Promoting critical thinking skills through debates in engineering education. A case study on manufacturing.

Argumentation and decision-making are fundamental in the training of industrial engineers to effectively develop their critical thinking skills. Despite this, engineering education focuses on technical aspects that hardly promote the development of these skills in the classroom. To promote them, a specific training programme in critical thinking for industrial engineers was proposed, which, among other activities, included short debates on socio-scientific problems. This paper presents the impact of a debate on manual versus mass production on 30 students of the Degree in Industrial Technologies Engineering at the University of Malaga (Spain) acting as listeners. To assess this impact, we analyse the argued decisions made by the listeners about the problem before and after the activity, finding that the initial position of the majority was manual manufacturing based on social evidence, and the final position was mass production based on scientific-technical evidence such as economic aspects or the quality of the manufactured product. The arguments used by the debaters were scientifically vague but had an essential effect on changing decisions, especially the evidence used, which the listeners made their ownUniversidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

ROTDR signal enhancement via deep convolutional denoising autoencoders trained with domain randomization

In this work, a deep convolutional adaptive filter is proposed to enhance the performance of a Raman based distributed temperature sensor system by the application of domain randomization methods for its training. The improvement of the signal-to-noise ratio in the Raman backscattered signals in the training process and translation to a real scenario is demonstrated. The ability of the proposed technique to reduce signal noise effectively is proved independently of the sensor configuration and without degradation of temperature accuracy or spatial resolution of these systems. Moreover, using single trace to noise reduction in the ROTDR signals accelerates the system response avoiding the employment of many averages in a unique measurement.This work has been supported by Spanish CICYT (TEC2016-76021-C2-2-R), by ISCIII (DTS17-00055, INTRACARDIO) co-funded by EU-FEDER FUNDS and by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports through FPU16/05705

Deep variational autoencoders for breast cancer tissue modeling and synthesis in SFDI

Extracting pathology information embedded within surface optical properties in Spatial Frequency Domain Imaging (SFDI) datasets is still a rather cumbersome nonlinear translation problem, mainly constrained by intrasample and interpatient variability, as well as dataset size. The B-variational autoencoder (B-VAE) is a rather novel dimensionality reduction technique where a tractable set of latent low-dimensional embeddings can be obtained from a given dataset. These embeddings can then be sampled to synthesize new data, providing further insight into pathology variability as well as differentiability in terms of optical properties. Its applications for data classification and breast margin delineation are also discussed.Research reported in this manuscript was funded by PhD grant FPU016/05705 (Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports), projects DTS1700055 (FUSIODERM), INNVAL 16/02 (DICUTEN), INNVAL 18/23 (DAPATOO), and TEC201676021C22R (SENSA), as well as cofunded with FEDER funds

Valorisation of pork by-products to obtain antioxidant and antihypertensive peptides

The porcine liver could be used for the extraction of zinc-protoporphyrin (ZnPP) as a natural red meat pigment. During the autolysis process, porcine liver homogenates was incubated at pH 4.8 and 45 °C under anaerobic conditions to obtain insoluble ZnPP. After incubation, the homogenates were readjusted at pH 4.8, and at pH 7.5 before being centrifuged at 5500 × g for 20 min at 4 °C and the resulting supernatant were compared with the obtained at pH 4.8 at the beginning of the incubation. The molecular weight distributions of the porcine liver fractions at both pHs were very similar, however, eight essential amino acids were more abundant in fractions obtained at pH 4.8. Regarding the ORAC assay, porcine liver protein fraction at pH 4.8 showed the highest antioxidant capacity but antihypertensive inhibition was similar for both pHs. Peptides with strong bioactivity potential from aldehyde dehydrogenase, lactoylglutathione lyase, SEC14-like protein 3 and others were identified. The findings have demonstrated the potential of the porcine liver to extract natural pigments and bioactive peptides.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Rheology of lignin-based chemical oleogels prepared using diisocyanate crosslinkers : effect of the diisocyanate and curing kinetics

In this work, alkali lignin together with different diisocyanates (hexamethylene diisocyanate (HDI), isophorone diisocyanate (IDI), toluene diisocyanate (TDI) and 4,4′-methylenebis (phenyl isocyanate) (MDI)) have been tested as gelling agents in a castor oil medium. A two-step process comprising first lignin functionalization with a diisocyanate and then the formation of a bio-based polyurethane with gel-like characteristics by combining the functionalized lignin with castor was followed. FTIR and thermogravimetry analysis were carried out on both the gelling agents and resulting oleogels. Moreover, oleogel rheological properties were evaluated by means of small-amplitude oscillatory shear (SAOS) tests and viscous flow measurements. The influences of time-temperature processing conditions during oleogel formation, lignin/diisocyanate ratio and functionalized lignin concentration on the rheological properties of oleogels were analyzed using HDI as crosslinker. 30% (w/w) thickener concentration and room temperature processing were selected to prepare oleogels with the rest of diisocyanates considered. Under the same conditions, HDI-functionalized lignin-based oleogels showed the strongest gel-like behavior whereas TDI-, IDI- and especially MDI-functionalized lignin-based oleogels displayed weak gel-like, or even a liquid-like, behaviors as a consequence of the respective chemical structures, which guide to higher steric hindrance, diminishing the formation of urethane linkages and/or Van der Waals forces. In general, oleogels exhibited an internal curing process due to the progressive formation of urethane linkages, which is closely related to the evolving rheological properties. The kinetics of this curing process was studied and an empirical model has been proposed to predict the evolution of the rheological properties with time.This work is a part of two research projects (CTQ2014-56038-C3-1R and TEP-1499) sponsored by the MINECO-FEDER and Junta de Andalucía programmes, respectively

Aprendizaje basado en actividades: el uso de casos de estudio real en la asignatura de Contabilidad Financiera III

El objetivo del estudio es analizar, de forma preliminar, el cambio metodológico introducido en la asignatura de Contabilidad Financiera III de cuarto curso de la Licenciatura de Administración y Dirección de Empresas: Aprendizaje basado en actividades mediante casos de estudio reales. Esta metodología docente aboga por sustentar el aprendizaje del alumno a través de la participación activa mediante actividades realizadas en grupo y acercar al alumno a la realidad de las prácticas contables mediante el uso de información financiera real de empresas. La metodología de investigación empleada está basada en un sondeo piloto, sobre las opiniones de los estudiantes, obtenidas mediante un cuestionario. Los resultados reflejan como los alumnos están de acuerdo con este tipo de metodología, tanto en lo referente a su utilidad como método de aprendizaje, como en lo relativo al potencial que tiene para el desarrollo de competencias instrumentales e interpersonales. No obstante, al estar en una fase intermedia el desarrollo de las actividades, muestran aspectos a mejorar que deben ser objeto de reflexión en el futuro.The aim of this study is to analyse, in a preliminary way, the methodological change introduced in the subject of Financial Accounting III in the fourth year of the Bachelor of Business Administration: Activity-based learning through actual case studies. This teaching methodology pleads for supporting the student's learning process through active participation in group activities and bringing students closer to the reality of accounting practices using financial information of real companies. The research methodology used is based on a pilot survey on the views of the students, obtained by questionnaire. The results reflect that students agree with this methodology, both in terms of its usefulness as a learning method and in relation to its potential for developing instrumental and interpersonal skills. However, with the development of the activities being in an intermediate stage, they show areas for improvement that should be reflected upon in the future

Fusion of OCT and hyperspectral imaging for tissue diagnosis and assessment

The combination of molecular (hyperspectral imaging) and morphological (optical coherent tomography imaging) optical technologies helps in the assessment of biological tissue both in pathological diagnosis and in the follow-up treatments. The co-registration of both imaging features allows quantifying the presence of chromophores and the subsurface structure of tissue. This work proposes the fusion of two optical imaging technologies for the characterization of different types of tissues where the attenuation coefficient calculated from OCT imaging serves to track the presence of anomalies in the distribution of chromophores over the sample and therefore to diagnose pathological conditions. The performance of two customized hyperspectral imaging systems working in two complementary spectral ranges (VisNIR from 400 to 1000 nm, and SWIR 1000 to 1700 nm) and one commercial OCT system working at 1325 nm reveals the presence of fibrosis, collagen alterations and lipid content in cardiovascular tissues such as aortic walls (to assess on aneurysmal conditions) or tendinous chords (to diagnose the integrity of the valvular system) or in muscular diseases prone to fibrotic changes and inflammation.Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (FIS2010-19860, TEC2016-76021-C2-2-R), Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness and Instituto de Salud Carlos III (DTS17-00055, DTS15- 00238), Instituto de Investigación Valdecilla (INNVAL16/02, INNVAL18/23) and Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sports (FPU16/05705)

Affinity-based color enhancement methods for contrast enhancement in hyperspectral and multimodal imaging

This work proposes separating data analysis from hyperspectral enhancement or editing, providing a robust, context-independent, fully-tunable framework for biomarker-based contrast in wide-field imaging with a series of reliable properties that could enable its use in guided surgery. Some applications of this method powered by deep learning diagnostics will be discussed and shown.Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (FIS2010-19860, TEC2016-76021-C2-2-R), Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness and Instituto de Salud Carlos III (DTS17-00055, DTS15- 00238), Instituto de Investigación Valdecilla (INNVAL16/02, INNVAL18/23), Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sports (FPU16/05705)