«MATLAB? I use Octave UPM»

Israel Herráiz

UPM

Abstract

MATLAB has become a standard for scientific computation and visualization in engineering and science, and as a teaching tool in universities. The main drawback for teaching with MATLAB is the difficulty for students to access the tool, due to the high cost of licenses. This causes a very clear educational impact, since few students can practice using their own computers.

Octave is an alternative to MATLAB, which is distributed as free software. Octave’s main drawback so far has been the lack of a simple graphical interface and programming environment, similar to those provided by MATLAB. Also, it can be difficult to install on some platforms, such as Windows.

This drawback is history thanks to the Octave UPM project, which provides a MATLAB-compatible Octave-based programming environment. The Octave UPM environment offers the same functionalities as MATLAB and has been successfully tested in several subjects at UPM, with more than 200 students enrolled, who previously used exclusively MATLAB, without changing a line of the subject code.

Bio

Israel Herraiz is a professor at the School of Civil Engineering of the Polytechnic University of Madrid. He is an Industrial Engineer from the University of Cádiz (with an Extraordinary End-of-Study Award), and a Doctor with a European Mention from the Rey Juan Carlos University, studying in the Computer Engineering program. He has been a visiting scholar at the University of California-Davis, at Queen’s University and the University of Victoria in Canada, and at The Open University and Oxford University in the United Kingdom. He is the author of more than 30 peer-reviewed international publications in the area of Empirical Software Engineering.

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