A Model for Developing an Academic Activity Index for Higher Education Instructors Based on Composite Indicators

The assessment of the teacher performance is a subject of criticism due to the lack of a well-establish methodology. This study develops an overall score to measure the dimensions that encompass the academic activities. To that end, a Benefit-of-the-doubt model is proposed. The advantage of this technique is the flexibility in the weights, so that the model selects for each teacher the most favourable set of weights. Furthermore, the paper proposes the barycentric coordinate system as a method to classify the teachers in clusters depending on their contribution to the dimensions. A specific pie chart has been proposed as an efficient way to report the contribution of the teachers to the dimensions and the overall teacher performance.

Acoustic Emission Source Localization System Using Fiber Bragg Grating Sensors and a Barycentric Coordinate-Based Algorithm

Structures and machines are very susceptible to some barely visible defects; acoustic emission (AE) is an effective technique of detecting defects and examining growth and location of these defects. In this paper, a new method was proposed to predict the position of the AE source. The dynamic strain signal from the AE source was acquired by fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors. Complex Morlet wavelet transform was used to extract narrowband signals from AE waves. It was proposed that the barycentric coordinate-based localization algorithm can be used to predict the coordinates of the AE source. The validation tests based on the designed AE detection system were performed on a 500 mm × 500 mm × 2 mm Al-alloy plate. The experimental results show that the proposed method is feasible.