ALBERT

Description: Sustainability, Vol. 10, Pages 1102: A Low-Cost Immersive Virtual Reality System for Teaching Robotic Manipulators Programming Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su10041102 Authors: Vicente Román-Ibáñez Francisco Pujol-López Higinio Mora-Mora Maria Pertegal-Felices Antonio Jimeno-Morenilla Laboratory tasks are a powerful pedagogical strategy for developing competences in science and engineering degrees, making students understand in a practical way the theoretical topics explained in the classroom. However, performing experiments in real conditions is usually expensive in terms of time, money and energy, as it requires expensive infrastructures that are generally difficult to maintain in good conditions. To overcome this problem, virtual reality has proven to be a powerful tool to achieve sustainability, making it easy to update laboratories without the need to acquire new equipment. Moreover, the ability to introduce practical knowledge into classrooms without leaving them, makes virtual laboratories capable of simulating typical operating environments as well as extreme situations in the operation of different devices. A typical subject in which students can benefit from the use of virtual laboratories is robotics. In this work we will develop an immersive virtual reality (VR) pedagogical simulator of industrial robotic arms for engineering students. With the proposed system, students will know the effects of their own designed trajectories on several different robotic arms and cell environments without having to buy all of them and being safe of damaging the cell components. The simulation will be checking for collisions of the elements in the scene and alert the student when they happen. This can be achieved with a robotic simulator, but the integration with immersive VR is intended to help students better understand robotics. Moreover, even having a real robotic arm available for students, with this proposed VR method, all the students have the opportunity to manage and learn his own version of the robotic cell, without waiting times generated by having less robotic arms than students in classroom.

Description: Sustainability, Vol. 10, Pages 1074: Virtual Reality Learning Activities for Multimedia Students to Enhance Spatial Ability Sustainability doi: 10.3390/su10041074 Authors: Rafael Molina-Carmona María Luisa Pertegal-Felices Antonio Jimeno-Morenilla Higinio Mora-Mora Virtual Reality is an incipient technology that is proving very useful for training different skills. Our hypothesis is that it is possible to design virtual reality learning activities that can help students to develop their spatial ability. To prove the hypothesis, we have conducted an experiment consisting of training the students using an on-purpose learning activity based on a virtual reality application and assessing the possible improvement of the students’ spatial ability through a widely accepted spatial visualization test. The learning activity consists of a virtual environment where some simple polyhedral shapes are shown and manipulated by moving, rotating and scaling them. The students participating in the experiment are divided into a control and an experimental group, carrying out the same learning activity with the only difference of the device used for the interaction: a traditional computer with screen, keyboard and mouse for the control group, and virtual reality goggles with a smartphone for the experimental group. To assess the experience, all the students have completed a spatial visualization test twice: just before performing the activities and four weeks later, once all the activities were performed. Specifically, we have used the well-known and widely used Purdue Spatial Visualization Test—Rotation (PSVT-R), designed to test rotational visualization ability. The results of the test show that there is an improvement in the test results for both groups, but the improvement is significantly higher in the case of the experimental group. The conclusion is that the virtual reality learning activities have shown to improve the spatial ability of the experimental group.

Description: This study considers how the formation and implementation strategies of a Latin America alliance between four of the best economic performance countries in the region have impacted the quality of entrepreneurship in these countries. To this end, we studied the Pacific Alliance (PA) and employed an ordered probit model with sample selection bias and statistical information from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) database for the 2012–2017 period. As a dependent variable, we used the growth aspiration of entrepreneurs as a proxy to measure the future growth of the company, from which a possible economic impact could be inferred. The evidence shows that during the implementation period of the PA, there is a positive impact on entrepreneur growth aspirations in member countries; the likelihood that entrepreneurs have high-growth aspirations is found to be greater during and after the implementation period than before the signing of the PA. Likewise, it was found that motivation, gender, education, skills, innovation (as perceived by the entrepreneur), export level, two pillars of the global competitiveness index (GCI), and the gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate explain the growth aspirations of entrepreneurs in the member countries during the period under study.

Description: Gamification has proved to be a methodology that increases the likelihood of success and sustainability of educational institutions. This methodology has recently revealed itself as one of the most efficient teaching methodologies in the student body, proving useful at all educational levels. One of the most frequently mentioned properties is its ability to “reset” the student’s attention clock: the key is collective learning, an attractive way of remembering new content. The experience described below has been developed in the context of a generalist university in two very different degrees: Degree in Teacher Training and Degree in Computer Engineering. To develop the theoretical sessions, the master class was combined with the use of the Kahoot tool. The observations made by the teachers in relation to the dynamics of the theoretical classes show that the use of Kahoot at the end of the theoretical sessions increased the students’ attendance at class, in addition to their involvement in the sessions and they kept their attention for longer. This study has also shown that there are significant differences in the level of satisfaction shown by the students of both degrees with these tools.

Description: Biodiesel from used cooking oil (UCO) is one of the most sustainable solutions to replace conventional fossil fuels in the transport sector. It can achieve greenhouse gas savings up to 88% and at the same time reducing the disposal of a polluting waste. In addition, it does not provoke potential negative impacts that conventional biofuels may eventually cause linked to the use of arable land. For this reason, most policy frameworks favor its consumption. This is the case of the EU policy that double-counters the use of residue and waste use to achieve the renewable energy target in the transport sector. According to different sources, biodiesel produced from UCO could replace around 1.5%–1.8% of the EU-27 diesel consumption. This paper presents an in-depth thermoeconomic analysis of the UCO biodiesel life cycle to understand its cost formation process. It calculates the ExROI value (exergy return on investment) and renewability factor, and it demonstrates that thermoeconomics is a useful tool to assess life cycles of renewable energy systems. It also shows that UCO life cycle biodiesel production is more sustainable than biodiesel produced from vegetable oils.

Description: Companies have realized the importance of “big data” in creating a sustainable competitive advantage, and user-generated content (UGC) represents one of big data’s most important sources. From blogs to social media and online reviews, consumers generate a huge amount of brand-related information that has a decisive potential business value for marketing purposes. Particularly, we focus on online reviews that could have an influence on brand image and positioning. Within this context, and using the usual quantitative star score ratings, a recent stream of research has employed sentiment analysis (SA) tools to examine the textual content of reviews and categorize buyer opinions. Although many SA tools split comments into negative or positive, a review can contain phrases with different polarities because the user can have different sentiments about each feature of the product. Finding the polarity of each feature can be interesting for product managers and brand management. In this paper, we present a general framework that uses natural language processing (NLP) techniques, including sentiment analysis, text data mining, and clustering techniques, to obtain new scores based on consumer sentiments for different product features. The main contribution of our proposal is the combination of price and the aforementioned scores to define a new global score for the product, which allows us to obtain a ranking according to product features. Furthermore, the products can be classified according to their positive, neutral, or negative features (visualized on dashboards), helping consumers with their sustainable purchasing behavior. We proved the validity of our approach in a case study using big data extracted from Amazon online reviews (specifically cell phones), obtaining satisfactory and promising results. After the experimentation, we could conclude that our work is able to improve recommender systems by using positive, neutral, and negative customer opinions and by classifying customers based on their comments.

Description: New technologies are changing the channels of communication between people, creating an interconnected society in which information flows. Social networks are a good example of the evolution of citizens’ communication habits. The user-generated data that these networks collect can be analyzed to generate new useful information for developing citizen-centered smart services and policy making. The aim of this paper is to investigate the possibilities offered by social networks in the field of sport to aid city management. As the novelty of this research, a systematic method is described to know the popular areas for sport and how the management of this knowledge enables the decision-making process of urban planning. Some case studies of useful actions to make inclusive cities for sport are described and the benefits of making sustainable cities are discussed.

Description: The drainage networks of our cities are currently experiencing a growing increase in runoff flows, caused mainly by the waterproofing of the soil and the effects of climate change. Consequently, networks originally designed correctly must endure floods with frequencies much higher than those considered in the design phase. The solution of such a problem is to improve the network. There are several ways to rehabilitate a network: conduit substitution as a former method or current methods such as storm tank installation or combined use of conduit substitution and storm tank installation. To find an optimal solution, deterministic or heuristic optimization methods are used. In this paper, a methodology for the rehabilitation of these drainage networks based on the combined use of the installation of storm tanks and the substitution of some conduits of the system is presented. For this, a cost-optimization method and a pseudo-genetic heuristic algorithm, whose efficiency has been validated in other fields, are applied. The Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) model for hydraulic analysis of drainage and sanitation networks is used. The methodology has been applied to a sector of the drainage network of the city of Bogota in Colombia, showing how the combined use of storm tanks and conduits leads to lower cost rehabilitation solutions.