5th e-LIVES Newsletter

April 2020

News from the project

e-Engineering in pandemic times
Business as usual

Welcome to this 5th e-LIVES newsletter.

The current pandemic situation has affected some of the activities planned under the e-LIVES project.

The activities that may take place online continue to be executed, but those requiring the physical presence of the participants have naturally been postponed. Among these is the setting up of the new remote laboratories in the project’s partner universities in North Africa and Jordan, whose necessary material has already been delivered.

Also, due to the current uncertainty about the evolution of the pandemic situation, we were forced to postpone the e-Engineering’2020 Conference that would take place in Petra, Jordan, by the end of June, together with the last General Assembly of the project, and for which we do not yet have a new date.

In this newsletter, we also report on some activities conducted in the last six months in the framework of the e-LIVES project and the e-Engineering Alliance, namely the Special Session titled ‘e-Engineering courses – Where and when students need’ we promoted at The 17th International Conference on Remote Engineering and Virtual Instrumentation held at the University of Georgia, in Athens, Georgia, the United States of America, in the last week of February.

Additionally, it is worth emphasizing the importance that distance learning has assumed due to the need for social distancing imposed to stop the rapid spread of the new coronavirus. This is another example of the importance of investing in the development of distance learning and, more specifically, in e-Engineering courses. Among all the other reasons already widely known, this situation has, unfortunately, added a new one.

Contributing to making up for the universities’ current absence of an alternative to face-to-face laboratory classes, due to the lack of adequate infrastructure, our partner Labsland is providing free access to its network of remote laboratories until the summer.

We hope you enjoy the reading of the newsletter and that it can bring some inspiring ideas, and above all, we wish you good health.

Manuel Gericota
Responsible for the e-LIVES project dissemination/networking/sustainability work package

News

Conference postponed

Due to the current pandemic situation, the International e-Engineering Education Services Conference (e-ENGINEERING’2020) was postponed until further notice.

A new date will be announced as soon as the current situation stabilizes.

Go to the “Keep me posted” section of the main conference webpage and leave us your email to receive the latest e-Engineering Conference updates.

Thank you for your understanding.

LabsLand support for schools and universities affected by COVID-19

The e-LIVES partner LabsLand is providing free remote access to real science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) laboratories for schools (typically High School and a few for Middle School), colleges, and universities affected by COVID-19.

Most of the labs for electronics and physics experiments are based on Arduino, while more complex subjects, like robotics, for instance, targeting universities and colleges, are based on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA).

e-Engineering Alliance Special Session at REV’2020

The e-Engineering Alliance promoted a Special Session titled ‘e-Engineering courses – Where and when students need’ at REV’2020, The 17th International Conference on Remote Engineering and Virtual Instrumentation held at the University of Georgia, in Athens, Georgia, the United States of America, in the last week of February.

Due to the great number of participants, the Special Session was divided into two parts, with four papers being presented in each part.

Articles from seven European and Latin American countries reported different experiences related to e-Engineering.

During the first session, the e-Engineering Alliance presented its objectives and invited all to participate in its activities.

The sessions were conducted by Manuel Gericota, from the Polytechnic of Porto, current Chair of the e-Engineering Alliance.

If you also wish to participate as an active member of the e-Engineering Alliance, please visit the Alliance’s web page and register as a member. Membership is totally free.

The e-Engineering Alliance is a Special Interest Group (SIG) inside the International Association of Online Engineering (IAOE).

Thank you for attending this Special Session.

e-LIVES at REV 2020

e-LIVES was presented with three papers at:

e-Engineering Alliance Special Session at REV’2020
the e-Engineering Special Session coordinated by the e-Engineering Alliance in the context of The 17th International Conference on Remote Engineering and Virtual Instrumentation, organized by The International Association of Online Engineering (IAOE), at the University of Georgia (Athens, GA, USA), between the 26th and the 28th of February, 2020.

Andre Fidalgo, from the Polytechnic of Porto, Portugal, presented the paper

EOLES Course – Five years of remote learning and experimenting
André Fidalgo, Paulo Ferreira, Manuel Gericota

Paulo Ferreira, from the Polytechnic of Porto, Portugal, presented the paper

e-Engineering Education: Issues and Perspectives for Higher Education Institutions
Paulo Ferreira, Andre Fidalgo, Manuel Gericota

Abdelhalim Benachenhou, from the Université Abdelhamid Ibn Badis Mostaganem, Algeria, presented the paper

An Implementation of Microservices Based Architecture for Remote Laboratories
Mohammed Moussa, Abdelhalim Benachenhou, Ismail Belghit, Abderrahmane Adda Benattia, Abderrahmane Boumehdi

The conference proceedings will be published as REV2020 Proceedings with Springer in the series “Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems”.

Thank you for attending the sessions.

1st LabsLand Community Event

e-LIVES partner LabsLand organized a Community Event at:

REV’2020
The 17th International Conference on Remote Engineering and Virtual Instrumentation, held at the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA.

e-LIVES members Pablo Orduña and Luis Rodriguez Gil, from LabsLand, organized this event whose goal was to put in touch people coming from different corners of the world that are using remote laboratories developed by LabsLand, learn what they are doing, and find opportunities for future developments.

The event was open to all those eager to discover remote laboratories and to find how they may help them to become better teachers and their students to become better engineering professionals.

Thank you for attending this event.

Professor Venu Babu Thati

On April 2, Venu Babu Thati publicly presented his Ph.D. thesis “Software Strategies to Improve Immunity of Programmable Embedded Systems against Disturbances” at KU Leuven University in Belgium.

Professor Venu Babu Thati is a member of the KU Leuven e-LIVES team.

Due to the current constraints posed by the pandemic situation, the presentation took place via videoconference, further proving that with e-Engineering business goes as usual.

The e-LIVES team congratulates Professor Venu Babu Thati and wishes him success and prosperity in days to come.