Gabriel Diaz

UNED - Spanish National Distance Education University · Electrical and Computing Engineering

One of the challenges that the industrial cybersecurity is facing is the lack of trained workers. The MQTT protocol is being used extensively in both IoT and OT environments to send messages between different processes. The aim of this work is to provide the needed tools (virtual machines) and knowledge (practices) to teach the students progressive...

This paper describes the organization and results of several MOOCs delivered about technical topics (i.e., digital electronics, VHDL design on FPGAs, open education and OERs repositories and the use of STEAM technologies to encourage diversity and inclusion), where online laboratories have been used in some of them. An analysis of the enrollment, s...

One of the main challenges that we face with MOOCs is that certain disciplines need more practical activities, usually carried out in physical environments, which is difficult to supply only with the use of videos or readings. It is here where virtual and remote laboratories play a great role, mechanisms that allow students to carry out practical e...

Arduino has emerged as a very popular electronic board because of its low-cost, open hardware approach and flexibility with a huge potential for prototyping, small product runs, Internet of Things, makers or educational electronic projects, among others. However, there is a literature gap concerning wide analysis on different versions and types of...

Some engineering concepts have been proven to be very important not only in engineering degrees but in several areas. This knowledge is difficult to grasp under certain circumstances, and sometimes prior training is needed. This is a special challenge in full or part remote education. Simulations may help in this area, but truly experimental lab pr...

This paper presents an extension of the VISIR Remote Laboratory to support the IoT Technologies. By means of this new extension, the users of the remote laboratory can experiment by programming an ARM device (a raspberry Pi) and interact with sensors and actuators. Furthermore, all the characteristics of VISIR are still preserved. Therefore, the us...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is made up of many devices, platforms, and communication protocols. Among them, Raspberry Pi has arisen as one of the most popular equipment for hobby and education purposes because of its low cost, small size, flexibility, and potential. Nevertheless, Raspberry Pi needs an operating system to work, which exposes it to...

Interest in energy cost saving and in global warming have persuaded transport companies to apply measures to reduce fuel consumption. Efficient driving is one of the most employed solutions as it allows savings in fuel consumption of around 10% with a minimal investment. The drawback is that efficient driving is a learning process, and it greatly d...

Experimenting is fundamental to the training process of all scientists and engineers. While experiments have been traditionally done inside laboratories, the emergence of Information and Communication Technologies added two alternatives accessible anytime, anywhere. These two alternatives are known as virtual and remote laboratories and are sometim...

In 2015, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (DIEEC) of the Spanish University for Distance Education (UNED) in Spain started together with the Santiago del Rosario National University (UNSE, Argentina) and with the support of the Research Institute of Education Sciences of Rosario (IRICE-CONICET, Argentina) under the Coordination of the...

Over the last decade, transport companies have tried to reduce fuel consumption using efficient driving programs. In them, motorists have to apply different specific techniques while driving. Thus, to succeed in this learning process there are two key elements: the knowledge of efficient driving techniques and the drivers’ motivation. The latter is...

Diesel engines of the vehicles in the transport sector are responsible for most of the CO2 emissions into the environment. An alternative to reduce fuel consumption is to promote efficient driving techniques. The aim of this paper is to assess the impact of efficient driving on fuel consumption in professional fleets. Data captured from the engine...

El presente artículo tiene como principal objetivo averiguar las perspectivas de los laboratorios remotos en la educación media y superior de la ciudad de Santiago del Estero. Motiva este estudio, la instalación de un Laboratorio Remoto VISIR+ en la Universidad Nacional de Santiago del Estero. Argentina. La metodología utilizada es el Estudio por E...

Public transport companies face great expenses. In order to be profitable companies, they need to reduce costs in all aspects. In addition, many countries have increased taxes to force transport companies to reduce their fuel consumption and, thus, greenhouse effect emissions. Efficient driving is the cheapest way to achieve this goal. In this pape...

The MOOC concept started in 2008, when George Siemens [1] and Stephen Downes created what we may call the first MOOC: “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge”. In autumn of 2011 more than one hundred and fifty thousand persons joined a course offered by Stanford University. MOOCs have proven to be an effective tool in some aspects of on-line open e...

Public institutions and private companies all around the world agree that road transport is one of the main sectors responsible for global warming. With this in mind, all of them have designed actions to increase efficiency and reduce fuel consumption and emissions. A favorite for the companies is eco-driving because it can improve the fleet perfor...

Experiments have been at the heart of scientific development and education for centuries. From the outburst of Information and Communication Technologies, virtual and remote labs have added to hands-on labs a new conception of practical experience, especially in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics education. This paper aims at describi...

Transport companies are probably one of the greatest sources of pollution nowadays. Perhaps because these companies would like to improve this situation, or perhaps because they simply would like to reduce the petrol they consume, they are more than ever deploying plans in order to increase the efficiency of their fleets. One of the easiest and che...

Effectively adapting the content to network conditions in real-time is an important matter in best-effort networks like the Internet. Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is an interesting alternative to implement such systems. However, some problems of the performance evaluation of SVC based adaptive systems have not been solved. The authors review the mai...

p>El presente artículo proporciona información sobre el proceso de evaluación como instrumento de formación dentro del proyecto RIPLECS basado en sistemas de laboratorios remotos, metodologías de evaluación y aprendizaje permanente. El proyecto de investigación “ Remote-labs access in Internet-based Performance-centred Learning Environment for curr...

Las nuevas tendencias educativas exigen que los alumnos realicen trabajos de forma autónoma. Bajo el paradigma del project oriented learning (POL) se busca dotar a los estudiantes de nuevas habilidades para el desarrollo de sus propios proyectos que los preparen mejor para la vida profesional. Este artículo presenta los primeros pasos de un laborat...

Nowadays, access to multimedia content is one of the most demanded services on the Internet. However, the transmission of audio and video over these networks is not free of problems that negatively affect user experience. Factors such as low image quality, cuts during playback or losses of audio or video, among others, can occur and there is no cle...

Universities and educational organizations or institutions, when designing any electronics course, trust in experimentation through laboratory practices in order to build successful cross-curricular capabilities and capacities. In electronics courses there is a need to have practical experiences, the benefits of electronics laboratory practices are...

Experimental activities with real components are an essential part of all courses including or devoted to electrical and electronic circuits theory and practice. The knowledge triangle composed of hand-written exercises, simulations and traditional lab experiments has been enriched with the possibility for students to conduct real experiments over...

Transport companies are probably one of the greatest sources of pollution nowadays. Maybe because these companies would like to improve this situation, or maybe because they simply would like to reduce the petrol they consume, they are more than ever deploying plans in order to increase the efficiency of their fleets. One of the easiest and cheapes...

La correcta evaluación de trabajadores en su puesto de trabajo es un problema complejo pero fundamental si se pretenden instaurar planes de recompensa. La evaluación ha de ser justa y basada en indicadores claros que no generen resultados ambiguos o poco ajustados a la realidad del rendimiento individual. En el campo de la conducción eficiente, la...

This paper shows the development of two new experimental exercises that are at the top of the state-of-the-art platforms for setting up, wiring, and measuring electronic circuits online, virtual instrument systems in reality (VISIR), allowing: 1) non-isolated linear regulated dc/dc converter and 2) non-isolated switching-regulated dc/dc converter....

Concerns about global warming and energy costs have induced transport companies to take measures to reduce fuel consumption. Among the different options available, efficient driving is widely used, allowing a reduction in fuel consumption of around 10%. However, changing the driver's behavior is not exempt of problems. The success of efficient driv...

The results from event-driven simulations with video services can present limitations because of the cost of developing accurate models. Creating a video server model precise in how streams are transmitted is generally as expensive as the construction of the real server, thus several simplifications are generally introduced to reduce the effort. In...

Driving efficiently motor vehicles is one of the most economic methods to reduce the consumption of petrol and, thus, the generation of greenhouse effect gasses. Traditionally, transport companies tackled this process with driving courses, but this approach on itself is not very successful on the medium and long terms. We consider that a learning a...

The ISO 50001 is an international standard oriented to the energy management. In the transport sector and in companies where the equipment is mainly combustion engine means, this energy management process is principally oriented to control the vehicle fuel consumption. In this paper, we present a service capable of monitoring how and when the fuel...

Reputation systems have been showed as effective mechanisms for capturing and extracting the global view a society has about some entities. Traditionally, these systems are based on capturing users' opinions through quantitative evaluations given by numerical ratings. However, it has been demonstrated that mapping opinions to numerical values might...

Uno de los costes operativos más importantes en una compañía de transporte por carretera es el del combustible. El consumo de carburantes representa un importante porcentaje del gasto y la variación de su precio suele obligar a cambios inmediatos en las tarifas para mantener la rentabilidad. Este artículo presenta un método para la reducción de con...

Abnormal human behaviour detection under free-living conditions is a reliable method to detect disorders and diseases in healthcare applications. The problem with current methods to detect human behaviour changes is the use of supervised techniques that require human intervention. This work proposes an automatic data mining method based on physical...

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 majorit...

Much as happened with open software, there has been a global attitude shift in the education community toward the open sharing of educational courses and resources. As the largest public distance education university in Spain, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) has had a clear commitment to open learning and content since its very...

In this paper we focus on the achievements of eMadrid initiative in some fields of technology-enhanced learning, mainly involving the improvement of the mechanisms for open educational content retrieval from Internet, considering Internet resources as potential learning objects. Also we facilitate the integration of remote laboratories and external...

There are many tools that enable the development of the augmented reality (AR) activities, some of them can even create and generate an AR experience where the incorporation of 3D objects is simple. However AR tools used in education are different from the general tools limited to the reproduction of virtual content. The purpose of this paper is to...

Scalable streaming has emerged as a feasible solution to resolve users' heterogeneity problems. SVC is the technology that has served as the definitive impulse for the growth of streaming adaptive systems. Systems seek to improve layer switching efficiency from the network point of view but, with increasing importance, without jeopardizing user per...

One of the most important expenses in bus and truck transport companies is the cost of fuel. A small increase in the price of petrol can have a very negative effect on the companies’ balance sheet. Apart from that, road transport companies are targeted due to their influence on air pollution. All of this has made the reduction in fuel consumption t...

This paper reports on the development of two advanced remote electronic circuits experiments: 1) non-isolated linear regulated DC/DC Converter; and 2) non-isolated switching regulated DC/DC converter. These experiments are oriented to labor markets and industrial needs; they allow students to study the behavior of electronics components and commerc...

HTTP Video streaming has become a strong candidate for video transmission on the Internet thanks to the abundance of web infrastructure. With the recent standardization of the new MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH), the flexibility and implantation of adaptive video systems has increased due to the fact that DASH can operate on a conv...

This article reports on the design and development of a new set of remotely controlled electronics experiments oriented to postgraduates and apprentices. Industrial-related issues are emphasized to allow understanding of the behavior of electronics components. The experiments are fully delivered online with a high level of flexibility. Remote retri...

Development of virtual/remote laboratories is a common task involved in the design of course's assessments (in engineering disciplines). The deployment of these laboratories must manage several aspects related to the real use of them, as user's authorization and access, tracking of usage information, loading/saving data from experiments and so on....

Technology surrounds us wherever we look, nonetheless it is necessary to facilitate its use in places where a greater public can enjoy, know and learn with it. Techno Museum and Go Lab projects are focused on this goal. As a first prototype to bring technology closer to young students and schools, UNED has developed a Arduino based smart device tha...

This paper describes the design, development and first results and impressions of a novel Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) on industrial electronics practices. This was possible by implementing a state-of-the-art remote laboratory within the MOOC to allow online delivery of such practices-which makes this MOOC a first of its kind. Thus, the core...

The evolution of Web 3.0 and consequently eLearning 3.0 have demanded a major change of the way learning objects are provided and implemented. It is foreseen that learning objects in eLearning 3.0 should be interoperable and easily discovered, and will represent any kind of virtual or physical object. Several approaches attempted to implement remot...

This work shows the results obtained by a MOOC devoted uniquely to acquiring practical competences for building basic electronic circuits. It has been running for 5 months under the Spanish UNED COMA platform initiative, and more than 3000 participants have enrolled. The electronics experiments included in the MOOC are based on the remote laborator...

The use of marking and labeling standards in digital objects is a process widely implemented for managing knowledge. This article aims to explain the work undertaken in the Electronics and Computer Engineering Department at UNED as a way to take advantage and reuse the department resources, such as annotations, problems, solutions, schemes, article...

Invasiveness and lack of autonomy are reported as the main barriers of current physical activity measurement systems. A non-invasive and autonomous physical activity measurement system is proposed in this work. The system is based on the use of a wearable device, a data gateway and a remote service to collect and process data. Using a watch-like de...

The characteristics of a changing environment and immersed in the knowledge society, demand from enterprises, organizations, universities and society in general, continuous adaptation. This adaptation has to be linked to innovation as a real need, giving a dynamic response to new demands, as a result of the need to improve their operation processes...

The ability for accessing learning tools at any time and from anywhere is highly increasing. Technologies such as Internet and mobile devices provide universal integration of teaching and learning. For scientific or engineering subjects, the use of real resources through on line laboratories is another step towards bringing the students to the prac...

One of the key issues in the education field is the acquisition of skills. This practical knowledge was usually acquired through traditional labs or standalone simulation programs. The World Wide Web and the advance in web programming language have allowed teachers to create online learning applications, such as virtual web laboratories which can b...

On-line laboratories (virtual or remote) are widely used in experimental engineering subjects as part of the learning process. In order to develop these laboratories, a development framework called RELATED (Remote Laboratories exTendED) is used by the Communications and Control System Department of the Spanish University for Distance Education of S...

This paper describes the design and development of a novel Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on industrial electronics circuits. It is the first MOOC that, besides the usual features of these courses, includes the extensive use of a real remote laboratory dedicated to practices in electronic circuits. Although the nature of a MOOC is completely ope...

Context: Static analysis tools are used to discover security vulnerabilities in source code. They suffer from false negatives and false positives. A false positive is a reported vulnerability in a programthat is not really a security problem. A false negative is a vulnerability in the code which is not detected by the tool. Objective: The main goal...

In the present knowledge economy the ability to learn in a way that produces knowledge and practical insights is vital. The technology evolution has also radically changed today’s educational and labor market. The Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) across the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and Telecommunication Industries i...

In this paper an innovative approach for preparing qualified and skilled engineers is presented. The paper reports on a new inter-institutional master’s degree program in Information and Communication System (ICS) that is delivered online and across five European institutions. The program has been developed under the European grant “Remotelabs Acce...

Abnormal human behavior detection under free-living conditions is a reliable technique to detect activity disorders and diseases. This work proposes an acceleration-based algorithm to detect abnormal behavior as an abnormal increase or decrease in physical activity (PA). The algorithm is based on statistical features of human physical activity. Usi...

Practical knowledge is increasingly getting more attention in the higher education, especially in the field of engineering education. Engineering is a discipline which has, by its own definition, a large amount of practical contents. Allowing students to interact with real equipment can give to them a qualitative knowledge that cannot be obtained i...

In the last decade and with the rapid pace of evolution of Information Technologies (IT), E-learning have witnessed noticeable leaps and have recorded a high rate of promulgation among universities and institutions around the world. Initially, e-learning was confined to the aid of computers in teaching. Nowadays, the concept has been extended magni...

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...