The School of Engineering of the UM (FIUM) organized a whole week of talks and workshops for the students, which went from February 27th till March 3rd. These were held by specialists from Argentina, Spain, China, and Uruguay, and were entitled "Modelo de transformación empresarial", “El rol de la Ingeniería en el desarrollo sostenible”, “Ingeniería biomédica”, “Técnicas avanzadas para la detección automática de fallas en código” and “Desafíos éticos de la Ingeniería artificial”.

ABOUT THE CONFERENCES

Business transformation model

Ph.D. Mario Chong, from ˜Universidad del Pacífico˜, taught "Modelo de transformación empresarial" dictated the course from a strategic and practical point of view of processes within organizations, considering business case studies and simulations from Harvard's School of Business. The main topics were strategy, processes, and transformation, and the objective was to design disruptive projects with social impact.

The role of engineering in sustainable development

Valentina Zurcan, FIUM Alumni and Ph.D. from the University of Navarra addressed the concepts of sustainability and circular economy as debate triggers so that students could develop them into topics such as eco-design, residual management, and recycling. Moreover, a discussion took place regarding European regulations as a reference for future politics about the environment developed in Uruguay.

Biomedical engineering

Ph.D. Ignacio Cassol, Executive Director of the School of Engineering at Universidad Austral, taught students with previous knowledge in Python (programming). During the sessions, he presented the foundations of molecular biology, from DNA, RNA, and proteins. He also mentioned computing tools and public databases that allow processing and managing information digitally.

Advanced techniques for the automatic detection of code failures

Moreover, Ph.D. Engineer Marcelo Frias, a member of the Informatic Engineering Department of the ITBA-CONICET, gave his workshop so that students became familiar with automatic flaw detection concepts. To do this, he presented a tool that allowed the detection of programs annotated with contracts, including invariants, pre and post-conditions, and variant functions.

In addition, he introduced the technique of relational dimension reduction to improve the performance of the automatic flaw detection tool significantly. He showed how these techniques allow trigger tests that execute the code parts they want to explore. The programming language used during this course was Java.

Ethical challenges of artificial engineering

Ph.D. Gonzalo Génova, professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, talked about the importance of ethics in artificial intelligence (AI), transforming the world and creating scientific, technological, and social progress, which causes significant controversies. In this context, the professor explained to the students that it is essential that engineers be capable of achieving a synthesis of scientific and practical knowledge that incorporates ethical reasoning. The workshop was inspired by other ethic courses for engineers, which are based on Christian humanism.