Tesis durant el mes de juliol a la URL (2)

Verónica de Lourdes Figueroa Huencho (ESADE) Capital Social y desarrollo Indígena  Urbano: Una propuesta para una convivencia multicultural. Los Mapuches de Santiago de Chile, amb calificació Excel.lent Cum Laude, ha estat dirigida per Àngel Castiñeira:

Multiculturalism has become a phenomenon that poses new challenges to coexistence in Latin American democratic societies, characterised by the existence of more than 400 different indigenous peoples. Nevertheless, this diversity has been marked by poverty and social deprivation, and these peoples have been incorporated – in a precarious and deprived environment – into national projects. In addition, increasing migratory waves from their territories of origin to urban areas have further accentuated the differences that separate them from dominant societies.

Faced with this situation, the demands and protests of indigenous people have increased or have become more visible in the public arena over the last decade. This has converted them into new political actors who have urged States to look for new ways to understand indigenous people’s development through policies and strategies that are coherent with the principles of multiculturalism, and responding to cultural, legal and values-based aspects.

This thesis is a contribution to this challenge, proposing a model of study based on the theory of social capital adapted to the needs and characteristics of urban indigenous peoples. It is strengthened, in addition, by the theoretical approaches of multiculturalism, indigenous development, and an exploration of relevant experiences in this field. Based on a comprehensive outlook, this model identifies, conceptualises and brings into play the elements that should be considered in designing and implementing policies, plans and programmes geared to urban indigenous people, and which will serve as a guideline for actions taken by States and international organisations.

Based on a qualitative approach, this study model for urban indigenous social capital is applied to the Mapuche people who live in two municipalities in the city of Santiago de Chile. This has allowed us to identify the characteristics of this social capital, its constituent variables, its actual behaviour, the dynamic relations that are established between them and environmental influences, among other elements, to give an account of the rounded and multidimensional character of our proposal. The obtained results have served as a basis to generate proposals and specific recommendations for policies, plans and programmes, as well as possible lines of action that respect diversity.

Cristina Bustillo Alonso (Escola Tècnica Superior d'Enginyeria Electrònica i Informàtica La Salle) Emoscopio: Una herramienta de Usabilidad Emocional. Formalización y aplicación en procesos de diseño centrado en el usuario (D.C.U.), amb calificació Excel.lent Cum Laude, ha estat dirigida pel Dr. Guillem Bou Bauzà:

The thesis exposes the process of formalization and application of a new tool of emotional Usability, the Emoscope. With its different modules, the Emotron, the Emotracking and the Second Eye, the Emoscope is intended to offer designers an agile and useful solution to the problems deriving from most methodologies of emotional Usability applied to date. It's aim is to link the formal properties of a product or service with the emotional condition of the user during the process of interaction. Thus, the pattern of formal perception becomes associated with an emotional pattern or script which in turn helps the designer make the transition from the design of objects, to the design of experiences.

Javier Melenchón Maldonado (Escola Tècnica Superior d'Enginyeria Electrònica i Informàtica La Salle) Síntesis Audiovisual Realista Personalizable, amb calificació Excel.lent Cum Laude, ha estat dirigida per la Dra. Elisa Martínez Marroquín:

A shared framework for realistic and personalizable audiovisual synthesis and analysis of audiovisual sequences of talking heads and visual sequences of sign language is presented in a domestic environment. The former has full synchronized animation using a text or auditory source of information; the latter consists in finger spelling. Their personalization capabilities ease the creation of audiovisual sequences by non expert users.

The applications range from realistic virtual avatars for natural interaction or videogames to low bandwidth videoconference and visual telephony for the hard of hearing, including help to speech therapists. Long sequences can be processed with reduced resources, specially storing ones. This is allowed thanks to the proposed scheme for the incremental singular value decomposition with mean preservation. This scheme is complemented with another three: the decremental, the split and the composed ones.

Fernando Fernández Hervás (IQS) Desarrollo de un proceso de obtención de bioproductos de alto valor económico a partir de residuos colagénicos crudos, amb calificació Excel.lent Cum Laude, ha estat dirigida pel Dr. Pere Celma Serra.

A new process of treatment of solid wastes from tannery is studied as alternative to their application in the production of low-cost products, such as glues, gelatines and protein hydrolyzed or, on the other hand, their dispose to drains. The study proposes the extraction of high-value bioproducts from the skin with the aims of to resolve the environmental problem and to generate a economic source in order to make sustainable the treatment of the wastes.

Three bioproducts were considered: the glycosaminoglycans, the acid soluble collagen and the high-quality gelatins. These bioproducts have currently application in cosmetic, pharmacy, medicine and other fields. Each one of those is separated from the wastes before its degradation at the next treatment stage. Therefore, the wastes are eliminated and the bioproducts are recovered and isolated simultaneously.

The process includes four groups of operations: the conditioning of wastes, the extraction of glycosaminoglycans, the extraction of the collagen and the obtaining of gelatins. This thesis studies each operation separately, evaluates the variables most important and sets the better operation conditions. Afterward, the information obtained is collect to propose the whole alternative process.

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