Mexico City, January 10, 2023.- Professors from the Faculty of Engineering of the Universidad Panamericana, Mexico City campus, participated in the 2nd Science Fair of Prepa en Línea organized by the National Online High School Service, Prepa en Línea-SEP (PL-SEP), an event that brings together conferences and workshops on a variety of topics to attract high school students to different disciplines.
The dissemination of research, science and technology activities is one of the main goals of the Science Fair, in which, from November 28 to December 2, Roberto González-Ojeda, Octavio Lozada-Flores, Jorge Brieva-Rico and Ernesto Moya-Albor, research professors from our university, gave lectures related to their research topics.
How atoms are arranged
The use of materials for everyday applications has depended throughout history on the availability of increasingly advanced metals, ceramics and plastics.
The conference How Atoms Arrange Themselves by Dr. Gonzalez-Ojeda, was an introduction to the type of materials currently in use and the importance of understanding how the atoms that make up these materials arrange themselves in crystalline structures.
Many of the properties of metals and other materials indispensable in daily life depend on the repetitive arrangement of the atoms that form them. The detection, identification and analysis of this arrangement, especially through X-ray based techniques, has been one of the great advances in modern science and in the development of new services to provide society with cheaper and more efficient products.
From Achilles to King Kong
With the aim of disseminating the importance of metals, iron and its alloys in the history of mankind, at From Achilles to King Kong: Key Moments in the History of SteelDr. Lozada made a historical journey from the Iron Age to the steel boom in the early 1900s, interspersing mythological stories with concepts from the area of materials science and engineering .
During the talk, special emphasis was placed on three key moments in the history of steel: the events narrated by Homer in the Iliad, the development of the Bessemer furnace and the construction of the Empire State Building.
Images and signs in everyday life
Finally, Dr. Moya-Albor and Dr. Brieva presented a workshop on Applications of image and signal processing in people's daily life, in order to promote a taste for mathematics and computation among high school students.The purpose of the workshop was to promote a taste for mathematics and computation among high school students.
In this workshop they presented a method for recognizing handwritten digits in an image using free software tools specialized in mathematical computation.
The session consisted of an introduction to digital image processing, basic processing techniques (enhancement, filtering and segmentation), and then focused on the extraction, detection and identification of handwritten digits in an image. For the implementation of the handwritten digit recognition algorithm, the freely available software Octave [1] was used.
[1] Eaton, J. W., Bateman, D., Hauberg, S., Wehbring, R. (2022). GNU Octave version 7.2.0 manual: a high-level interactive language for numerical computations. https://octave.org/doc/v7.2.0/
