Rafael Pastor Vargas | Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (original) (raw)

Papers by Rafael Pastor Vargas

International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (iJET), 2013

The role of Learning Management Systems (LMSs) is very important when conducting educational acti... more The role of Learning Management Systems (LMSs) is very important when conducting educational activities, spe- cially in the case of distant education â?? when its use becomes essential since all the interactions among the participants in the learning/teaching process are conducted though it. There are a number tools to provide this functionality, both open-source (such as .LRN, Sakai, or Moodle) and proprietary solutions (such as Blackboard). Given the wide variety of existing LMSs, it is worthwhile to devote effort in order to figure out which LMS is the most suitable for my needs? This paper strives at answering this question by presenting a twofold evaluation that compares three of the most widely used open-source LMS, namely .LRN, Sakai, and Moodle. First, a performance evaluation is presented that shows the different levels of use of the hardware resources (e.g. CPU, memory, I/O) of the machine the LMS is running on. Second, a performance evaluation from the point of view of th...

Energies

Energy Transition is changing the renewable energy participation in new distributed generation sy... more Energy Transition is changing the renewable energy participation in new distributed generation systems like the Local Energy Markets. Due to its inherent intermittent and variable nature, forecasting production and consumption load profiles will be more challenging and demand more complex predictive models. This paper analyzes the production, consumption load profile, and storage headroom% of the Cornwall Local Energy Market, using advanced statistical time series methods to optimize the opportunity market the storage units provide. These models also help the Energy Community storage reserves to meet contract conditions with the Distribution Network Operator. With this more accurate and detailed knowledge, all sites from this Local Energy Market will benefit more from their installation by optimizing their energy consumption, production, and storage. This better accuracy will make the Local Energy Market more fluid and safer, creating a flexible system that will guarantee the techni...

IEEE Access, 2021

The instructional design of meaningful experimental activities completely integrated into on-line... more The instructional design of meaningful experimental activities completely integrated into on-line Engineering courses is still a significant challenge, by following the sustainable development goal of the United Nations for quality education, the SDG number 4. Remote and virtual laboratories can be a solution to improve this design in distance methodology. This fact has been more noticeable during the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences with respect to education. Its transparent integration into the learning process and the inclusion of learning analytic features are essential features of these kinds of technologies. Without them, lecturers cannot track the performance and the satisfaction of their students. Our LoT@UNED (Laboratory-of-Things@UNED) platform has been implemented to include all these educational features for IoT environments, ranging from edge to cloud computing. Taking the advantages of the IoT paradigm, this platform involves acquiring practical competences within IoT and edge-cloud programming topics, among others. Furthermore, its flexibility allows us to host other areas, such as cybersecurity. Specifically, our platform incorporates a set of sustainable capabilities (scalability, availability, and security), so contributing to the SDG 4 challenge with a low-complex and efficient solution for quality distance education. To analyze the impact of our proposed solution, this work also focuses on studying the influence among several acceptance UTAUT/TAM factors during the students' learning and teaching process. To achieve this goal, both exploratory and confirmatory analyses have been conducted. The reliability and validity of data are also analyzed. An improved structural equation model has also been studied, satisfying several statistical indicators according to the recommended thresholds in the current literature. The usefulness of our platform, easing the users' attitude and having a high availability of resources affect positively the intention of use our IoT cloud solution and, as a consequence, the great quality of the education process.

The International Journal of Electrical Engineering & Education, 2005

In this paper, an XML-based framework, known as RELATED, is used to build a remote lab for provid... more In this paper, an XML-based framework, known as RELATED, is used to build a remote lab for providing experience of control engineering on a servo motor using components distributed across the Internet. This new approach allows different groups to share their hardware and software resources and to facilitate the creation of networks of virtual/remote laboratories.

International Journal of Online Engineering (iJOE), 2013

Practical knowledge is increasingly getting more attention in the higher education, especially in... more 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 in other way. In this situation, remote laboratories are especially useful. This paper presents a way of reusing remote labs code by its XML representation. The idea is that students learn not only the basic subjects of the course, even more, that students do not only manipulate lab equipment. The idea is to give the students a practical way to check the potential of work organization and to give a taste of the powerfulness of code reusing, that is, in the end, a way to improve work efficiency

nuevo paradigma, la valoración del trabajo realizado por el estudiante y la evaluación continua d... more nuevo paradigma, la valoración del trabajo realizado por el estudiante y la evaluación continua del mismo implica el uso de recursos tecnológicos para realizar el seguimiento de las actividades fuera del aula, entre los que se deben destacar las denominadas plataformas de e-Learning (teleformación). Todas las universidades españolas han implantado (o comenzado a implantar) este tipo de sistemas, por lo que en este trabajo se muestra una revisión detallada de las características de las diferentes alternativas disponibles y extendidas en el mapa del espacio español universitario.

International Journal of Online Engineering (iJOE), 2016

Remote practical experiences are nowadays essential in the context of distance education, because... more Remote practical experiences are nowadays essential in the context of distance education, because students cannot use face-to-face traditional laboratories. These remote laboratories can be used by faculty within virtual classrooms, so that students can carry out their on-line experiments in a ubiquitous way – from anywhere and at any time. But these activities cannot be isolated from the learning process of students. Therefore, the services provided by a remote laboratory must be integrated into the institutional Learning Management System (LMS), in order to be employed during the whole learning process. In this work, a fully-functional example of the integration of service-oriented remote laboratories into a LMS is presented, where the Moodle platform has been chosen as a representative LMS

JMIR Medical Informatics, 2022

Background Eating disorders affect an increasing number of people. Social networks provide inform... more Background Eating disorders affect an increasing number of people. Social networks provide information that can help. Objective We aimed to find machine learning models capable of efficiently categorizing tweets about eating disorders domain. Methods We collected tweets related to eating disorders, for 3 consecutive months. After preprocessing, a subset of 2000 tweets was labeled: (1) messages written by people suffering from eating disorders or not, (2) messages promoting suffering from eating disorders or not, (3) informative messages or not, and (4) scientific or nonscientific messages. Traditional machine learning and deep learning models were used to classify tweets. We evaluated accuracy, F1 score, and computational time for each model. Results A total of 1,058,957 tweets related to eating disorders were collected. were obtained in the 4 categorizations, with The bidirectional encoder representations from transformer–based models had the best score among the machine learning a...

BACKGROUND Eating disorders (EDs) are diseases that affect an increasing number of people. Social... more BACKGROUND Eating disorders (EDs) are diseases that affect an increasing number of people. Social networks provide information that can help to solve problems in this domain. In our study, we use artificial intelligence applied to social media data on eating disorders. OBJECTIVE We set out to find efficient models capable of categorizing tweets into four different binary categories in the EDs domain. We sought to obtain the most accurate model at the best computational cost. METHODS For three consecutive months, 1,058,957 tweets related to eating disorders were collected. The data were preprocessed and a subset of 2,000 tweets was labeled into four binary categories: (i) messages written by people suffering from EDs or not, (ii) messages promoting suffering from EDs or not, (iii) informative messages or not, and (iv) scientific or non-scientific messages. Following this, traditional machine learning and deep learning models capable of classifying text were applied to make use of thi...

Control Engineering Practice, 2003

This paper describes a tuning tool for PID controllers. What makes this tool different to others ... more This paper describes a tuning tool for PID controllers. What makes this tool different to others available in the market is: (a) its ability to model the most important load disturbances, (b) its wide range of tuning methods that cover two types of specifications (features of time responses and features of frequency responses), (c) its possibilities in order to import or export data and to determine the more adequate control parameters exportable to the distributed control system. The calculated MISO model enables an improved tuning of the PID loop, both for the servo and regulatory cases. This is of special interest in the Petrochemical Industry where most of the PID controllers have a fixed design criterion, load disturbances rejection or setpoint following, like in model predictive control applications. This tool, which combines direct experience in the industry with the solid theoretical knowledge of a group of university researchers, is already being widely used in all the REPSOL-YPF refineries and some of its petrochemical industrial complexes.

International Journal of Interactive Multimedia and Artificial Intelligence, 2014

This work presents the integration of an automatic assessment system for virtual/remote laborator... more This work presents the integration of an automatic assessment system for virtual/remote laboratories and the institutional Learning Management System (LMS), in order to analyze the students' progress and their collaborative learning in virtual/remote laboratories. As a result of this integration, it is feasible to extract useful information for the characterization of the students' learning process and detecting the students' engagement with the practical activities of our subjects. From this integration, a dashboard has been created to graphically present to lecturers the analyzed results. Thanks to this, faculty can use the analyzed information in order to guide the learning/teaching process of each student. As an example, a subject focused on the configuration of network services has been chosen to implement our proposal.

International Journal of Online Engineering (iJOE), 2014

In the recent years, the research community has been focused on cloud systems as a way to provide... more In the recent years, the research community has been focused on cloud systems as a way to provide customizable on demand access to computing resources in a variety of flavors (the most widely known being Infrastructure as a Service, IaaS, Platform as a Service, PaaS, and Software as a Service, SaaS). In this work, we strive to provide our vision on cloud- based laboratories, which allow the on-demand creation and customization of experiments, these being called Laboratories as a Service (LaaS). Our LaaS will be based on the deconstruction of remote laboratories, creation of clients, and selection of a container. An aeolian laboratory based on the Lego Mindstorms robotic kit is used as an example.

Applied Sciences, 2021

The employment of modern technologies is widespread in our society, so the inclusion of practical... more The employment of modern technologies is widespread in our society, so the inclusion of practical activities for education has become essential and useful at the same time. These activities are more noticeable in Engineering, in areas such as cybersecurity, data science, artificial intelligence, etc. Additionally, these activities acquire even more relevance with a distance education methodology, as our case is. The inclusion of these practical activities has clear advantages, such as (1) promoting critical thinking and (2) improving students’ abilities and skills for their professional careers. There are several options, such as the use of remote and virtual laboratories, virtual reality and game-based platforms, among others. This work addresses the development of a new cloud game-based educational platform, which defines a modular and flexible architecture (using light containers). This architecture provides interactive and monitoring services and data storage in a transparent wa...

In this paper, a novel environment is described that provides 24-h-a-day access to aWeb-based lab... more In this paper, a novel environment is described that provides 24-h-a-day access to aWeb-based lab for the remote control of different didactic setups. The control of an inverted pendulum is used to demonstrate the use of such an environment. The main attr

espanolEn este trabajo se presenta una experiencia basada en laboratorios remotos con el fin de c... more espanolEn este trabajo se presenta una experiencia basada en laboratorios remotos con el fin de crear actividades orientadas al contexto de la ciberseguridad. Para lograr este fin, se ha desarrollado una plataforma que ofrece soporte a dichas actividades, estando compuesta por un conjunto de dispositivos de bajo coste de Internet de las Cosas (IoT) y tecnologias dentro del paradigma de Cloud Computing. La plataforma desarrollada se llama LoT@UNED, visto como un laboratorio de cosas (en ingles, Laboratory of Things), que esta alojado en el departamento de Sistemas de Comunicacion en Control (SCC) en la Escuela Tecnica Superior de Ingenieria Informatica (ETSI Informatica) de la UNED. En concreto, el presente trabajo describe con detalle la experiencia llevada a cabo y los resultados obtenidos a partir de su puesta en marcha, siempre teniendo en cuenta la metodologia de ensenanzaaprendizaje a distancia, caracteristica fundamental de la UNED, la arquitectura modular de LoT@UNED y los el...

La UNED en TVE-2 La utilizacion de drones es una realidad que esta presente ya en nuestra socieda... more La UNED en TVE-2 La utilizacion de drones es una realidad que esta presente ya en nuestra sociedad. Este programa pretende ser una introduccion a este fascinante mundo.

In engineering grades, the accomplishment of experimental practices is limited to a real presence... more In engineering grades, the accomplishment of experimental practices is limited to a real presence in the laboratory installations. Nevertheless, the development of remote environments has facilitated the use of experimental equipment outside the laboratory, avoiding the spatial and temporary barriers. There are so many initiatives that provides real interaction with the laboratory equipment, but no methodology exits that allows getting a unified vision of the development and access to these laboratories, that is to say, an specification of the experimental environment. This paper describes a specification proposal that relies about the definition of the laboratory components and the functionality of the experimentation environment in terms of these components. Using this approach, it will be possible to focus on the accomplishment of experiments and define them as reusable units of learning in an independent way. The component descriptions are defined in terms of XML tags and also a...

Eating disorders (ED) are among the most widespread mental illnesses in our society today. This r... more Eating disorders (ED) are among the most widespread mental illnesses in our society today. This research work presents the study of deep learning models applied to the domain of eating disorders. For this purpose, a collection of messages from the social network Twitter was compiled using web scraping techniques. After collecting a total amount of 1,085,957 tweets, a subset of 2,000 tweets was manually classified. This classification made it possible to differentiate tweets written by people who suffer or have suffered from an ED from those written by people who have not suffered from an ED. After this, 6 predictive models based on Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) were created and a comparison was made by evaluating which model scored the best. The best scoring model was RoBERTa using the pre-trained roberta-base model with an accuracy of 87.5%.