Local relevancy evaluation in the accreditation bodies for engineering master's programs

Accreditation models in the international context mainly consider the evaluation of learning outcomes and the ability of programs (or higher education institutions) to achieve the educational objectives stated in their mission. However, it is not clear if these objectives and therefore their outcomes satisfy real national and regional needs, a critical point in engineering master's programs, especially in developing countries. The aim of this paper is to study the importance of the local relevancy evaluation of these programs and to analyze the main models of quality assurance and accreditation bodies of USA, Europe and Latin America, in order to ascertain whether the relevancy is evaluated or not. After a literature review, we found that in a free-market economic context and international education, the accreditation of master’s programs follows an international accreditation model, and doesn´t take in account in most cases criteria and indicators for local relevancy. It concludes that it is necessary both, international accreditation to ensure the effectiveness of the program (achievement of learning outcomes) and the national accreditation through which it could ensure local relevancy of programs, for which we are giving some indicators.

Estrategias Avanzadas de Tabulación y Paralelismo en Programas Lógicos = Advanced Evaluation Strategies for Tabling and Parallelism in Logic Programs

Dentro de los paradigmas de programación en el mundo de la informática tenemos la "Programación Lógica'', cuyo principal exponente es el lenguaje Prolog. Los programas Prolog se componen de un conjunto de predicados, cada uno de ellos definido en base a reglas que aportan un elevado nivel de abstracción y declaratividad al programador. Sin embargo, las formulación con reglas implica, frecuentemente, que un predicado se recompute varias veces para la misma consulta y además, Prolog utiliza un orden fijo para evaluar reglas y objetivos (evaluación SLD) que puede entrar en "bucles infinitos'' cuando ejecuta reglas recursivas declarativamente correctas. Estas limitaciones son atacadas de raiz por la tabulación, que se basa en "recordar'' en una tabla las llamadas realizadas y sus soluciones. Así, en caso de repetir una llamada tendríamos ya disponibles sus soluciones y evitamos la recomputación. También evita "bucles infinitos'' ya que las llamadas que los generan son suspendidas, quedando a la espera de que se computen soluciones para las mismas. La implementación de la tabulación no es sencilla. En particular, necesita de tres operaciones que no pueden ser ejecutadas en tiempo constante simultáneamente. Dichas operaciones son: suspensión de llamadas, relanzamiento de llamadas y {acceso a variables. La primera parte de la tesis compara tres implementaciones de tabulación sobre Ciao, cada una de las cuales penaliza una de estas operaciones. Por tanto, cada solución tiene sus ventajas y sus inconvenientes y se comportan mejor o peor dependiendo del programa ejecutado. La segunda parte de la tesis mejora la funcionalidad de la tabulación para combinarla con restricciones y también para evitar computaciones innecesarias. La programación con restricciones permite la resolución de ecuaciones como medio de programar, mecanismo altamente declarativo. Hemos desarrollado un framework para combinar la tabulación con las restricciones, priorizando objetivos como la flexibilidad, la eficiencia y la generalidad de nuestra solución, obteniendo una sinergia entre ambas técnicas que puede ser aplicada en numerosas aplicaciones. Por otra parte, un aspecto fundamental de la tabulación hace referencia al momento en que se retornan las soluciones de una llamada tabulada. Local evaluation devuelve soluciones cuando todas las soluciones de la llamada tabulada han sido computadas. Por contra, batched evaluation devuelve las soluciones una a una conforme van siendo computadas, por lo que se adapta mejor a problemas donde no nos interesa encontrar todas las soluciones. Sin embargo, su consumo de memoria es exponencialmente peor que el de local evaluation. La tesis presenta swapping evaluation, que devuelve soluciones tan pronto como son computadas pero con un consumo de memoria similar a la de local evaluation. Además, se implementan operadores de poda, once/1, para descartar la búsqueda de soluciones alternativas cuando encontramos la solución deseada. Por último, Prolog adopta con relativa facilidad soluciones para paralelismo gracias a su flexibilidad en el control de la ejecución y a que sus asignaciones son lógicas. La tercera parte de la tesis extiende el paralelismo conjuntivo de Ciao para trabajar con programas no deterministas, lo que presenta dos problemas principales: los objetivos atrapados y la recomputación de objetivos. Las soluciones clásicas para los objetivos atrapados rompían muchos invariantes de la ejecución Prolog, siendo soluciones difíciles de mantener y de extender, que la experiencia nos dice que han caído en desuso. Nosotros proponemos una solución modular (basada en la implementación de swapping evaluation), localizada y que no rompe los invariantes de la ejecución Prolog, pero que mantiene un alto rendimiento de la ejecución paralela. En referencia a la recomputación de objetivos paralelos en presencia de no determinismo hemos adaptado ténicas derivadas de la tabulación para memorizar computaciones de estos objetivos y evitar su recomputación.

Evaluation of three solar and daylighting control systems based on Calumen II, Ecotect and Radiance simulation programs to obtain an energy efficient and healthy interior in the experimental building prototype SDE10

Evaluation of three solar and daylighting control systems based on Calumen II, Ecotect and Radiance simulation programs to obtain an energy efficient and healthy interior in the experimental building prototype SDE10

Local relevance evaluation in the accreditation bodies for engineering masters programs

Accreditation models in the international context mainly consider the evaluation of learning outcomes and the ability of programs (or higher education institutions) to achieve the educational objectives stated in their mission. However, it is not clear if these objectives and therefore their outcomes satisfy real national and regional needs, a critical point in engineering master's programs, especially in developing countries. The aim of this paper is to study the importance of the local relevancy evaluation of these programs and to analyze the main models of quality assurance and accreditation bodies of USA, Europe and Latin America, in order to ascertain whether the relevancy is evaluated or not. After a literature review, we found that in a free-market economic context and international education, the accreditation of master's programs follows an international accreditation model, and doesńt take in account in most cases criteria and indicators for local relevancy. It concludes that it is necessary both, international accreditation to ensure the effectiveness of the program (achievement of learning outcomes) and the national accreditation through which it could ensure local relevancy of programs, for which we are giving some indicators.

Training project management complexity in postgraduate and continuing education programs: a learning strategy in the eshe (European Space of Higher Education) framework

The objective of this paper is to address the methodological process of a teaching strategy for training project management complexity in postgraduate programs. The proposal is made up of different methods —intuitive, comparative, deductive, case study, problem-solving Project-Based Learning— and different activities inside and outside the classroom. This integration of methods motivated the current use of the concept of “learning strategy”. The strategy has two phases: firstly, the integration of the competences —technical, behavioral and contextual—in real projects; and secondly, the learning activity was oriented in upper level of knowledge, the evaluating the complexity for projects management in real situations. Both the competences in the learning strategy and the Project Complexity Evaluation are based on the ICB of IPMA. The learning strategy is applied in an international Postgraduate Program —Erasmus Mundus Master of Science— with the participation of five Universities of the European Union. This master program is fruit of a cooperative experience from one Educative Innovation Group of the UPM -GIE-Project-, two Research Groups of the UPM and the collaboration with other external agents to the university. Some reflections on the experience and the main success factors in the learning strategy were presented in the paper

Training project management complexity in postgraduate and continuing education programs: a learning strategy in the eshe (European Space of Higher Education) framework

The objective of this paper is to address the methodological process of a teaching strategy for training project management complexity in postgraduate programs. The proposal is made up of different methods —intuitive, comparative, deductive, case study, problem-solving Project-Based Learning— and different activities inside and outside the classroom. This integration of methods motivated the current use of the concept of ―learning strategy‖. The strategy has two phases: firstly, the integration of the competences —technical, behavioral and contextual—in real projects; and secondly, the learning activity was oriented in upper level of knowledge, the evaluating the complexity for projects management in real situations. Both the competences in the learning strategy and the Project Complexity Evaluation are based on the ICB of IPMA. The learning strategy is applied in an international Postgraduate Program —Erasmus Mundus Master of Science— with the participation of five Universities of the European Union. This master program is fruit of a cooperative experience from one Educative Innovation Group of the UPM -GIE-Project-, two Research Groups of the UPM and the collaboration with other external agents to the university. Some reflections on the experience and the main success factors in the learning strategy were presented in the paper.

Exploiting goal independence in the analysis of logic programs

This paper illustrates the use of a top-down framework to obtain goal independent analyses of logic programs, a task which is usually associated with the bottom-up approach. While it is well known that the bottomup approach can be used, through the magic set transformation, for goal dependent analysis, it is less known that the top-down approach can be used for goal independent analysis. The paper describes two ways of doing the latter. We show how the results of a goal independent analysis can be used to speed up subsequent goal dependent analyses. However this speed-up may result in a loss of precisión. The influence of domain characteristics on this precisión is discussed and an experimental evaluation using a generic top-down analyzer is described.

Annotation algorithms for unrestricted independent and-parallelism in logic programs

We present two new algorithms which perform automatic parallelization via source-to-source transformations. The objective is to exploit goal-level, unrestricted independent and-parallelism. The proposed algorithms use as targets new parallel execution primitives which are simpler and more flexible than the well-known &/2 parallel operator. This makes it possible to genérate better parallel expressions by exposing more potential parallelism among the literals of a clause than is possible with &/2. The difference between the two algorithms stems from whether the order of the solutions obtained is preserved or not. We also report on a preliminary evaluation of an implementation of our approach. We compare the performance obtained to that of previous annotation algorithms and show that relevant improvements can be obtained.

Removing superfluous versions in polyvariant specialization of prolog programs.

Polyvariant specialization allows generating múltiple versions of a procedure, which can then be separately optimized for different uses. Since allowing a high degree of polyvariance often results in more optimized code, polyvariant specializers, such as most partial evaluators, can genérate a large number of versions. This can produce unnecessarily large residual programs. Also, large programs can be slower due to cache miss effects. A possible solution to this problem is to introduce a minimization step which identifies sets of equivalent versions, and replace all occurrences of such versions by a single one. In this work we present a unifying view of the problem of superfluous polyvariance. It includes both partial deduction and abstract múltiple specialization. As regards partial deduction, we extend existing approaches in several ways. First, previous work has dealt with puré logic programs and a very limited class of builtins. Herein we propose an extensión to traditional characteristic trees which can be used in the presence of calis to external predicates. This includes all builtins, librarles, other user modules, etc. Second, we propose the possibility of collapsing versions which are not strictly equivalent. This allows trading time for space and can be useful in the context of embedded and pervasive systems. This is done by residualizing certain computations for external predicates which would otherwise be performed at specialization time. Third, we provide an experimental evaluation of the potential gains achievable using minimization which leads to interesting conclusions.

A generic framework for the analysis and specialization of kogic programs

The relationship between abstract interpretation [2] and partial evaluation [5] has received considerable attention and (partial) integrations have been proposed starting from both the partial deduction (see e.g. [6] and its references) and abstract interpretation perspectives. Abstract interpretation-based analyzers (such as the CiaoPP analyzer [9,4]) generally compute a program analysis graph [1] in order to propagate (abstract) call and success information by performing fixpoint computations when needed. On the other hand, partial deduction methods [7] incorporate powerful techniques for on-line specialization including (concrete) call propagation and unfolding.

Implementation of multiple specialization in logic programs

We study the múltiple specialization of logic programs based on abstract interpretation. This involves in general generating several versions of a program predícate for different uses of such predícate, making use of information obtained from global analysis performed by an abstract interpreter, and finally producing a new, "multiply specialized" program. While the topic of múltiple specialization of logic programs has received considerable theoretical attention, it has never been actually incorporated in a compiler and its effects quantified. We perform such a study in the context of a parallelizing compiler and show that it is indeed a relevant technique in practice. Also, we propose an implementation technique which has the same power as the strongest of the previously proposed techniques but requires little or no modification of an existing abstract interpreter.

Goal dependent vs goal independent analysis of logic programs

Goal independent analysis of logic programs is commonly discussed in the context of the bottom-up approach. However, while the literature is rich in descriptions of top-down analysers and their application, practical experience with bottom-up analysis is still in a preliminary stage. Moreover, the practical use of existing top-down frameworks for goal independent analysis has not been addressed in a practical system. We illustrate the efficient use of existing goal dependent, top-down frameworks for abstract interpretation in performing goal independent analyses of logic programs much the same as those usually derived from bottom-up frameworks. We present several optimizations for this flavour of top-down analysis. The approach is fully implemented within an existing top-down framework. Several implementation tradeoffs are discussed as well as the influence of domain characteristics. An experimental evaluation including a comparison with a bottom-up analysis for the domain Prop is presented. We conclude that the technique can offer advantages with respect to standard goal dependent analyses.

Constructs and evaluation strategies for intelligent speculative parallelism - armageddon revisited

This report addresses speculative parallelism (the assignment of spare processing resources to tasks which are not known to be strictly required for the successful completion of a computation) at the user and application level. At this level, the execution of a program is seen as a (dynamic) tree —a graph, in general. A solution for a problem is a traversal of this graph from the initial state to a node known to be the answer. Speculative parallelism then represents the assignment of resources to múltiple branches of this graph even if they are not positively known to be on the path to a solution. In highly non-deterministic programs the branching factor can be very high and a naive assignment will very soon use up all the resources. This report presents work assignment strategies other than the usual depth-first and breadth-first. Instead, best-first strategies are used. Since their definition is application-dependent, the application language contains primitives that allow the user (or application programmer) to a) indícate when intelligent OR-parallelism should be used; b) provide the functions that define "best," and c) indícate when to use them. An abstract architecture enables those primitives to perform the search in a "speculative" way, using several processors, synchronizing them, killing the siblings of the path leading to the answer, etc. The user is freed from worrying about these interactions. Several search strategies are proposed and their implementation issues are addressed. "Armageddon," a global pruning method, is introduced, together with both a software and a hardware implementation for it. The concepts exposed are applicable to áreas of Artificial Intelligence such as extensive expert systems, planning, game playing, and in general to large search problems. The proposed strategies, although showing promise, have not been evaluated by simulation or experimentation.

Two efficient representations for set-sharing analysis in logic programs

Set-Sharing analysis, the classic Jacobs and Langen's domain, has been widely used to infer several interesting properties of programs at compile-time such as occurs-check reduction, automatic parallelization, flnite-tree analysis, etc. However, performing abstract uniflcation over this domain implies the use of a closure operation which makes the number of sharing groups grow exponentially. Much attention has been given in the literature to mitígate this key inefficiency in this otherwise very useful domain. In this paper we present two novel alternative representations for the traditional set-sharing domain, tSH and tNSH. which compress efficiently the number of elements into fewer elements enabling more efficient abstract operations, including abstract uniflcation, without any loss of accuracy. Our experimental evaluation supports that both representations can reduce dramatically the number of sharing groups showing they can be more practical solutions towards scalable set-sharing.

Towards Integrating Partial Evaluation in a Specialization Framework based on Generic Abstract Interpretation

Abstract is not available