Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

En la actualidad, la Escuela Politécnica Nacional tiene un proceso electoral que se lo realiza de manera manual. Por lo tanto, representa un trabajo de gestión considerable a la hora de ser llevado a cabo. Además, dado la naturaleza de los procesos manuales, está sujeto a errores humanos. Como solución a estas y otras problemáticas del proceso electoral vigente en la institución, el presente trabajo plantea su automatización a través de un sistema web de votación electrónica. El sistema propuesto implementa un esquema de seguridad de firmado ciego, para controlar tanto la privacidad como la validez de los votos. El desarrollo se lo realizó bajo el marco de trabajo de SCRUM, debido a su ajuste a equipos de desarrollo pequeños y a su enfoque en la entrega de software funcional en cortos periodos de tiempo. El sistema implementa una arquitectura Modelo-Vista-Controlador, teniendo el desarrollo de la vista en el framework de JavaScript, Angular; el controlador en la plataforma .NET Framework de Microsoft y, finalmente, el modelo en SQL Server. Por otra parte, el sistema ha sido sometido a pruebas de usabilidad y funcionalidad, con lo que se determinó que es excelentemente usable y cumple satisfactoriamente con el 100 % de los requisitos de usuario obtenidos.

Towards the search for opportunities in a world of adversity. Since the beginning of this Journal, we have provided a space for scientific dissemination without barriers, guaranteeing open access and the right to free thought for our authors and readers. We believe that this principle has taken on a much deeper relevance; especially as our society goes through a Pandemic with our eyes set on a glimmer of hope that finally seems to reveal itself to us. However, if this hope does not materialize through the management of knowledge and its responsible dissemination, the action of science in each of our realities would make no sense at all. Consequently, the contribution of researchers to cope with the current situation would be irrelevant, not to say non-existent. In this aspect, applied research, in the field of computer science and informatics, more than a calling, becomes a duty, committing us to our future. We must guarantee sustainable, accessible, and safe access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Mainly considering that, since the beginning of 2020, these have become an undeniable and inalienable service that guarantees our right to work, access to study, and coexistence with our loved ones. From our editorial, we see with optimism the contributions made in this issue, which give certainty of the impact that ICTs have on the transformation of our society and its adverse realities. The articles that we present constitute important assets for the assistance in the diagnosis and treatment of different pathologies, the intelligent monitoring of crops, and the efficient management of information systems and their underlying technologies. These contributions demonstrate the work carried out by various researchers who, regardless of their current situation, continue to dedicate their lives so that knowledge generation does not stop in spite of current limitations. We cordially invite you to review their work, hoping that you find it inspiring, eloquent and insightful. Finally, as the new Editor-in-Chief of the Latin American Journal of Computing (LAJC), I would like to sincerely thanks to our editorial team and our valued reviewers, because without their hard work it would not have been possible to successfully complete this issue. I am extremely pleased to enter firmly into our ninth year, being part of such a professional team, optimistic and above all committed to our authors in providing a space for the dissemination of their academic and scientific work.

At present, the monitoring of crops in agricultural plots remains one of the most important tasks that precision agriculture has since through it is possible to perform the estimation of the yield and the prediction of crops. Due to the complicated atmospheric conditions and climatic factors that the sector presents, the early detection of pests and diseases has become a considerable challenge that producers must constantly assume. This research proposes a rapid and effective necrotic lesion recognition system for the early detection of the thrips infestation in peas by implementing the yolov4-tiny deep learning method. The results obtained by the developed system showed that the IoU (Intersection at the Union) is 59.23% for an mAP (Medium Precision) of 87.8% in a high-density data set. In addition, each of the values ​​delivered by the system was compared with a prescribed diagnosis that was made by an expert in crop production through direct observations of the pea. In this way, it was established that the system is 80% effective.

El objetivo de este estudio es identificar la producción de recursos educativos a partir de publicaciones científicas, páginas web y tienda de aplicaciones móviles para la enseñanza de la lectura labial a sordos, enfatizando en las metodologías educativas aplicadas y el uso de la tecnología.  Los resultados refieren soluciones tecnológicas apoyadas en elementos audiovisuales y textos, dejando en segundo plano la lengua de señas.  El enfoque metodológico aplicado es pasivo, combina medios sincrónicos y asincrónicos, utilizan bajos niveles de gamificación y realidad extendida, demanda conocimiento previo de lectura y escritura para interactuar con las herramientas que se orientan a la práctica de vocabulario o frases.  La presencia de aplicaciones móviles es mínima en relación con la cantidad de páginas web y proyectos derivados de producciones científicas para enseñar la lectura labial, en general escasamente mencionan documentación técnica de los proyectos salvo que sean producto de estudios formales de postgrado.

This project was carried out in collaboration with INSFIDIM therapists, the institute's therapists encounter some difficulties when giving language therapy to their students with some type of disability, there is little specific digital pedagogical material for people with intellectual disabilities and in many cases, general applications have been used during therapies without obtaining good results. The objective of the project is to develop a web application and a mobile application so that it allows people with intellectual disabilities to improve their communication and language skills. The methodology used for the development of this project was incremental iterative development in combination with user experience and prototyping, the union of these is useful to validate the application requirements and obtain constant feedback at each step gives in the development of the application. Usability and satisfaction surveys conducted to evaluate prototypes of the application show that therapists have a quick understanding of the functionality and navigability of the application and agree with the design, information, and difficulty of the game levels to meet with his goal of teaching grammatical structures with adjectives. The developed application is easy to use for INSFIDIM therapists and students, therapists comment that the application will be of great help in the work they do with students to develop their comprehensive and expressive language.

With the increase of smart devices and their capacities, their use for different services have also increased. As much as this is an advantage, it has posed additional risks because of the confidential information stored on them. This has increased the need for additional security on these systems. Most of the methods used for user authentication pose certain drawbacks that are either easy to circumvent or cumbersome to use. As a result, multi-level means of authentication is needed to improve the security of mobile devices. Sensors are playing a vital role in the mobile ecosystem to enhance different services. These sensors can be leveraged upon as a solution for user authentication. This research analyzed and evaluated different mobile device sensors for continuous and transparent user authentication. The mobile data used includes gyroscope, accelerometer, linear accelerometer, proximity, gravity, and magnetometer sensors’ data. Using a Feedforward Neural network for data classification after extracting features from the different sensors available in the mobile device; the most effective was selected by evaluating performance of the different sensors. The best sensor, the accelerometer was further experimented on. The experiment showed that smartphone accelerometer sensor exhibits sufficient discriminability, stability, and reliability for active and continuous authentication, by achieving a performance of 6.55% for the best overall EER.

Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) aggregate and coordinate Distributed Energy Resources (DER) as a single entity aiding in decarbonization of the energy generation mix. The infrastructure of VPPs relies heavily on rigorous and accurate exchange of information between the DER and the VPP, as well as other grid entities. This exposes them to possible cyber threats that impede their functions and can have negative impacts on the stability and reliability of the grid. In this paper, the threat landscape is evaluated against threats that affect VPPs. A heuristic method of assessing the impact and likelihood of attacks is constructed based on a) proposed methods in literature, b) standardization bodies, and c) in relation to a VPPs security profile. Our findings indicate that False Data Injection attacks are posing the greatest risk, competing with disruption of their functions due to Denial of Service.

Memory forensics is rapidly becoming a critical part of all digital forensic investigations. The value of information stored within a computer’s memory is immense; failing to capture it could result in a substantial loss of evidence. However, it is becoming increasingly more common to find situations where standard memory acquisition tools do not work. The paper addresses how an investigator can capture the memory of a locked computer when authentication is not present. The proposed solution is to use a bootable memory acquisition tool, in this case, Passware Bootable Memory Imager. To enhance the findings, three different reboot methods will be tested to help identify what would happen if the recommended warm reboot is not possible. Using a warm reboot and a secure reboot, Passware Bootable Memory Imager was able to successfully acquire the memory of the locked machine, with the resulting captures being highly representative of the populated data. However, the memory samples collected after a cold reboot did not retain any populated data. These findings highlight that to capture the memory of a locked machine, the reboot method is highly successful, providing the correct method is followed.

El objetivo de esta investigación consiste en reportar los resultados de la aplicación del Sistema de indicadores para la Equidad de Género en instituciones de educación superior (Buquet Corleto et al, 2010) en el Instituto Superior Tecnológico Sudamericano, Loja. En el marco de los principios de la Educación Inclusiva, este es un paso para profundizar en políticas en igualdad que garanticen el respeto a los derechos humanos y propicien ambientes idóneos para el desarrollo integral de nuestros actores institucionales. Conforme a este Sistema, se emplearon indicadores de entrada, de insumo, de proceso, de resultado y de impacto. Gracias a ellos se identificará la gestión y realidad institucional. Tal como lo establece este índice, la investigación de campo tiene carácter cuantitativo y cualitativo. El nivel de análisis es descriptivo. La población objeto de estudio la integran 1185 estudiantes, 58 docentes, 27 entre autoridades y administrativos, y 3 auxiliares de servicios. Los resultados obtenidos destacan que el 81% del personal de la institución cree que las políticas, protocolos de equidad de género y prevención de violencia son los adecuados; además el 97.20% de estudiantes refiere que el trato es igualitario. Se concluye que las políticas, acciones, campañas de igualdad llevadas a cabo en este centro de estudio ha tenido un impacto favorable, pues se ha mejorado su nivel de inclusión, aunque hay que continuar trabajando hasta alcanzar la plena inclusión.

En el siguiente artículo se presentan los resultados del estudio de las prácticas discursivas de tres profesores de literatura. Para ello proponemos un modelo de análisis sustentado en la articulación de la Teoría de la Argumentación (cf. Lausberg, 1968; Curtius, 1975;  Moeschler, 1985; Perelman y Olbrechts- Tyteca, 1989, entre otros) y la Teoría de la Valoración (Martin y White, 2005). Este estudio fue de carácter cualitativo bajo el paradigma constructivista con un enfoque fenomenológico- hermenéutico. Consideramos las nociones, poder, autoridad e ideología del análisis del discurso (AD). La investigación fue de campo, de corte etnográfico con un diseño de Estudio de Casos. De los casos estudiados concluimos que: (i) las prácticas discursivas de todos los docentes incluyen tanto los Argumentos para regular la interacción como los argumentos para articular los razonamientos con diferentes grados de preponderancia y (ii) en cada caso predominaron los recursos valorativos de compromiso.