In this interview, Professor Denise Leite from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) reflects on the concept of innovation and good practices in higher education.

In this interview, Mary-Louise Kearney, Consultant to the OECD/IMHE Programme and until recently Director of the Secretariat of the UNESCO Forum on Higher Education, Research and Knowledge, shares her views on the significance of research for the development of a country. She also highlights the importance of involving a wide range of stakeholders within the research system of a country.

In this interview, Young-Gil Kim, President of Handong Global University, which is
hosting the UNITWIN Network on Capacity Building of Sustainable Development in
Developing Countries in the Asian Region, details the objectives and activities of the
Network and reflects upon the contribution of higher education towards sustainable
development.

The Harvard University Professor, L. David Brown, talked with GUNI about how higher education in the United States faces the challenges for human and social development. Mr. Brown considers that universities and students, all together, have to be engaged with the global arena. He also talked about ‘practice-research engagement’, its benefits for the society, and about why universities have to be involved in this issue.

Acte de presentació del grup CINMAR amb la presentació dels grups Laboratori d'Enginyeria Maritima (LIM-Ocean) i Centre Internacional de Mètodes Numérics en Enginyeria (CIMNE-Naval), amb col·loqui posterior sobre la investigació a la Facultat de Nàutica de Barcelona.

Presentació de la Universitat Catalana d'Estiu de la Natura, que se celebra a Berga del 7 al 15 de juliol de 2009

This contribution has two main objectives: On the one hand, we want to introduce survival analysis techniques for use in building maintenance and, on the other hand, to apply this methodology to analyzing a large building stock in order to obtain information for maintenance strategies and/or prevention policies.
Similar to technical systems, buildings and their elements are also subject to aging. They age even faster when they are exposed to external (sometimes extreme) weather conditions. In this paper we are particularly interested in describing the time to the event when the event of interest is some damage (or level of degradation) on the building façade which can represent some risk for people (inside or outside the building). For the time being, building follow-up is based on inspections. Data coming from building inspections is always inaccurate, but censored, due to the fact that, at each inspection time, the event of
interest has already happened, or not yet happened. We have adapted the existing methodology for fields like medicine, biology, industrial engineering or event history analysis, and we have implemented in SPLUS®, by Insightful®, the routines for a numerical and graphical systematic analysis.
The potential of this proposal is illustrated with its application to a real dataset. We have been collecting data for years from all the buildings façades in Hospitalet de Llobregat, the second most populous city in Catalonia (Spain). More than 10,000 buildings have been inspected and an exhaustive checklist has been completed for each one. The analysis of the results allows technicians to detect different zones and levels of intervention to be applied in the city.

L’Institut d’Estadística i Matemàtica Aplicada a l’Edificació (IEMAE) recull propostes en el sector de l’edificació sostenible de professors de diferents departaments de l’EPSEB de forma transversal i en aquest context dinamitza i dóna suport a l’activitat dels seus membres en l’àrea de l’Estadística i Matemàtica Aplicada orientades a noves metodologies i les seves aplicacions. Dins del Seminari de l'Institut trobem l'exposició en català a càrrec del Carles Serrat i Pié professor del departament de Matemàtica Aplicada I (EPSEB-UPC).

El coordinador de la conferència és José Mª Cacho Herrero, professor del departament d’Organització d’Empreses de la UPC i el ponent és Ángel Serrano de Nicolás, notari de Barcelona.

Conferència

Deane Neubauer, senior advisor to the East-West Center, Hawaii, talked with GUNI about the role of universities in the framework of the new concept of global citizenship. Mr. Neubauer considers that universities must continue to enforce their teaching and research tasks, while reinforcing their relation with other universities and with policy and decision makers internationally.