La implantación del sistema ECTS en el ámbito de los planes de estudio vigentes. Experiencia para primer curso de Ingeniero Técnico en Informática de Sistemas de la UCO

En el presente trabajo se resume la situación actual del proceso de convergencia europea y se explica la metodología seguida para la adaptación al ECTS de las asignaturas correspondientes a primer curso de Ingeniero Técnico de Informática de Sistemas dentro de los Planes de Estudios de 1999. El proceso culmina con la generación de las guías docentes de todas las materias y se encuentra actualmente en implantación experimental

Analysis of online quizzes as a teaching and assessment tool

This article deals with the integrated use of online quizzes as a teaching and assessment tool in the general program of the subject Proyectos in the third course of Ingeniero Técnico en Informática de Gestión over five consecutive years. The research undertaken aimed to test quizzes effectiveness on student performance when used, not only as an isolated assessment tool, but also when integrated into a combined strategy, which support the overall programming of the subject. The results obtained during the five years of experimentation using online quizzes shows that such quizzes have a proven positive influence on students' academic performance. Furthermore, surveys conducted at the end of each course revealed the high value students accord to use of online quizzes in course instruction.Peer Reviewe

A Multi-User Interactive Coral Reef Optimization Algorithm for Considering Expert Knowledge in the Unequal Area Facility Layout Problem

The problem of Unequal Area Facility Layout Planning (UA-FLP) has been addressed by a large number of approaches considering a set of quantitative criteria. Moreover, more recently, the personal qualitative preferences of an expert designer or decision-maker (DM) have been taken into account too. This article deals with capturing more than a single DM’s personal preferences to obtain a common and collaborative design including the whole set of preferences from all the DMs to obtain more complex, complete, and realistic solutions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the preferences of more than one expert designer have been considered in the UA-FLP. The new strategy has been implemented on a Coral Reef Optimization (CRO) algorithm using two techniques to acquire the DMs’ evaluations. The first one demands the simultaneous presence of all the DMs, while the second one does not. Both techniques have been tested over three well-known problem instances taken from the literature and the results show that it is possible to obtain sufficient designs capturing all the DMs’ personal preferences and maintaining low values of the quantitative fitness function

Key strategies to attract and improve the influx of women into Engineering Degrees in the University of Cordoba

Si bien las carreras de la rama de ingeniería y arquitectura se encuentran entre las que mayor grado de inserción laboral presentan, es un hecho contrastado a nivel nacional e internacional que existe una tremenda descompensación entre el número de mujeres y hombres que eligen este tipo de grados a favor de los últimos; y lo mismo ocurre, aunque en menor proporción, en las titulaciones de la rama de ciencias. Sin embargo, en el conjunto de la Universidad Española, el número de estudiantes mujeres ya ha superado el 50%. Este hecho sorprendente puede tener diversas causas entre las que se encuentran la mitificación de las ingenierías como “carreras de hombres”, la menor (aunque injustificada) confianza de las mujeres en el campo de las matemáticas y la tecnología y, en general, un elevado desconocimiento de los tipos de trabajos que se desarrollan en el campo de la ingeniería. El presente artículo recoge los resultados tras trabajar con alumnas de institutos y colegios de la provincia de Córdoba en un triple sentido: 1) desmitificar las carreras de ingeniería como poco adecuadas para las mujeres; 2) facilitar toda la información necesaria para una correcta integración en la vida universitaria desde el primer día; y 3) desarrollar actividades académicamente dirigidas que faciliten la transición entre el bachillerato y la universidad.It is well known that engineering and architect degrees offer real possibilities to insert graduates in the labour market. But, it is also a proven fact that, both at national and international scale, women are a minority in this sector. This also happens in other science degrees, but in smaller percentages. In the Spanish Universities, more than half of the students are female. This makes the small number of women in technological degrees even more remarkable. Some of the reasons behind these low numbers could be the traditional consideration of degrees “more appropriate for men”, the lack of confidence in mathematics and other related science, that women could experience, and in general the tendency of society to discriminate (also in remuneration) women for these jobs. All these, combined with the absence of concrete knowledge of the functions of an engineer, leads to this inequality in the sector. The idea was to work with high school female students with multiple purposes: 1) change the wrong concept that engineering is more suitable for men, 2) provide accurate information for a right integration of girls in the university before they start their activity on the campus and 3) develop activities addressed to integrated and facilitated the transition between high school and university

Using eye-tracking into decision makers evaluation in evolutionary interactive UA-FLP algorithms

Unequal area facility layout problem is an important issue in the design of industrial plants, as well as other fields such as hospitals or schools, among others. While participating in an interactive designing process, the human user is required to evaluate a high number of proposed solutions, which produces them fatigue both mental and physical. In this paper, the use of eye-tracking to estimate user’s evaluations from gaze behavior is investigated. The results show that, after a process of training and data taking, it is possible to obtain a good enough estimation of the user’s evaluations which is independent of the problem and of the users as well. These promising results advice to use eye-tracking as a substitute for the mouse during users’ evaluations

A Novel Artificial Neural Network to Predict Compressive Strength of Recycled Aggregate Concrete

Most regulations only allow the use of the coarse fraction of recycled concrete aggregate (RCA) for the manufacture of new concrete, although the heterogeneity of RCA makes it difficult to predict the compressive strength of concrete, which is an obstacle to the incorporation of RCA in concrete production. The compressive strength of recycled aggregate concrete is closely related to the dosage of its constituents. This article proposes a novel artificial neural network (ANN) model to predict the 28-day compressive strength of recycled aggregate concrete. The ANN used in this work has 11 neurons in the input layer: the mass of cement, fly ash, water, superplasticizer, fine natural aggregate, coarse natural or recycled aggregate, and their properties, such as: sand fineness modulus of sand, water absorption capacity, saturated surface dry density of the coarse aggregate mix and the maximum particle size. Two training methods were used for the ANN combining 15 and 20 hidden layers: Levenberg–Marquardt (LM) and Bayesian Regularization (BR). A database with 177 mixes selected from 15 studies incorporating RCA were selected, with the aim of having an underlying set of data heterogeneous enough to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach, even when data are heterogeneous and noisy, which is the main finding of this work

A Hybrid Coral Reefs Optimization – Variable Neighborhood Search Approach for the Unequal Area Facility Layout Problem

The Unequal Area Facility Layout Problem (UA-FLP) is a relevant optimization problem related to industrial design, that deals with obtaining the most effective allocation of facilities, that make up the rectangular manufacturing plant layout. The UA-FLP is known to be a hard optimization problem, where meta-heuristic approaches are a good option to obtain competitive solutions. Many of these computational approaches, however, usually fall into local optima, and suffer from lack of diversity in their population, mainly due to the huge search spaces and hard fitness landscapes produced by the traditional representation of UA-FLP. To solve these issues, in this paper we propose a novel hybrid meta-heuristic approach, which combines a Coral Reefs Optimization algorithm (CRO) with a Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) and a new representation for the problem, called Relaxed Flexible Bay Structure (RFBS), which simplifies the encoding and makes its fitness landscape more affordable. Thus, the use of VNS allows more intensive exploitation of the searching space with an affordable computational cost, as well as the RFBS allows better management of the free space into the plant layout. This combined strategy has been tested over a set of UA-FLP instances of different sizes, which have been previously tackled in the literature with alternative meta-heuristics. The tests results show very good performance in all cases

An Enhanced Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Classifying Indian Classical Dance Forms

Indian classical dance (ICD) classification is an interesting subject because of its complex body posture. It provides a stage to experiment with various computer vision and deep learning concepts. With a change in learning styles, automated teaching solutions have become inevitable in every field, from traditional to online platforms. Additionally, ICD forms an essential part of a rich cultural and intangible heritage, which at all costs must be modernized and preserved. In this paper, we have attempted an exhaustive classification of dance forms into eight categories. For classification, we have proposed a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) model using ResNet50, which outperforms various state-of-the-art approaches.Additionally, to our surprise, the proposed model also surpassed a few recently published works in terms of performance evaluation. The input to the proposed network is initially pre-processed using image thresholding and sampling. Next, a truncated DCNN based on ResNet50 is applied to the pre-processed samples. The proposed model gives an accuracy score of 0.911

A novel multi-objective Interactive Coral Reefs Optimization algorithm for the Unequal Area Facility Layout Problem

The Unequal Area Facility Layout Problem (UA-FLP) has been widely analyzed in the literature using several heuristics and meta-heuristics to optimize some qualitative criteria, taking into account different restrictions and constraints. Nevertheless, the subjective opinion of the designer (Decision Maker, DM) has never been considered along with the quantitative criteria and restrictions. This work proposes a novel approach for the UA-FLP based on an Interactive Coral Reefs Optimization (ICRO) algorithm, which combines the simultaneous consideration of both quantitative and qualitative (DM opinion) features. The algorithm implementation is explained in detail, including the way of jointly considering quantitative and qualitative aspects in the fitness function of the problem. The experimental part of the paper illustrates the effect of including qualitative aspects in UA-FLP problems, considering three different hard UA-FLP instances. Empirical results show that the proposed approach is able to incorporate the DM preferences in the obtained layouts, without affecting much to the quantitative part of the solutions