Ruben Heradio

• Ph.D. in Computer Science
• Professor (Full) at National University of Distance Education

Contribution: A competency assessment framework that enables learning analytics for course monitoring and continuous improvement. Our work fills the gap in systematic methods for competency assessment in higher education. Background: Many institutions are shifting toward competency-based education (CBE), thus encouraging their educators to start e...

A Software Product Line SPL is a family of similar programs. Each program is defined by a unique set of features, called a configuration , that satisfies all feature constraints. “What configuration achieves the best performance for a given workload?” is the SPL Optimization SPLO challenge. SPLO is daunting: just 80 unconstrained features yields 10...

Fuzzy testing of integrated circuits is an established technique. Current approaches generate an approximately uniform random sample from a translation of the circuit to Boolean logic. These approaches have serious scalability issues, which become more pressing with the ever-increasing size of circuits. We propose using a base of binary decision di...

Casualties in conflicts and wars are the subject of study and research, which allows us to quantify the odds of victory and tries to minimize one's losses. There have been numerous attempts to develop battle dynamics models that determine the evolution of war as a competitive advantage. Understanding which decision types are applied, how those deci...

Challenging domains of the future such as Smart Cities, Cloud Computing, or Industry 4.0 expose highly variable systems with colossal configuration spaces. The automated analysis of those systems’ variability has often relied on SAT solving and constraint programming. However, many of the analyses have to deal with the uncertainty introduced by the...

Some of the most critical competencies students need to acquire to become control engineers require performing practices under actual industrial conditions. This means that they must not only master the theoretical aspects of the discipline but also acquire skills and attitudes to face unpredictable real-world situations. Software tools such as Mat...

Software systems are becoming increasingly configurable. A paradigmatic example is the Linux kernel, which can be adjusted for a tremendous variety of hardware devices, from mobile phones to supercomputers, thanks to the thousands of configurable features it supports. In principle, many relevant problems on configurable systems, such as completing...

The advent of the Internet of Things has generated loads of data from the devices that are now connected to the Internet. While the majority of the data corresponds to measurements done by these devices, there is a second type of information (the metadata) that provides information about the devices themselves. Most of this metadata is still underu...

Translational medicine is an important area of biomedicine, and has significantly facilitated the development of biomedical research. Despite its relevance, there is no consensus on how to evaluate its progress and impact. A systematic review was carried out to identify all the methods to evaluate translational research. Seven methods were found ac...

Many analyses on configurable software systems are intractable when confronted with colossal and highly-constrained configuration spaces. These analyses could instead use statistical inference, where a tractable sample accurately predicts results for the entire space. To do so, the laws of statistical inference requires each member of the populatio...

Software systems tend to become more and more configurable to satisfy the demands of their increasingly varied customers. Exhaustively testing the correctness of highly configurable software is infeasible in most cases because the space of possible configurations is typically colossal. This paper proposes addressing this challenge by (i) working wi...

Psychopathology networks consist of aspects (e.g., symptoms) of mental disorders (nodes) and the connections between those aspects (edges). This article aims to analyze the research literature on network analysis in psychopathology and mental health for the last ten years. Statistical descriptive analysis was complemented with two bibliometric tech...

Providing computers with the ability to process handwriting is both important and challenging, since many difficulties (e.g., different writing styles, alphabets, languages, etc.) need to be overcome for addressing a variety of problems (text recognition, signature verification, writer identification, word spotting, etc.). This paper reviews the gr...

Battle casualties are the subject of study in military operations research, which applies mathematical models to quantify the probability of victory vs. loss. In particular, different approaches have been proposed to model the course of battles. However, none of them provide adequate decision-making support for high-level command. To overcome this...

Stepwise design of programs is a divide-and-conquer strategy to control complexity in program modularization and theorems. It has been studied extensively in the last 30 years and has worked well, although it is not yet commonplace. This paper explores a new area of research, finding efficient products in colossal product spaces, that builds upon p...

The increase of computer processor speed and the ubiquitous availability of data coming from a diversity of sources (e.g., version control systems, software developers forums, operating system logs, etc.) have boosted the interest in applying machine learning to software engineering. Accordingly, the research literature on this topic has increased...

Several relevant analyses on configurable software systems remain intractable because they require examining vast and highly-constrained configuration spaces. Those analyses could be addressed through statistical inference, i.e., working with a much more tractable sample that later supports generalizing the results obtained to the entire configurat...

See the video presentation on: https://youtu.be/1eWi0FUuoP8

The advance in control engineering education needs well-designed studies that validate what methods and tools work best. This paper addresses the lack of empirical evidence supporting innovations in control engineering education by proposing a methodology that works at different abstraction levels. Hence, innovations' impact on students' performanc...

Decisions concerning crucial and complicated problems are seldom made by a single person. Instead, they require the cooperation of a group of experts in which each participant has their own individual opinions, motivations, background, and interests regarding the existing alternatives. In the last 30 years, much research has been undertaken to prov...

Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) have been used to represent logic models in a variety of research contexts, such as software product lines, circuit testing, and plasma confinement, among others. Although BDDs have proven to be very useful, the main problem with this technique is that synthesizing BDDs can be a frustratingly slow or even unsuccessfu...

The potential benefits of networked control systems are tremendous, as they can be easily upgraded by just including new components (i.e., sensors, actuators, or controllers), avoiding any further modifications to their structure. A critical approach to unleash such potential benefits is event-based control, where the system output turns to be samp...

Slides

Along almost forty years, considerable research has been undertaken on rough set theory to deal with vague information. Rough sets have proven to be extremely helpful for a diversity of computer-science problems (e.g., knowledge discovery, computational logic, machine learning, etc.), and numerous application domains (e.g., business economics, tele...

This paper carries out a bibliometric analysis to detect (i) what is the most influential research on software engineering at the moment, (ii) where is being published that relevant research, (iii) what are the most commonly researched topics, (iv) and where is being undertaken that research (i.e., in which countries and institutions). For that, 6,...

RESUMEN El último rediseño de la carrera de Ingeniería Civil Electrónica de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, realizado el año 2014, hizo transitar su curriculum desde un plan de estudios tradicional a uno basado en competencias. Debido a esto, las estrategias de enseñanza y metodologías de evaluación han debido migrar desde un form...

Online labs are revolutionary tools that produce both economic and educational benefits. On the one hand, labs can be shared among institutions, drastically reducing traditional lab costs. On the other hand, students can access experimental resources 24/7 from anywhere through their electronic devices. This paper presents an open source online lab...

Automated analysis of variability models is crucial for managing software system variants, customized for different market segments or contexts of use. As most approaches for automated analysis are built upon logic engines, they require having a Boolean logic translation of the variability models. However, the translation of some significant langua...

The increasing popularity of distance education poses exciting new challenges. In particular, current pedagogical paradigms, such as competency-based education, require students’ continuous evaluation. That is, to master skills, students need to receive constant feedback to guide their experimentation processes. However, teaching teams are usually...

This work presents PuzzlEx, an experimentation environment for control engineering virtual and remote labs. This environment not only allows students to make interactive use of the lab but also to define and run customized experiments. For this purpose, an intuitive visual programming language that communicates internally with the laboratory is use...

Variability models are broadly used to specify the configurable features of highly customizable software. In practice, they can be large, defining thousands of features with their dependencies and conflicts. In such cases, visualization techniques and automated analysis support are crucial for understanding the models. This paper contributes to thi...

Competency-Based Education is becoming increasingly adopted by higher education institutions all over the world. This paper presents a framework that assists instructors in this pedagogical paradigm, and its corresponding open-source implementation. The framework supports the formal definition of competency assessment models and the students' evalu...

The open-source hardware movement is becoming increasingly popular due to the emergence of successful low-cost technologies, such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi, and thanks to the community of makers that actively share their creations to be freely studied, modified, and re-distributed. Numerous authors have proposed distinct ways to seize this approa...

The software product line approach undertakes the development of complete portfolios of software products as a single, coherent development task. Although there are well documented examples of cost reduction, shorter development times, and quality improvement achieved by introducing the product line paradigm in industry, the approach is not always...

Competency-based education (CBE) is related, in simple words, with the possibility to create curricula whose main objective is to train students for the work reality, trying to minimize the time of adaptation of them in their future professional life. Although the philosophy behind this teaching paradigm is attractive, in practice its implementatio...

Laboratory experimentation is essential in any educational field. Existing software allows two options for performing experiments: (1) Interacting with the graphic user interface (it is intuitive and close to reality, but it has certain constraints that cannot be easily solved), or (2) scripting algorithms (it allows more complex instructions, howe...

La Escuela de Ingeniería Eléctrica de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, desde el año 2014, desarrolla sus nuevos planes curriculares basados en competencias de las carreras de Ingeniería Civil Eléctrica e Ingeniería Civil Electrónica. La educación basada en competencias (EBC) se relaciona, en palabras simples, a la posibilidad de im...

Software Product Lines (SPLs) are families of related software systems that provide different combinations of features. Extensive research and application attest to the significant economical and technological benefits of employing SPL practices. Variability models represent the feature combinations and the properties of the software products of SP...

Laboratory experimentation plays an essential role in control education. To reduce the high costs of maintaining apparatus in traditional labs and to support distance and blended learning, online laboratories are used as a possible alternative to conventional hands-on labs. In these labs it is often desirable to allow students to define their own e...

Inquiry-based learning is a pedagogical approach where students are motivated to pose their own questions when facing problems or scenarios. In physics learning, students are turned into scientists who carry out experiments, collect and analyze data, formulate and evaluate hypotheses, and so on. Lab experimentation is essential for inquiry-based le...

Laboratory experimentation is essential in any educational field. Existing software allows two options for performing experiments: (1) Interacting with the graphic user interface (it is intuitive and close to reality, but it has certain constraints that cannot be easily solved), or (2) scripting algorithms (it allows more complex instructions, howe...

This paper describes a new way to perform automated experiments using virtual laboratories. Experiments are developed and executed using a new software tool: the Experiment Editor. This tool uses virtual laboratories applications designed with educational purposes. The main features/advantages of the Experiment Editor are: 1) the possibility of mod...

Variability models play a key role in software product line engineering as they are used to represent the common and variable features that products may include, and what constraints among the features must be satisfied to guarantee the validity of the products. Valuable analysis operations on variability models can be performed by black box reusin...

Mass customization is the new frontier in business competition for both manufacturing and service industries. To improve customer satisfaction, reduce lead-times and shorten costs, families of similar products are built jointly by combining reusable parts that implement the features demanded by the customers. To guarantee the validity of the produc...

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 f...

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...

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, a...

Experimentation in laboratories is a key pillar in the education of graduate and undergraduate students, who need to understand the fundamental concepts from both perspectives: theoretical and practical. High costs associated with equipment, space, and maintenance staff, impose certain constraints on resources for traditional laboratories. While, V...

This work describes two experiments: “study of the diffraction of light: Fraunhofer approximation” and “the photoelectric effect”. Both of them count with a virtual, simulated, version of the experiment as well as with a real one which can be operated remotely. The two previous virtual and remote labs (built using Easy Java(script) Simulations) are...

Existing software allows the development of high quality interactive applications that permit their implementation in laboratories, both virtual and remote. To perform an experiment, the user needs to know how these applications are implemented. In addition, when coding an experiment, the user has to manage the language in which the simulation was...

Mass customization enables the creation of personalized products that ful ll the features desired by speci c customers. In this context, variability models are used to specify which con gurable features are supported and which constraints among the features must be satis ed to guarantee the validity of the derived products. As the market demand gro...

To compete in the global marketplace, manufacturers try to differentiate their products by focusing on individual customer needs. Fulfilling this goal requires companies to shift from mass production to mass customization. In the context of software development, software product line engineering has emerged as a cost effective approach to developin...

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 that kind of labs. An excellent proof of the EJS potential is the Open Source Physics (OSP) repository, which hosts...

While many works focus on embedding web-based labs within a Learning Management System without really taking much benefit from this integration, this one tries to take the most from the file system of Moodle in order to enhance and extend the functionalities of the online labs that are deployed into this Learning Management System.

Easy Java Simulations (EJS) es una herramienta gratuita y de código abierto, escrita en Java, que ayuda a crear simulaciones interactivas en Java y Javascript. Por medio de esta herramienta, los profesores pueden crear fácilmente laboratorios virtuales y (si disponen del software o hardware adicional necesario) remotos. Mientras que los laboratorio...

To compete in the global marketplace, manufacturers try to differentiate their products by focusing on individual customer needs. Fulfilling this goal requires that companies shift from mass production to mass customization. Under this approach, a generic architecture, named product platform, is designed to support the derivation of customized prod...

Las herramientasWeb 2.0 han facilitado y mejorado la participación de los usuarios en las actividades ofrecidas por las bibliotecas. Pero, para que las herramientas Web 2.0 sean útiles, es indispensable saber si están satisfaciendo las necesidades y expectaciones de los usuarios. El objetivo de este artículo es presentar un modelo de evaluación de...

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,...

There are two main obstacles for supporting lab experimentation in distance learning institutions, such as the Turkish Anadolu University, the UK Open University and the Spanish Open University (UNED): (i) their high number of students, and (ii) the fact that students are usually scattered around the world. Both problems make impossible to provide...

Virtual and remote laboratories (VRLs) are e-learning resources that enhance the accessibility of experimental setups providing a distance teaching framework which meets the student's hands-on learning needs. In addition, online collaborative communication represents a practical and a constructivist method to transmit the knowledge and experience f...

In software product line engineering, feature diagrams are a popular means to represent the similar-ities and differences within a family of related systems. In addition, feature diagrams implicitly model valuable information that can be used in economic models to estimate the cost savings of a product line. In particular, this paper reviews existi...

Web 2.0 tools have changed the relationship between users and libraries by improving the involvement of users in the libraries activities. To use such tools efficiently, it is essential to know if they are meeting user requirements and expectations, and how they could be improved to increase user satisfaction. The aim of this paper is to present a...

This paper presents a generative approach to build a Software Product Line (SPL). This Software Product Line is used to build applications based on the Notification of Changes in databases. The paper highlights the benefits, in terms of productivity and cost, using this approach. To obtain the economicdata we have used two cost models, the SIMPLE M...

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 cal...

This paper presents a web-based control laboratory for a ball and beam system that was adapted to be used within an online course of a Learning Management System platform. The experimentation web environment is presented in the context of the UNEDLabs project, a Spanish network of web-based laboratories for science and engineering education. LabVie...

Web–based labs are key tools for distance education that help to illustrate scientific phenomena which require costly or difficult-to-assemble equipment. We propose the extension of two open source tools: (i) the learning management system Moodle, and (ii) the application to create web–based labs Easy Java Simulations (EJS). Our extension provides:...

This paper presents a domain engineering approach to build a software product line that supports the change notification service in a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) according to the Information Technology Infrastructure Li-brary (ITIL) best practices. For the development of this product line, the proposed approach makes use of a construct...

La asignatura de «Fundamentos de Programación», que se imparte en el primer año de Grado en Informática de la Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), tiene un carácter eminentemente práctico y aproximadamente dos mil alumnos matriculados. Este trabajo aborda tres retos fundamentales para la asignatura: (i) facilitar al alumno un lengu...

Humans decide how to carry out a spontaneous interactionwith an object by using the whole geometric information obtained from their eyes. The aim of this paper is to present how our object representation model MWS (Adán in Comput Vis Image Underst 79:281–307, 2000) can help a robot manipulator to make a single and reliable interaction. The contribu...

Este trabajo presenta un portal web de laboratorios virtuales y remotos, UNEDLabs, que reúne aplicaciones de experimentación (laboratorios) y un entorno web (basado en un sistema de gestión de aprendizaje) juntos. Los laboratorios virtuales son utilizados por los estudiantes como una primera toma de contacto con los fenómenos estudiados, pero tambi...

La asignatura de Robótica se encuentra como materia optativa en las dos titulaciones de primer ciclo de la Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería Informática desde su implantación, y está prevista su impartición en el futuro título de grado de la Escuela. Desde su implantación se ha venido impartiendo por el mismo equipo docente. En base a esta exp...

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 dist...

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) has emerged as the new technology paradigm for acquisition and information management. RFID can be used to improve significantly the efficiency of business processes by providing the capability of automatic identification and data capture. This technology introduces new challenges on data and process informatio...