Ruben Heradio

Virtual and remote labs in education

Laboratory experimentation plays an essential role in engineering and scientific education. Virtual and remote labs reduce the costs associated with conventional hands-on labs due to their required equipment, space, and maintenance staff. Furthermore, they provide additional benefits such as supporting distance learning, improving lab accessibility to handicapped people, and increasing safety for dangerous experimentation. This paper analyzes the literature on virtual and remote labs from its beginnings to 2015, identifying the most influential publications, the most researched topics, and how the interest in those topics has evolved along the way. To do so, bibliographical data gathered from ISI Web of Science, Scopus and GRC2014 have been examined using two prominent bibliometric approaches: science mapping and performance analysis. Display Omitted Laboratory experimentation plays an essential role in engineering and sci-entific education.Virtual and remote labs are emerging as a valuable alternative to conven-tional hands-on labs.This paper analyzes the literature on virtual and remote labs from 1993 to 2015.4405 records retrieved from ISI Web of Science, Scopus and GRC2014 are processed.Two bibliometric approaches are applied: performance analysis and science mapping.

A review of quality evaluation of digital libraries based on users’ perceptions

In the past two decades, the use of digital libraries (DLs) has grown significantly. Accordingly, questions about the utility, usability and cost of DLs have started to arise, and greater attention is being paid to the quality evaluation of this type of information system. Since DLs are destined to serve user communities, one of the main aspects to be considered in DL evaluation is the user’s opinion. The literature on this topic has produced a set of varied criteria to judge DLs from the user’s perspective, measuring instruments to elicit users’ opinions, and approaches to analyse the elicited data to conclude an evaluation. This paper provides a literature review of the quality evaluation of DLs based on users’ perceptions. Its main contribution is to bring together previously disparate streams of work to help shed light on this thriving area. In addition, the various studies are discussed, and some challenges to be faced in the future are proposed.

Providing Collaborative Support to Virtual and Remote Laboratories

Virtual and remote laboratories (VRLs) are e-learning resources that enhance the accessibility of experimental setups providing a distance teaching framework which meets the students hands-on learning needs. In addition, online collaborative communication represents a practical and a constructivist method to transmit the knowledge and experience from the teacher to students, overcoming physical distance and isolation. This paper describes the extension of two open source tools: (1) the learning management system Moodle, and (2) the tool to create VRLs Easy Java Simulations (EJS). Our extension provides: (1) synchronous collaborative support to any VRL developed with EJS (i.e., any existing VRL written in EJS can be automatically converted into a collaborative lab with no cost), and (2) support to deploy synchronous collaborative VRLs into Moodle. Using our approach students and/or teachers can invite other users enrolled in a Moodle course to a real-time collaborative experimental session, sharing and/or supervising experiences at the same time they practice and explore experiments using VRLs.

The Ball and Beam System: A Case Study of Virtual and Remote Lab Enhancement With Moodle

Web-based labs are key tools for distance education that help to illustrate scientific phenomena, which require costly or difficult-to-assemble equipment. Easy Java Simulations (EJS) is an authoring tool that speeds up the creation of these kind of labs. An excellent proof of the EJS potential is the open source physics (OSP) repository, which hosts hundreds of free EJS labs. Learning management systems, such as Moodle, provide social contexts where students interact with each other. The work described in this paper looks for the synergy of both tools, EJS and Moodle, by supporting the deployment of EJS labs into Moodle and thus enriching them with social features (e.g., chat, forums, and videoconference). To test this approach, the authors have created the ball and beam lab, which helps students of automatic control engineering to train different advanced techniques (robust, fuzzy, and reset control), and compare their performance in relation to a conventional proportional-integral-derivative control.

A bibliometric analysis of 20 years of research on software product lines

Context: Software product line engineering has proven to be an efficient paradigm to developing families of similar software systems at lower costs, in shorter time, and with higher quality.Objective: This paper analyzes the literature on product lines from 1995 to 2014, identifying the most influential publications, the most researched topics, and how the interest in those topics has evolved along the way.Method: Bibliographic data have been gathered from ISI Web of Science and Scopus. The data have been examined using two prominent bibliometric approaches: science mapping and performance analysis.Results: According to the study carried out, (i) software architecture was the initial motor of research in SPL; (ii) work on systematic software reuse has been essential for the development of the area; and (iii) feature modeling has been the most important topic for the last fifteen years, having the best evolution behavior in terms of number of published papers and received citations.Conclusion: Science mapping has been used to identify the main researched topics, the evolution of the interest in those topics and the relationships among topics. Performance analysis has been used to recognize the most influential papers, the journals and conferences that have published most papers, how numerous is the literature on product lines and what is its distribution over time.

A fuzzy linguistic model to evaluate the quality of Library 2.0 functionalities

Abstract Libraries incessantly undergo change determined by evolving user needs. These are often induced by the emergence of previously unavailable tools. Web 2.0 represents an example of such a need-shifting technology, which has led to an embrace of new user interactivity services for many library websites, thus coined Library 2.0. This paradigm shift calls for new evaluation models to include the implementation of Web 2.0 technologies. The aim of this paper is to present such a model, and to evaluate the quality of Library 2.0 functionalities, measuring the quality of the 2.0 services offered through the websites based on user perception. We adopt fuzzy linguistic modeling to represent user perception, and apply aggregation operations to linguistic labels in order to evaluate the quality of the new services. Furthermore, our model subsumes the LibQUAL+ methodology, allowing for the identification of specific 2.0 functionalities in need of improvement and of those outstandingly satisfied by the system.

Virtual and remote labs in control education: A survey

Abstract Virtual and remote labs have been around for almost twenty years and while they have been constantly gaining popularity since their appearance, there are still many people in the control education community who either do not know many details about them or do not know them at all. What are their benefits? Which examples of virtual and remote labs for control education can be found in the Internet and how spread and popular are they? What are the current trends and issues in the implementation and deployment of these tools? And the future ones? These and others are some of the questions we answer in this paper, trying to bring the attention of the control education community to these tools which, we believe, are meant to have an increasing importance and relevance for the 21st century students.

Managing RFID Sensors Networks with a General Purpose RFID Middleware

RFID middleware is anticipated to one of the main research areas in the field of RFID applications in the near future. The Data EPC Acquisition System (DEPCAS) is an original proposal designed by our group to transfer and apply fundamental ideas from System and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems into the areas of RFID acquisition, processing and distribution systems. In this paper we focus on how to organize and manage generic RFID sensors (edge readers, readers, PLCs, etc…) inside the DEPCAS middleware. We denote by RFID Sensors Networks Management (RSNM) this part of DEPCAS, which is built on top of two new concepts introduced and developed in this work: MARC (Minimum Access Reader Command) and RRTL (RFID Reader Topology Language). MARC is an abstraction layer used to hide heterogeneous devices inside a homogeneous acquisition network. RRTL is a language to define RFID Reader networks and to describe the relationship between them (concentrator, peer to peer, master/submaster).

Understanding the role of conceptual relations in Word Sense Disambiguation

In this article, we concentrate in conceptual relations as a source of information for Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) systems. We start with a review the most relevant research in the field, then we implement our own algorithm. As a starting point we have chosen the conceptual density algorithm of Agirre and Rigau. We generalize the original algorithm, parameterizing many aspects. This new algorithm obtains a relative improvement of 24% in terms of precision and recall. We also offer comparative evaluation of our system with respect to the participants in the SENSEVAL-2 disambiguation competition. We conclude that conceptual relations provide a source of information that is insufficient by itself to achieve good disambiguation results, but can, however, be a very accurate heuristic in a combined system.

Making EJS applications at the OSP digital library available from Moodle

Easy Java Simulations (EJS) is a free and open source software that allows to easily create simulations or virtual labs of very different topics such as control engineering, physics and so on. The Open Source Physics (OSP) project holds the ComPADRE library, a digital repository that offers more than 500 EJS applications, created by the community, that are accessible for free. Moodle is a free and open source software, well-known for being the most used and spread Learning Management System (LMS) all over the world. This work presents a new plugin for Moodle that allows searching, downloading, and adding to a Moodle course, EJS applications from the OSP ComPADRE library.