A language exchange program: sustainability innovation in language and culture engagement

Spanish Educational Laws have been promoting the widespread use of English; as a result, Spanish Uni versities are looking for ways to give students more international training in order to prepare them for a future that will increasingly involve global problems and partnerships. Therefore, the Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain (UPM), and the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, Canada (UBCO) have come together to offer opportunities for international collaboration and learning, thus facilitating virtual encounters among Spanish and Canadian students. The Language Exchange Program between the UPM and UBCO acts as a model for sustainability innovation in language and culture engagement as the students can interact with native speakers in communication tasks. This interdisciplinary initiative supports the latest methodological principles observed in the Common European Framework for Languages, such as autonomous and life-long learning, self-assessment and peer-assessment as well as the incorporation of new technologies to the learning process. Additionally the ‘virtual’ mobility is provided at no extra cost. This article presents the preliminary results of two virtual exchange programs that have been offering varied forms of study which are venue-independent, and have clearly expanded the range of scenarios for the students on both sides by promoting collaborative work and cultural exchange.

Forced response of Bladed Disks with Damping Mistuning

The effect of mistuning on the vibration of bladed disks has been extensively studied in the past 30 years. Most of these analysis typically cover the case of small variations of the elastic characteristics (mass and stiffness) of the blades. In this work we study the not so common case of the forced response of a stable rotor with damping mistuning. The Asymptotic Mistuning Model (AMM) is used to analyze this problem. The AMM methodology provides a simplified model that describes the effect of blade to blade damping variation, and gives precise information on the underlying mechanisms involved in the action of damping mistuning.

A practical approach to the global analysis of CLP programs

This paper presents and illustrates with an example a practical approach to the dataflow analysis of programs written in constraint logic programming (CLP) languages using abstract interpretation. It is first argued that, from the framework point of view, it sufnces to propose relatively simple extensions of traditional analysis methods which have already been proved useful and practical and for which efncient fixpoint algorithms have been developed. This is shown by proposing a simple but quite general extensión of Bruynooghe's traditional framework to the analysis of CLP programs. In this extensión constraints are viewed not as "suspended goals" but rather as new information in the store, following the traditional view of CLP. Using this approach, and as an example of its use, a complete, constraint system independent, abstract analysis is presented for approximating definiteness information. The analysis is in fact of quite general applicability. It has been implemented and used in the analysis of CLP(R) and Prolog-III applications. Results from the implementation of this analysis are also presented.

Independence in constraint logic programs

Studying independence of literals, variables, and substitutions has proven very useful in the context of logic programming (LP). Here we study independence in the broader context of constraint logic programming (CLP). We show that a naive extrapolation of the LP definitions of independence to CLP is unsatisfactory (in fact, wrong) for two reasons. First, because interaction between variables through constraints is more complex than in the case of logic programming. Second, in order to ensure the efUciency of several optimizations not only must independence of the search space be considered, but also an orthogonal issue - "independence of constraint solving." We clarify these issues by proposing various types of search independence and constraint solver independence, and show how they can be combined to allow different independence-related optimizations, from parallelism to intelligent backtracking. Sufficient conditions for independence which can be evaluated "a-priori" at run-time are also proposed. Our results suggest that independence, provided a suitable definition is chosen, is even more useful in CLP than in LP.

Maximum Likelihood Estimation of Modal Parameters in Structures Using the Expectation Maximization Algorithm

This paper presents a time-domain stochastic system identification method based on maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) with the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm. The effectiveness of this structural identification method is evaluated through numerical simulation in the context of the ASCE benchmark problem on structural health monitoring. The benchmark structure is a four-story, two-bay by two-bay steel-frame scale model structure built in the Earthquake Engineering Research Laboratory at the University of British Columbia, Canada. This paper focuses on Phase I of the analytical benchmark studies. A MATLAB-based finite element analysis code obtained from the IASC-ASCE SHM Task Group web site is used to calculate the dynamic response of the prototype structure. A number of 100 simulations have been made using this MATLAB-based finite element analysis code in order to evaluate the proposed identification method. There are several techniques to realize system identification. In this work, stochastic subspace identification (SSI)method has been used for comparison. SSI identification method is a well known method and computes accurate estimates of the modal parameters. The principles of the SSI identification method has been introduced in the paper and next the proposed MLE with EM algorithm has been explained in detail. The advantages of the proposed structural identification method can be summarized as follows: (i) the method is based on maximum likelihood, that implies minimum variance estimates; (ii) EM is a computational simpler estimation procedure than other optimization algorithms; (iii) estimate more parameters than SSI, and these estimates are accurate. On the contrary, the main disadvantages of the method are: (i) EM algorithm is an iterative procedure and it consumes time until convergence is reached; and (ii) this method needs starting values for the parameters. Modal parameters (eigenfrequencies, damping ratios and mode shapes) of the benchmark structure have been estimated using both the SSI method and the proposed MLE + EM method. The numerical results show that the proposed method identifies eigenfrequencies, damping ratios and mode shapes reasonably well even in the presence of 10% measurement noises. These modal parameters are more accurate than the SSI estimated modal parameters.