Mujeres e ingeniería: ¿realmente es necesario todo esto?

Perdonen que hable en primera persona, pero cuando pensaba cómo enfocar este artículo, decidí hacerlo desde mi experiencia personal. Hace ya cuatro años que dirijo la Escuela Universitaria de Teruel (Universidad de Zaragoza). He sido la primera mujer directora del centro. El equipo de Dirección está íntegramente formado por varones. También creé el grupo de investigación EduQTech, primer grupo de investigación reconocido por el Gobierno de Aragón en el ámbito tecnológico en Teruel (http://eduqtech. unizar.es/). Hasta hace pocos años todos los miembros eran hombres, si bien habíamos tenido alguna estudiante colaborando con nosotros. Impulsé y dirigí la “Cátedra de Innovación y Calidad Tecnológica”, la primera cátedra Empresa-Universidad con sede en Teruel. Otras actuaciones… junto con algunos empresarios impulsé TecnoclusTer, la primera asociación de empresas tecnológicas en Teruel. Fuera del ámbito local, junto con otros compañeros y liderados por el profesor Manuel Castro, fundamos el Capítulo Español de la Sociedad de Educación del IEEE, del que fui vice-presidenta dos años y presidenta otros dos, siendo la primera mujer en ocupar este cargo

Towards Agent-Based Simulation Support for Training Teachers

he quality of teacher training is crucial as it influences the academic performance of students. The last decades have witnessed a steep increase in the use of information applications for improving the training of teachers. In this line of work, the current approach proposes to use agent-based simulation for supporting the training of teachers. The current work focuses on the capability of teachers in designing appropriate teaching strategies with the corresponding schedules of learning activities. In particular, the current approach uses FTS-SOCI (an agent-based Framework for simulating Teaching Strategies with evolutions of Sociograms) for simulating the social repercussions of certain teaching strategies. Teachers can pursue obtaining groups with high cohesion, which is normally related with a high academic performance. This article illustrates the current approach with the training of a computer science teacher for the programming subject

Sensing Systems for Respiration Monitoring: A Technical Systematic Review

Respiratory monitoring is essential in sleep studies, sport training, patient monitoring, or health at work, among other applications. This paper presents a comprehensive systematic review of respiration sensing systems. After several systematic searches in scientific repositories, the 198 most relevant papers in this field were analyzed in detail. Different items were examined: sensing technique and sensor, respiration parameter, sensor location and size, general system setup, communication protocol, processing station, energy autonomy and power consumption, sensor validation, processing algorithm, performance evaluation, and analysis software. As a result, several trends and the remaining research challenges of respiration sensors were identified. Long-term evaluations and usability tests should be performed. Researchers designed custom experiments to validate the sensing systems, making it difficult to compare results. Therefore, another challenge is to have a common validation framework to fairly compare sensor performance. The implementation of energy-saving strategies, the incorporation of energy harvesting techniques, the calculation of volume parameters of breathing, or the effective integration of respiration sensors into clothing are other remaining research efforts. Addressing these and other challenges outlined in the paper is a required step to obtain a feasible, robust, affordable, and unobtrusive respiration sensing system

ABS-SOCI: An Agent-Based Simulator of Student Sociograms

Sociograms can represent the social relations between students. Some kinds of sociograms are more suitable than others for achieving a high academic performance of students. However, for now, at the beginning of an educative period, it is not possible to know for sure how the sociogram of a group of students will be or evolve during a semester or an academic year. In this context, the current approach presents an Agent-Based Simulator (ABS) that predicts the sociogram of a group of students taking into consideration their psychological profiles, by evolving an initial sociogram through time. This simulator is referred to as ABS-SOCI (ABS for SOCIograms). For instance, this can be useful for organizing class groups for some subjects of engineering grades, anticipating additional learning assistance or testing some teaching strategies. As experimentation, ABS-SOCI has been executed 100 times for each one of four real scenarios. The results show that ABS-SOCI produces sociograms similar to the real ones considering certain sociometrics. This similarity has been corroborated by statistical binomial tests that check whether there are significant differences between the simulations and the real cases. This experimentation also includes cross-validation and an analysis of sensitivity. ABS-SOCI is free and open-source to (1) ensure the reproducibility of the experiments; (2) to allow practitioners to run simulations; and (3) to allow developers to adapt the simulator for different environments

Nela: un entrenador de Braille para niños

Nela es un programa informático que ayuda en el aprendizaje de la escritura usando el código Braille, simulando una máquina Perkins con el teclado del ordenador. Está dirigido a niños con discapacidad visual (visión reducida o ceguera). Programado en C++ usando las bibliotecas Qt, es multiplataforma (funciona tanto en Microsoft Windows como en GNU/Linux) y está internacionalizado

Exploring the influence of facial verification software on student academic performance in online learning environments

In spite of the advances in technology in the e-learning field during the last decades, there is still a gap of software and tools that actually improve the assessment of this kind of education by preventing students from cheating when they perform their activities online. Currently, most learning management systems do not offer enough tools or characteristics to check that students are who they assure when they carry out their exercises or online tests. Facial verification software can be considered an interesting tool to answer this need. This facial software helps to verify the identity of the students when they perform their activities, with the intention of confirming whether they are who they claim to be. However, its use could modify the academic results of the students due to psychological factors (e.g. they could feel spied, ashamed or too controlled). The aim of this article is to investigate whether the utilization of facial verification software can modify the academic performance of students in their online activities. In this work, the grades of 70 master students were analyzed and the conclusions pointed out that the academic performance obtained by the students is similar for both groups: those who have used facial authentication and those who did not use it

An agent-based simulator applied to teaching-learning process to predict sociometric indices in higher education

Most novice teachers and even some experienced teachers can lack appropriate tools for designing teaching strategies that ensure the quality of education. The ability of working in teams is crucial in educating professionals. The literature proves that social relations influence the performance of teams. For instance, the team cohesion is directly related with its performance. In the current work, we have developed an agent-based tool for assisting teachers in simulating their teaching strategies to estimate their influence on the group sociometrics like cohesion, coherence of reciprocal relations, dissociation and density of relations. The experiments with nine scenarios in disciplines of computer science, electronic, psychology, business, tourism and renewal energies with 239 students and six teachers including experienced and novice ones show that its underlying agent-based framework can adapt to different disciplines obtaining similar outcomes to the real ones. We learned that the tool was especially reliable in predicting the density of relations and the cohesion, being the latter one probably the most relevant due to its known relation with academic performance. In addition, we also learned that it was difficult to assess the prediction quality of the dissociation in higher education, due to the usual low amounts or absence of reciprocal rejections in the students' groups in this educational stage. The presented agent-based tool is publicly distributed as open source for facilitating other researchers in following this research line

Reduction of the students´ evaluation of education quality questionnaire

Assessment of students and the evaluation of their satisfaction has been an important element in the improvement of teaching quality in all the Higher Education areas. Specifically the student participation in Computer Science (C S) and Information System (IS) has been highlight valued. Thus a large number of methodologies and standard tools regarding student evaluation has been developed. Specifically, the Students ́ Evaluation of Education Quality (SEEQ) is a tool that is validated for international use. But its use leads to several problems, such as the low voluntary participation of students. To solve these problems, a short version of this questionnaire developed using statistic tools is proposed. After using the proposed new version, the voluntary participation of students increased. The reduction of the number of questions facilitates the analysis of data, improving the flow of information and feedback between professors and studentsPeer ReviewedPreprin

Solución de múltiples sistemas lineales en GPUs

Este trabajo se centra en el calculo, de forma concurrente, de múltiples sistemas lineales definidos por matrices densas de una dimensión media. Se considera una solución basada en la factorización de Cholesky y su implementación sobre plataformas GPUs. Este tipo de problema algebraico forma parte de distintos modelos de procesamiento de señal, y además exhibe distintos niveles de paralelismo que pueden ser explotados muy eficientemente por las GPUs. En este trabajo, como aplicación del problema, nos centramos en la detección de anomalías sobre imágenes hiperespectrales, lo que supone una importante tarea en la explotación de este tipo de imágenes obtenidas en la observación de la Tierra. Concretamente, consideramos la versión local del ampliamente usado algoritmo RX (Reed-Xiaoli), denotado como LRX, en el que una de sus etapas más costosas consiste en la solución, para cada pixel de la imagen, de un sistema lineal cuyas dimensiones coinciden con el número de bandas de la imagen. En este contexto se describe y evalúa la solución múltiple de sistemas lineales en GPUs, y se comprueba el factor de aceleración obtenido con la implementación propuesta en este trabajo.Este trabajo ha sido financiado por el Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (TIN2008- 01117, TIN2011-23283, TIN2012-37483-C03-01 and AYA2011-29334-C02-02), Junta de Andalucía (P10- TIC-6002 y P011-TIC7176), Junta de Extremadura (PRI09A110 y GR10035), CAPAP-H4 (TIN2011- 15734-E) y por los fondos FEDER. Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec