levels of environmental and sustainability competencies. It advocates the involvement of key stakeholders from all five partner Higher Education Institutions to ensure a broad perspective on these practices and competences within their respective countries and organizations. Different methods and perspectives will be used to collect data to enable a holistic understanding of the topic. The joint completion of the assessment template serves as a catalyst for joint discussions on the level of environmental and sustainability competencies and the identification of best practices in each organization. The results show that national implementation strategies are relatively loose, although some competency descriptions set targets for undergraduate degree programs. Challenges faced by higher education staff include resource constraints, particularly lack of time, the need for a deeper understanding of sustainable development and pedagogical tools, and the need for improved opportunities for collaboration. Given the time and resource constraints of this study, the results must be considered preliminary. Nevertheless, they confirm the findings of previous studies