Equal access to quality higher education: consolidation of the sustainable development goals, case of virtual software engineering of the Manuela Beltrán University

This paper is about extended application of virtual engineering principles, methodologies, and systems as a possible answer to urgent need for integrated industrial, research, and higher educational programs and processes. One of the motivations is the changed world of engineering which requires quick utilization of new findings as new context. At the same time, development of virtual engineering allows for and requires organized knowledge, experience, and expertise content as active context in engineering model structures. Laboratory of Intelligent Engineering Systems published research results in relevant topics such as virtual engineering space, active information content, content structure for the driving product system model entities, integrating higher education course into industrial engineering systems, and application of intellectual property at virtual engineering processes. In this paper, multipurpose potential of a formerly defined and industrial virtual technology conform virtual engineering space is analyzed, specific contextual knowledge driving of model entity generation is conceptualized, a modified driving content structure is explained, and intellectual property as source of driving knowledge is considered. Finally, configuration and user programming capabilities of recent professional virtual industrial engineering system is considered as the only way for the implementation of proposed multipurpose concept and method.

The second workshop on Virtual and Augmented Reality Software Engineering (VARSE) was held on November 1st, 2024, colocated with ASE 2024 at Sacramento, California. The workshop promotes collaboration and knowledge sharing in Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and software engineering while building a dedicated research community. As VR and AR technologies rapidly grow, major companies invest heavily, and platforms like Unity, ARCore, and ARKit enable diverse applications in gaming, education, and communication. The event brings together academic people and industry professionals to address challenges in VR/AR software development while exploring new opportunities for software engineering in immersive environments.

The Manuela Beltran University, located in Cajica, Colombia, is a national example for academic accessibility support, and its virtual modality in educational programs offer support in sustainable development goals (SDGs) under the parameters of UNESCO. This document is a description of its virtual unity trained in the design, creation, administration, and advisement of virtual programs, in new technologies, in this case of the software engineering program. The investigation is done under multimethod and mixed methods research case study descriptive methodology. To define the phenomenon and the real-life context reviewing the framework and national conception of 'software engineering' within the context of quality education in Colombia, justification of teaching-learning processes of software engineering, need of the program under the virtual modality at the national level, and achievements of the Virtual Software Engineering Program of the UMB.

The implementation of a virtual engineering system at John Zink Company, LLC is starting to change the engineering and development processes for industrial combustion equipment. This system is based on the virtual engineering software called VE-Suite being developed at the Virtual Reality Applications Center (VRAC) of Iowa State University. The goal of the John Zink virtual engineering system is to provide a virtual platform where product design, system engineering, computer simulation, and pilot plant test converge in a virtual space to allow engineers to make sound engineering decisions. Using the virtual engineering system, design engineers are able to inspect the layout of individual components and the system integration through an immersive stereo 3D visualization interface. This visualization tool allows the engineer not only to review the integration of subsystems, but also to review the entire plant layout and to identify areas where the design can be improved. One added benefit is to significantly speed up the design review process and improve the turn around time and efficiency of the review process. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is used extensively at John Zink to evaluate, improve, and optimize various combustion equipment designs and new product development. Historically, design and product development engineers relied on CFD experts to interpret simulation results. With the implementation of the virtual engineering system, engineers at John Zink are able to assess the performance of their designs using the CFD simulation results from a first person perspective. The virtual engineering environment provided in VE-Suite greatly enhances the value of CFD simulation and allows engineers to gain much needed process insights in order to make sound engineering decisions in the product design, engineering, and development processes. Engineers at John Zink are now focusing on taking the virtual engineering system to the next level: to allow for real-time changes in product design coupled with high-speed computer simulation along with test data to optimize product designs and engineering. It is envisioned that, when fully implemented, the virtual engineering system will be integrated into the overall engineering process at John Zink to deliver products of the highest quality to its customers and significantly shorten the development cycle time for a new generation of highly efficient and environmentally friendly combustion products.

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals Requires Transdisciplinary Innovation at the Local Scale

SysML is a popular tool for capturing and presenting information about a system through models, but integration with domain specific engineering analysis tools and visualizing the results remain two of the biggest challenges for this model-based systems engineering tool. This paper describes a method to integrate models developed using SysML with virtual engineering software to create an executable, interactive, and user centered platform for engineering systems, providing full traceability between the domain specific analysis tools and the overall systems architecture model. The framework combines the benefits offered by model-based systems engineering and virtual engineering for full system design. Visualization tools available in virtual engineering software make it possible to examine three-dimensional rendering of the systems corresponding to particular architectural views. In addition, by sharing the system parametric information between the SysML model and the virtual engineering model, this methodology enables evaluations that go beyond simple numerical analysis and allow for detailed engineering design tools to be coupled with systems engineering information management techniques. This paper applies the methodology to a biotech fermentor as a simple case study and proof of concept, and provides a discussion of how the method can be used to create a specific view of subsystems within full scale complex systems. By creating these customized views of how the system components perform and interact, it is possible to leverage the detailed engineering information into the decision-making process for case studies and review evaluations.

ПРОФЕСІОНАЛІЗМ ВИКЛАДАЧІВ ВВНЗ ЯК СКЛАДОВА ВНУТРІШНЬОЇ СИСТЕМИ ГАРАНТУВАННЯ ЯКОСТІ ВИЩОЇ ВІЙСЬКОВІЙ ОСВІТИ

‘Virtual engineering’ software for engineers

To Achieve a Sustainable Blue Future, Progress Assessments Must Include Interdependencies between the Sustainable Development Goals

This article discusses future of virtual engineering. Not only will the plant of the future be different from the current one, but also the design tools that engineers use will be different. To reduce cost and shorten development time for the future plants, the DOE is developing virtual engineering as an enabling technology. To integrate all the parts in an intuitive manner will require a software framework, which is being developed by the Virtual Engineering Research Group at Iowa State University. The software is a virtual engineering toolkit called YE-Suite. It is composed of three main software engines—VE-CE, VE-Xplorer, and VE-Conductor—that coordinate the flow of data from the engineer to the virtual components being designed. YE-CE is responsible for the synchronization of the data among the various analysis and process models and the engineer. VE-Xplorer is the decision-making environment that allows the engineer to interact with the equipment models in a visual manner. YE-Conductor is the engineer’s mechanism to control models and other information.

In this issue

It is increasingly easy to imagine a future in which services are delivered through virtual worlds, such as Linden Lab's Second Life. Whereas one might always have to visit the dentist for a filling, the preliminary examination can be conducted through a mash-up of virtual and real images. In fact, with the right technology, nothing purely analytic is impossible virtualized: observation is simply the internalization of an item or an event. Even certain physical products, released from the need for distance-spanning delivery, will shuffle off their physical existence and join the virtual party: virtual visits to the cinema, theatre, ballet and opera. For physical synthesis, however, the situation is more complex: building in a virtual world with the intention of changing the real world is difficult to countenance. In one area, however, synthesis is as easy virtually as it is in the real world: knowledge engineering provides the perfect product for virtual-world synthesis. Knowledge, of course, is already a virtualized product running in the brain. Unfortunately, traditional notions of engineering do not easily translate to the virtual. Consider Rogers's (1983) practice-based definition of engineering:1 [Engineering is] the practice of organising the design and construction of any artifice [solution] which transforms the physical world around us to meet some recognised need. To work with this definition means one must consider virtual as embedded in the real, as illustrated in Figure 1. Rogers embeds the virtual world in the real. The Brain User is the human operator with, perhaps, knowledge needs. Rogers's model is correct in the analysis it enables – we experience the virtual only through physical interaction with the PC. However, it leaves something to be desired when it comes to synthesis in the virtual world, as building the virtual artifice rests on lengthy navigation back and forth through avatars, the PC embedded in the physical world which interacts with our Brain User in their physical world. Is there a simpler model that removes some of this complexity for easier synthesis? The metaphor I am suggesting for virtual engineering is illustrated in Figure 2. Here, we have held a mirror up to the real world to illustrate the symmetry that exists between the virtual world and the real world. It induces a paraphrasing of Rogers, from which we may define virtual engineering as A mirror on the problem: virtual engineering enabled through recognition of the virtualized identified need: the avatar as virtualized brain user. the practice of organizing the design and construction of any virtual artifice which transforms the virtual world around it and our virtual selves to meet some virtual recognized need. Notably, this definition suggests that our real-world engineering skills can and should be transferable to the virtual: there is no reason that organization in the virtual should differ substantially from that in the physical (unless we can get the avatars to do it!). It may also be, of course, that there are new organizational skills to learn from the virtual, to do with enhancing communications for instance, whence our real-world skills are augmented. What isn't clear from our simple restatement of Rogers is the nature of the process by which the real recognized need becomes its virtualized counterpart: more simply, how can we deduce the virtual need from the real one? Examples of the complexity of the relationship will be clear to anyone whose avatar has sat on the virtual beach of any second life world: if you haven't, I recommend the OU's new virtual MPhil on Second Life – hosted on the deep|think islands. The deep|think islands provide a virtual campus for research students where avatars sit on virtual deckchairs under virtual parasols sipping virtual cocktails and watching spectacular virtual sunsets. Virtual birds fly overhead singing virtual birdsong. Later, the avatars will dance the night away in a virtual disco, or go boating: most relaxing, your avatar drifting away into the sunset. Whilst relaxing there, one gets to thinking: for, although the virtual deckchair supports the avatar, it does not support the student whose avatar it is. On the other hand, the virtual birdsong does not calm the avatar, it calms the avatar's owner; just as the virtual sunsets burn themselves not into the avatar's retinas but into real memories. Each virtual artifice has both virtual and real effects, with each virtual effect having a physical emotional counterpart: indeed, it is the emotional response of the real that is reflected by the mirror! Outside of military simulations, 1982's best virtual reality was provided by Microsoft's Flight Simulator, and so it is not too difficult to understand why, for Rogers, the physicality of the real world was of critical importance to engineering. We now know that real-world engineering and virtual-world engineering are related; that the relation is based on a useful symmetry between them that allows skills from one to be used to good effect on the other; but that the translation of real recognized need to the virtual need is complex. As knowledge engineers, we should take a view on this complexity and try to describe it so that real and virtual engineers can come together, to think both outside and inside the box. The deep|think sunsets can be experienced by visiting http://slurl.com/secondlife/Deep%20Think%20East/228/29/34/. (Free registration is required to visit Second Life.) HTTP://www.welcome.ac.uk/News/2010/News/WTX058631.htm In their new ten-year plan, the Wellcome Trust will focus on supporting the best researchers to address five challenges. While each of the challenges is truly worthwhile and valuable, one might be of particular interest to the readers of Expert Systems, and especially to those researchers whose contribution defines it. It reads: Exploring how the billions of nerves in the brain allow us to think, learn and remember, so that we can find new approaches to treating mental illness and neurological disorders such as stroke, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. What is particularly welcome is the Wellcome Trust's recognition that researchers need freedom and security to pursue long term the questions that will provide answers to these challenges. Writing in their Strategic Plan, 2010–20, the Wellcome Trust writes: We will support research to improve understanding of how the brain functions and to find improved approaches for treating brain and mental health disorders. This will require the characterisation of how nerve cells function and interact in complex networks to enable specific cognitive and behavioural functions. It will also demand a fully integrated approach that links basic and clinical biomedical research, with key inputs from social sciences, humanities and the arts. More details at http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/news/2010/news/wtx058631.htm. Dr Juan I. Arribas, an Associate Editor for Expert Systems, is on his way to visit the Laboratory of Behavioral Neurophysiology, part of Barrow Neurological Institute (BNI, http://www.thebarrow.org/index.htm), in Phoenix, Arizona. The BNI is the largest neurological centre in the southwestern USA. Juan will travel at the behest of the Spanish government which has awarded him a fellowship to study computational models of blood flow measurements during seizure events and their use for neuroprotective therapies. The expected results of Dr Arribas have the potential to affect the quality of life of epilepsy patients everywhere. So, please join with me in wishing Juan a truly productive stay! Juan will, of course, continue his Associate Editor duties while he is away. Ronald Reagan, the 40th President of the United States, repeated this old Russian proverb many times in his long career as a politician. When asked by Mikhail Gorbachev ‘Why?’, he simply said, ‘I like it!’ Perhaps what he liked was the phrase's easy juxtaposition of the faith-based ‘’ (‘Trust’) with the scientist's creed ‘’ (verify). In legalese ‘Trust, but verify’ becomes the assonant, but otherwise unpoetic, ‘due diligence’. Expert Systems is currently trialling iThenticate. iThenticate is a web-based service which indicates overlaps between academic papers. It provides a way of verifying what we trust to be the case: that an author's writing is his/her own. As an example of the iThenticate service in use, I ran this short editorial through the iThenticate system. The system picked up that Rogers's definition also appears in other papers and, in particular, one from 1995 by Professor Tom Maibaum who cites Rogers and gives the same definition in a paper on the teaching of software engineering. Satisfyingly, that's precisely where I first came across Rogers's quote. We have five excellent papers for you in this issue, in a number of areas of our field. To whet your appetite for more – The first, ‘Identification and resolution of conflicts during ontological integration using rules’ by Biletskiy, Ranganathan and Vorochek, shows how larger ontologies can be built from smaller heterogeneous ones, even in the presence of certain semantic conflicts. The work is grounded in OWL, the Ontology Web Language, and also demonstrates how the newer SWRL, the Semantic Web Rule Language, can be used for executable ontology representations. In ‘Discovering hidden knowledge in data classification via multivariate analysis’, Chen, Ip, Li and Wang propose a new three-step classification algorithm based on multivariate analysis for the grading of school transcripts. Claiming high classification accuracy and intuitive data interpretation, this work is supportive of new ways of working in today's educational environment. Iskurt and Becerikli present their system for automatic calculation of the quantities of vascular plaque from intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) images. Validation of the new technique is provided by an algorithm for labelling IVUS images and comparison against expert-produced contours and the contours extracted by their system. The paper is entitled ‘Extraction of media and plaque boundaries in intravascular ultrasound images by level sets and min/max flow’. In ‘Method of classifier selection using the genetic approach’, Jackowski and Wozniak present a compound classifier system machine learning algorithm for sets of area classifiers, whose parameters were chosen through the application of an evolutionary algorithm. The results of experiments confirm that the proposed method outperforms each elementary classifier as well as a simple voting committee. Vague information is the bane of modern life. In our last paper, ‘Knowledge acquisition in vague objective information systems based on rough sets’, Feng, Wang and Li describe new theories, techniques and tools which permit the analysis of vague data sets based on the combination of rough and vague sets theories.

Academia in driving University Global Coalition development through mineral extraction, 83-86 Adaptive leadership, 42-43 approaches, 41-43 African climate and development initiative (ACDI), 78 African union's Agenda 2063, building networks of research towards delivery of, 76-78 Agenda 30, 60

Over the past century livestock housing facilities have evolved from traditional wooden barns to engineered structures made of plastic and steel. Although building materials have changed dramatically to match the needs of modern agriculture, the facility design process continues to lag considerably with farmers and consultants developing and adapting designs based on rules of thumb and past experience. Virtual Engineering tools are presented that couple computational tools with building geometry in a virtual reality environment enabling a livestock production specialist (farmer) to interactively alter the shape, size, operating conditions, or other characteristics of the components within the proposed system and immediately see the impact of these changes on his/her production operation. This presentation will discuss the capabilities of Virtual Engineering technology packaged in VE_SUITE, an open source virtual reality software tool being developed at Iowa State University. The technologies wrapped in VE_SUITE will be discussed, they include: user interface, numerical modeling, boundary condition and grid augmentation in virtual reality. A case study of Virtual Engineering performed on a Hoop-Structure swine enclosure to improve ventilation and track emission is presented in this paper.

Engineering for products has been changed dramatically. In the leading industries, the conventional way of engineering will be over soon. Engineers define products in large teams including high number of fully integrated subsidiaries in virtual product information environments at leading industries. Virtual engineering systems accumulate knowledge and engineering results for decades of experience. During product definition engineers can not decide results those break previously verified results or a minimum level of knowledge. Engineers are faced with computing intelligence and high level verified knowledge in product representations. Result of engineering work is based on proven verified solutions and it is accumulated in product model. While this new situation urges change for an absolutely new way of higher education in engineering, the knowledge intensive environment provided by virtual engineering systems is a fantastic new possibility for the establishment courses to fulfill the new demands in engineering. In this paper, first the new scenario of virtual engineering is characterized. Following this, a possible way for course management in the new environment is conceptualized. Finally, implementation of virtual engineering in higher education courses is discussed and connection with existing product lifecycle management (PLM) systems is outlined.