Managing data within a research unit is not a trivial task due to the high number of entities to ... more Managing data within a research unit is not a trivial task due to the high number of entities to deal with: projects, researchers, publications, attended events, etc. When all these data are exposed on a public website, the need to have it updated is fundamental to avoid getting an incorrect impression of the group's performance. As research centres websites are usually quite static, external documents are generated by managers, resulting in data redundancy and out-of-date records. In this paper, we show our efforts to manage all these data using Labman, a web framework that deals with all the data, links entities and publishes them as Linked Open Data, allowing to get insightful information about the group's productivity using visual analytics and interactive charts.
When performing analytics on educational datasets, the best scenario is where the dataset was des... more When performing analytics on educational datasets, the best scenario is where the dataset was designed to be analyzed. However, this is often not the case and the data extraction becomes more complicated. This contribution is focused on extracting social networks from a dataset which was not adapted for this type of extraction and where there was no relation among students: a set of remote laboratories where students individually test their experiments by submitting their data to a real remote device. By checking which files are shared among students and submitted individually by them, it is possible to know who is sharing how many files with who, automatically extracting what students are bigger sources. While it is impossible to extract the full real social network of these students, all the edges found are clearly part of it. These relations can indeed be used as a new input for performing the analytics on the dataset.
Fundamentals of electronic circuits' practices have a central role in all the electrical engineer... more Fundamentals of electronic circuits' practices have a central role in all the electrical engineering education disciplines. They teach the student the basics of electronic circuit's components and the adjustment of electrical instruments, and allow him to wire and build circuits in order to realize and monitor measurements. Unfortunately, and despite the importance of this type of practices, they are not usually available at many universities owing to geographical, cost, and time constraints. With the evolving of communication and computer technologies, and the advent of E-Learning, it was possible to vanish these constrains by the powerful tools provided by E-Learning, among them the remote laboratories. Thus, recently, many universities have shifted from traditional hands-on laboratories to remote laboratories in order to tackle these constrains bringing fundamentals of electronic circuits practices on-line to students. This has allowed students to access the lab at any time and from anywhere and to design, wire and measure electronic circuits remotely, achieving a significant increase in the lab availability and cost reduction. This paper reports on the current trends in remote laboratories for fundamentals of electronic circuits practices, pointing out significant projects such as Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR), NetLab, and remote labs based on NI ELVIS II, which have been successfully adopted at many universities and deployed in the electrical engineering curricula. The paper, also, addresses other common independent approaches based on Data Acquisition Systems (DASs) in combination with measurement and control environments, such as LabVIEW and MATLAB.
Remote Laboratories have traditionally been focused on specific solutions for specific problems. ... more Remote Laboratories have traditionally been focused on specific solutions for specific problems. We can find a wide range of Remote Laboratories in the literature, assisting different types of subjects but commonly bound to a restricted set of requirements. Due to this, little attention has been paid on working on a maintainable, scalable, secure architecture that addresses the requirements of a wider set of experiments, and that could be open enough to support or adopt new experiments, developed using different technologies in both client and server side. In this paper, we describe several aspects that might be taken into account when designing Remote Laboratories, describing the XWL Architecture and comparing it with other existing architectures.
The present work describes the implementation of a new remote lab, SecondLab, that allows student... more The present work describes the implementation of a new remote lab, SecondLab, that allows students to control a microbot from Second Life. SecondLab works over WebLab-Deusto, the remote lab of the University of Deusto, giving the students the chance to work with real experiments from a social 3D-based immersive environment. This approach places the remote lab closer to the students, trying this way to increase their motivation to study science and engineering.
The increase of life expectancy has arisen new challenges related with the amount of resources re... more The increase of life expectancy has arisen new challenges related with the amount of resources required to attend elderly people with cognitive disabilities. These requirements, such as medical staff and financial resources, have been multiplied in the last years, and this tendency will continue in the forthcoming ones. In order to reduce these requirements, the introduction of new technologies will be a key aspect. In this paper we propose a test-question-based memory game that collects the answers given by patients and facilitates access to this information to caregivers and relatives.
People’s impairments cause a wide range of difficulties in everyday tasks. Particularly, handicap... more People’s impairments cause a wide range of difficulties in everyday tasks. Particularly, handicapped people face many challenges both at home, but especially outside it, where their reduced mobility is a burden. Buying in a supermarket can be sometimes troublesome for them and so as to facilitate this task, a product locator application is proposed. This application runs on heterogeneous personal mobile devices keeping the user private information safe on them, and it locates the desired products over each supermarket’s map.
Managing data within a research unit is not a trivial task due to the high number of entities to ... more Managing data within a research unit is not a trivial task due to the high number of entities to deal with: projects, researchers, publications, attended events, etc. When all these data are exposed on a public website, the need to have it updated is fundamental to avoid getting an incorrect impression of the group's performance. As research centres websites are usually quite static, external documents are generated by managers, resulting in data redundancy and out-of-date records. In this paper, we show our efforts to manage all these data using Labman, a web framework that deals with all the data, links entities and publishes them as Linked Open Data, allowing to get insightful information about the group's productivity using visual analytics and interactive charts.
When performing analytics on educational datasets, the best scenario is where the dataset was des... more When performing analytics on educational datasets, the best scenario is where the dataset was designed to be analyzed. However, this is often not the case and the data extraction becomes more complicated. This contribution is focused on extracting social networks from a dataset which was not adapted for this type of extraction and where there was no relation among students: a set of remote laboratories where students individually test their experiments by submitting their data to a real remote device. By checking which files are shared among students and submitted individually by them, it is possible to know who is sharing how many files with who, automatically extracting what students are bigger sources. While it is impossible to extract the full real social network of these students, all the edges found are clearly part of it. These relations can indeed be used as a new input for performing the analytics on the dataset.
Fundamentals of electronic circuits' practices have a central role in all the electrical engineer... more Fundamentals of electronic circuits' practices have a central role in all the electrical engineering education disciplines. They teach the student the basics of electronic circuit's components and the adjustment of electrical instruments, and allow him to wire and build circuits in order to realize and monitor measurements. Unfortunately, and despite the importance of this type of practices, they are not usually available at many universities owing to geographical, cost, and time constraints. With the evolving of communication and computer technologies, and the advent of E-Learning, it was possible to vanish these constrains by the powerful tools provided by E-Learning, among them the remote laboratories. Thus, recently, many universities have shifted from traditional hands-on laboratories to remote laboratories in order to tackle these constrains bringing fundamentals of electronic circuits practices on-line to students. This has allowed students to access the lab at any time and from anywhere and to design, wire and measure electronic circuits remotely, achieving a significant increase in the lab availability and cost reduction. This paper reports on the current trends in remote laboratories for fundamentals of electronic circuits practices, pointing out significant projects such as Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR), NetLab, and remote labs based on NI ELVIS II, which have been successfully adopted at many universities and deployed in the electrical engineering curricula. The paper, also, addresses other common independent approaches based on Data Acquisition Systems (DASs) in combination with measurement and control environments, such as LabVIEW and MATLAB.
Remote Laboratories have traditionally been focused on specific solutions for specific problems. ... more Remote Laboratories have traditionally been focused on specific solutions for specific problems. We can find a wide range of Remote Laboratories in the literature, assisting different types of subjects but commonly bound to a restricted set of requirements. Due to this, little attention has been paid on working on a maintainable, scalable, secure architecture that addresses the requirements of a wider set of experiments, and that could be open enough to support or adopt new experiments, developed using different technologies in both client and server side. In this paper, we describe several aspects that might be taken into account when designing Remote Laboratories, describing the XWL Architecture and comparing it with other existing architectures.
The present work describes the implementation of a new remote lab, SecondLab, that allows student... more The present work describes the implementation of a new remote lab, SecondLab, that allows students to control a microbot from Second Life. SecondLab works over WebLab-Deusto, the remote lab of the University of Deusto, giving the students the chance to work with real experiments from a social 3D-based immersive environment. This approach places the remote lab closer to the students, trying this way to increase their motivation to study science and engineering.
The increase of life expectancy has arisen new challenges related with the amount of resources re... more The increase of life expectancy has arisen new challenges related with the amount of resources required to attend elderly people with cognitive disabilities. These requirements, such as medical staff and financial resources, have been multiplied in the last years, and this tendency will continue in the forthcoming ones. In order to reduce these requirements, the introduction of new technologies will be a key aspect. In this paper we propose a test-question-based memory game that collects the answers given by patients and facilitates access to this information to caregivers and relatives.
People’s impairments cause a wide range of difficulties in everyday tasks. Particularly, handicap... more People’s impairments cause a wide range of difficulties in everyday tasks. Particularly, handicapped people face many challenges both at home, but especially outside it, where their reduced mobility is a burden. Buying in a supermarket can be sometimes troublesome for them and so as to facilitate this task, a product locator application is proposed. This application runs on heterogeneous personal mobile devices keeping the user private information safe on them, and it locates the desired products over each supermarket’s map.
When performing analytics on educational datasets, the best scenario is where the dataset was des... more When performing analytics on educational datasets, the best scenario is where the dataset was designed to be analyzed. However, this is often not the case and the data extraction becomes more complicated. This contribution is focused on extracting social networks from a dataset which was not adapted for this type of extraction and where there was no relation among students: a set of remote laboratories where students individually test their experiments by submitting their data to a real remote device. By checking which files are shared among students and submitted individually by them, it is possible to know who is sharing how many files with who, automatically extracting what students are bigger sources. While it is impossible to extract the full real social network of these students, all the edges found are clearly part of it. These relations can indeed be used as a new input for performing the analytics on the dataset.
In Ambient Intelligence environments machines proactively and transparently work on behalf of hum... more In Ambient Intelligence environments machines proactively and transparently work on behalf of humans. The nature of these machines and the communication protocols they use is multifarious. Therefore, the applications running on top of them remarkably demand interoperability. The Triple Space Computing (TSC) paradigm addresses that problem by sharing information represented in a semantic format through a common virtual space. As long as application developers use standard ontologies, different applications using the same spaces will interact automatically. The focus of this paper is to present Otsopack, a fully distributed TSC middleware designed to meet the needs of mobile and resource constrained devices. Otsopack defines a simple HTTP interface for the TSC operations. This interface focuses on simplicity and modularity, so that two implementations that support different modules can still interact. To assess the middleware we provide time and load measurements, and we analyze two independent implementations.
During the last few decades, many industrial remote and virtual laboratories have been designed a... more During the last few decades, many industrial remote and virtual laboratories have been designed and implemented at different universities and schools with the goal of providing online experiments that are remotely available to their students from anywhere and at any time. Research into virtual and remote laboratories has shown that the vast majority of these laboratories are built using learning tools and resources that are suited to a specific institution. Thus, different universities implement the software for their particular needs and consume a significant amount of time and energy in the process. This article describes a different approach: the design and implementation of a learning management system (LMS) activity that allows sharing of electronic, control and automation, and electrical remote laboratories from different universities within industrial courses without requiring the teacher to program a single line of code.
In this paper we present an automatic assessment model for the development of competencies in a p... more In this paper we present an automatic assessment model for the development of competencies in a physics course using VISIR remote experiment, based on a rubric, and using learning analytics techniques to process data automatically collected from students’ activity using Weblab-Deusto platform.
Remote laboratories have emerged as a viable addition to the tools supporting experiential learni... more Remote laboratories have emerged as a viable addition to the tools supporting experiential learning. The advent of Remote Laboratory Management Systems (RLMSs) has allowed several integrated heterogeneous remote laboratories, developed with various technologies, to be administrated and accessed through a common portal. A key benefit arising from the ability to access the laboratories remotely through RLMSs is the opportunity to share laboratory resources across multiple institutions. This sharing is, however, restricted by the inability of a contemporary RLMS installed at an institution to communicate with other RLMS installed at other institution. In this paper we propose a novel Application Programming Interface (API) design pattern for inter-communication between RLMSs accommodating different levels of functional support and thereby allowing more efficient sharing of laboratory resources regardless of their hosting RLMS. The pattern is based on common profile roles supported by the predominating RLMSs, along with their underlying service calls. Afterwards, we present initial results and demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of this pattern by developing an API for two common RLMSs, Sahara and the iLab shared Architecture (ISA). As a result, users logging into a Sahara server managed to access and manipulate a radio-activity experiment hosted on an ISA server.
Remote laboratories are software and hardware tools that allow students to remotely access real e... more Remote laboratories are software and hardware tools that allow students to remotely access real equipment located in universities. The integration of remote laboratories in learning tools (learning management systems, content management systems, or personal learning environments) has been achieved to integrate remote laboratories as part of the learning curricula. A cross-institutional initiative called gateway4labs has been created to perform this integration extensible to multiple remote laboratories in multiple learning tools. This contribution focuses on describing this initiative and, in particular, how opening it to public systems (where users do not need to be registered) produces new technical and organizational challenges due to the public availability of labs. In addition, this contribution shows integrations of systems that were not previously addressed in this initiative, such as PhET or ViSH, as well as a new approach for integrating supported laboratories in external specifications such as the smart device one through OpenSocial.
Remote Labs didactic worth can be very supported using them to solve pressing educational probl... more Remote Labs didactic worth can be very supported using them to solve pressing educational problems. The contrasted lack of interest from young students for Engineering is a growing problem today for the Universities that will affect the global economies in the future. Awakening bachelor’s interest for Science and Engineering is a possible way to restrain this tendency. Since different researches prove that the higher is the sense of presence in the environment the more effective becomes the learning process, using Remote Labs from highly immersive environments can be considered a promising idea. Following this educational aim, the present work covers the technical development of SecondLab, an experimental Remote Lab built over the WebLab-Deusto architecture and the popular 3D-based virtual environment Second Life.
Until a few decades ago, face to face classrooms and hand-on laboratories were the common solutio... more Until a few decades ago, face to face classrooms and hand-on laboratories were the common solution for teaching theory and practice. But, new e-Learning tools have emerged and learning methodologies such as blended and distance learning have taken an important space in learning initiatives. Among them are virtual and remote Labs which provide student with a learning environment where can carry out the experiments through Internet and acquire the needed skills to develop his future jobs. This paper describes the importance of virtual and remote labs and their usage in learning scenarios.
Educational remote laboratories are a software and hardware tool that allows students to remotely... more Educational remote laboratories are a software and hardware tool that allows students to remotely access real equipment located in the university as if they were in a hands-on-lab session. Since the equipment used by students is real, it has associated costs: laboratory development, hardware used and maintenance costs. Given the remote nature of the remote laboratories, institutions can share these costs by sharing the access to the laboratories. In order to reduce the associated development and maintenance costs, as well as to reduce the overall costs by managing the sharing of laboratories in different institutions, software infrastructures and toolkits have arisen, such as the MIT iLab project, the Labshare Sahara project, or WebLab-Deusto. However, a particular feature seamlessly present on hands-on-lab sessions but not often present in remote laboratories sessions is direct collaboration among students. While collaboration at a particular laboratory level is generally supported -or can easily be implemented-, some features of remote laboratory management systems such as load balancing or federation might enter in conflict with collaboration. This paper is focused on discussing levels of adoption of collaboration in these remote laboratory management systems.
During the last years, VISIR (Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality) has proved itself a useful t... more During the last years, VISIR (Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality) has proved itself a useful tool for electronics remote experimentation, having been deployed in several different universities. As a domain-specific remote laboratory, VISIR offers those features which are required for its stand-alone usage, such as authentication, scheduling, user management, etc. Though for certain purposes this may be adequate, often it is more appropriate to offer VISIR as one kind of experiment among many, under a generic remote laboratories framework, such as WebLab-Deusto, MIT iLabs or Labshare Sahara. These frameworks provide integrated access to several different kinds of experiments, such as electronics, robotics, etc. Through this integration, a smooth experience can be provided to the user, and VISIR can benefit from all the functionality that the generic framework provides (common authentication, load-balancing, scheduling, etc). Efforts are currently being made to integrate VISIR with various laboratories. In this paper, we describe what the integration of VISIR with Weblab-Deusto involves; how certain VISIR-specific functionalities that depended on its original framework were handled, and how through Weblab-Deusto VISIR can easily gain certain new features. Some of those are the integration with different environments such as Facebook, or with Learning Management Systems such as Moodle. Another feature is collaboration among VISIR users, which makes it possible to share a VISIR circuit in real time. Furthermore, through this association VISIR gains new possibilities, such as federation.
A vast number of learning content and tools can be found over Internet. Currently, most of them a... more A vast number of learning content and tools can be found over Internet. Currently, most of them are ad-hoc solutions which are developed for a particular learning platform or environment. New concepts, such as Widgets, Smart devices, Internet of Thing and learning Clouds, are ideas whose goals is the creation of shareable online learning scenarios over different devices and environments.
This paper describes the current influence of the remote laboratory on practical learning aspects... more This paper describes the current influence of the remote laboratory on practical learning aspects of secondary sector of education. The key challenges faced by the teaching of science include insufficient hands-on laboratory usage in classrooms. The main objective of the paper is to present learning approach of adaptation and usage of remote experiments of WebLab-Deusto in curriculum of secondary school. The activity was organized in collaboration with secondary school teachers of P. Andrés Urdaneta School. Educators can benefit from different teaching methods (collaborative, inquiry-, and project-based learning) integrated in WebLab-Deusto. The teaching of Ohm's Law in Physics curriculum of secondary school was one of the topics executed during this research. The remote laboratory assignment for students was developed on Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR) Open Lab Platform. The existing remote laboratories are more or less copies of hands-on ones. VISIR is a remote laboratory created by Blekinge Institute of technology (BTH) for designing, wiring and measurement of electric circuits. This main feature of VISIR allows one building a scenario of performing basic DC and low frequency AC circuits experiments related to Ohm's and Kirchhoff's laws. Moreover, the students will become familiar with instruments, components, manuals, data sheets, circuit wiring, and other laboratory work. In the paper the main principle of VISIR will be presented; the remote experiments executed by students will be shown. Finally, the result of integrating of remote experiments for study in Urdaneta School will be discussed.
In this paper the practical case of remote laboratory sharing is shown. Educational remote labora... more In this paper the practical case of remote laboratory sharing is shown. Educational remote laboratories allow students to use real experimental systems in similar way as in traditional labs with additional given value by eliminating time and flexibilityrestrictions. Essential requested features for management of users, accesses, experiments and resource sharing are provided by remote laboratory management system (RLMS) WebLab-Deusto. Using the RLMS we were able to implement set of control educational remote laboratories into existing network of remote laboratories and provide them as shared resources across the different institution that collaborate on WebLab-Deusto RLMS. Educational laboratory processes like thermo-optical plant and two liquid tank systems have been deployed to WebLab-Deusto at Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Slovakia (STU), and provided as shared resources to University of Deusto, Spain (UD). In the same way, several experimental laboratories focused on electronics and robotics were provided by UD to STU. This model, also called federation, offers possibilities for educational institutions to extend their laboratory base by experiments aimed on related fields of science.
Within the pedagogical community, Serious Games have arisen as a viable alternative to traditiona... more Within the pedagogical community, Serious Games have arisen as a viable alternative to traditional course-based learning materials. Until now, they have been based strictly on software solutions. Meanwhile, research into Remote Laboratories has shown that they are a viable, low-cost solution for experimentation in an engineering context, providing uninterrupted access, low-maintenance requirements, and a heightened sense of reality when compared to simulations. This paper will propose a solution where both approaches are combined to deliver a Remote Laboratory-based Serious Game for use in engineering and school education. The platform for this system is the WebLab-Deusto Framework, already well-tested within the remote laboratory context, and based on open standards. The laboratory allows users to control a mobile robot in a labyrinth environment and take part in an interactive game where they must locate and correctly answer several questions, the subject of which can be adapted to educators' needs. It also integrates the Google Blockly graphical programming language, allowing students to learn basic programming and logic principles without needing to understand complex syntax.
An educational remote laboratory is a software and hardware tool that allows students to remotely... more An educational remote laboratory is a software and hardware tool that allows students to remotely access real equipment located in universities or educational centers. Federations of remote laboratories have existed for years: students of one university transparently access laboratories of other university through software systems that enable these contracts. However, traditionally these contracts have been defined in a “one to one” basis and both universities using the same remote laboratory management system. The focus of this contribution is to present different interoperable bridges among different remote laboratory systems and explore how they can be chained to build complex ecosystems of remote laboratories. The impact of this chaining is that, if successful, it would definitely contribute to the adoption of remote laboratories.
Health care environments, as many other real world environments, present many changing and unpred... more Health care environments, as many other real world environments, present many changing and unpredictable situations. In order to use a social robot in such an environment, the robot has to be prepared to deal with all the changing situations. This paper presents a robot self-configuration approach to overcome suitably the commented problems. The approach is based on the integration of a semantic framework, where a reasoner can take decisions about the configuration of robot services and resources. An ontology has been designed to model the robot and the relevant context information. Besides rules are used to encode human knowledge and serve as policies for the reasoner. The approach has been successfully implemented in a mobile robot, which showed to be more capable of solving not pre-designed situations.
We extend a previous access control solution for wireless network services with group-based autho... more We extend a previous access control solution for wireless network services with group-based authorization and encryption capabilities. Both the basic solution and this novel extension focus on minimizing computation, energy, storage and communications required at sensors so they can be run in very constrained hardware, since the computations involved rely on symmetric cryptography and key derivation functions. Furthermore, no additional messages between users and sensors are needed. Access control is based on user identity, group membership and time intervals.
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Papers by Pablo Orduña