Oportunidades Públicas

Biodesign: Research in engineering design for health

Computer Science Museum

This IPRE will involve conducting research on museums and how objects are displayed. Field research will then be conducted to understand the perceptions of relevant stakeholders. Finally, a proposal for the museum will be designed.

Gamification and Mixed Reality in Construction: Review and Research Opportunities

This project focuses on reviewing and analyzing the existing literature on the application of gamification and extended reality technologies (with an emphasis on mixed reality) in the training of construction workers, particularly in the field of ergonomics and the prevention of work-related musculoskeletal disorders.

The study aims to identify:
- The main trends and theoretical approaches in gamification applied to safety and ergonomics education.
- The current state of mixed reality use in construction training environments.
- The limitations and research gaps in integrating these technologies to foster ergonomic behavior change in real workplace contexts.

This study is conceived as an initial step to support future, larger-scale research aimed at developing practical immersive training platforms. At this stage, however, it will be limited to a systematic bibliographic study, with emphasis on recent academic publications.

Designing a Situated Mobile Augmented Reality Exhibition for Communicating Coastal Research Findings

This project aims to design and prototype a situated mobile augmented reality exhibition using smartphones, focused on communicating scientific research results related to coastal phenomena. The exhibition is conceived as a museum-like experience outdoors where users can physically move through different locations and, via their mobile devices, access visualizations, videos, and narrative content explaining wave dynamics, coastal flooding, and associated risks. The project emphasizes experience design, spatial storytelling, and communicative clarity, rather than the development of numerical simulations or scientific modeling.

The work will build upon existing scientific materials—such as simulation videos, images, diagrams, and explanatory texts—which will be reinterpreted through principles of user-centered design and public communication of science. The final outcome will be a low- to mid-fidelity functional prototype implemented in Unity for mobile devices, accompanied by a conceptual exhibition design, a narrative script, and an exploratory user evaluation. The project seeks to strengthen skills in interaction design, situated immersive experience design, and the visual translation of complex scientific knowledge.

Transforming University Management: Digitalizing Processes in the Faculty of Education

This research opportunity focuses on the digitalization of management processes in higher education. The project involves a review of specialized literature on digitalization in university contexts, the analysis of both manual and digital processes carried out by the Research Office of the Faculty of Education, and the design of a concrete improvement proposal aimed at optimizing its management through digital solutions. This experience will allow students to develop competencies in applied research, process analysis, and digital transformation within real institutional contexts.

International Doctoral Internships: Student Experiences, Academic Trajectories, and Institutional Ties at the School of Engineering

International research stays and co-tutorship programs are a cornerstone of doctoral training, yet their real impact —both on those who experience them and on the institution that supports them— remains an open question. This research opportunity seeks to answer it from its most direct source: doctoral students themselves. Through the design and application of semi-structured interviews with current students and graduates who completed research stays abroad, the student will conduct in-depth accounts of their experiences, exploring dimensions such as growth as a researcher, competency development, exposure to new methodologies and scientific cultures, and the perceived effect on their subsequent professional trajectory. From that same material, the academic and institutional ties that these mobilities have generated or strengthened between the School of Engineering and foreign universities and institutions will be identified and mapped. The work will combine qualitative analysis of the interviews with a literature review on postgraduate internationalization, offering the student a formative experience in applied social research and qualitative methodologies, with results that can directly inform the School's doctoral training and internationalization strategy. The work will take place during the second semester of 2026.

Ventana Celeste: design and development of an immersive digital telescope for astronomy outreach

Ventana Celeste is an astronomy outreach project, developed in partnership with the Interactive Museum Mirador (MIM), that turns a physical-digital telescope into an immersive, accessible experience: the user handles a real device —pointing at the sky, changing magnification, focusing— and explores planets, stars and constellations on a screen, with simulation of real phenomena such as light pollution and atmospheric turbulence (seeing).

The experience comes in complementary modalities: an autonomous (non-mediated) station, intuitive and high-rotation; a mediated station, more realistic and guided by a facilitator; and a home version (web application). The system is also designed to scale to other contexts —such as its eventual use in classrooms—, though that is not the primary focus.

This IPre invites students to join an interdisciplinary team to design, build and improve the device and its software, along two complementary tracks:

• Design and fabrication (CAD/CAM and analog prototyping): 3D modeling and printing, interaction mechanisms (mount, eyepieces, zoom/focus knob), ergonomics and iterative physical prototyping.

• Computer science (software development): the application that generates the sky, orientation sensors, image stabilization, user interface and logging and evaluation tools.

Students will gain experience in human-computer interaction, digital fabrication, software development and science communication, in a project with real impact in museums and other public spaces.

As a curricular activity, the IPre involves committed dedication like any course. In addition, the project has funding that allows outstanding contributions —from especially motivated students who take on a prominent role— to be recognized with financial support.

Design and Research: Computational Thinking from a Phone

Join a project that brings physical computing to schools that can't afford class sets of kits. The idea: rebuild the hands-on, tangible value of physical computing using the smartphone students already own, plus everyday materials like cardboard, programming with Blockly blocks on the Protobject platform. This lowers the cost barrier and brings real equity to Chilean classrooms.

Your role is to own the quality of a progression of several activities: reviewing, iterating, and redesigning them against clear computational-thinking objectives, refining the texts, the pedagogical progression, and the equivalence check between the phone version and a micro:bit/MakeCode one. This is real iterative design with concrete classroom impact.

You'll gain experience in instructional design, CS education, and mentored research, with the chance to contribute to a paper in progress. We're looking for someone meticulous and creative, interested in CS didactics and physical computing.

As an undergraduate research placement (IPre), it is curricular and calls for committed dedication, like any course. The project also has funding to recognise, with financial support, the exceptional contributions of especially motivated students who take on a standout role.

Excavating Tomorrow: An Archaeology of Innovation, Technique, and Technology (1965–1986)

Excavating Tomorrow: An Archaeology of Innovation and Technique (1965–1986)The Archaeology of Innovation is a critical and methodological approach that rejects the premise that technological advancement is a linear, neutral, and progressive process. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), this research project delves into the semantics of the past to unearth the ideas, tensions, and ruptures that shaped our current paradigms.By framing innovation as a profoundly social and cultural phenomenon—rather than a strictly commercial enterprise—this methodology tracks the discourses that shaped the practices of design and project disciplines in Chile's recent past. Analyzing the evolution of the terms "innovation" and "technology" serves as a key to deciphering the shifts in the cultural mindset of an era.Within this framework, the project examines both concepts during their embryonic phase of application in the Southern Cone. To achieve this, it focuses on a specific archive within a defined period (1965–1986), a critical juncture when these terms began to take root in the region.Project Objectives (Stage 1)Systematic Search: Track the concepts of "innovation," "technique," and "technology" within the historical archive of an interdisciplinary journal from the era (1960–1980).Conceptual Analysis: Develop analytical conceptual profiles based on the findings.To meet these objectives, participants will receive introductory training on the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) applied to semantic studies. This stage of the Programmed Research Practicum (IPRE) will conclude with the co-authoring of an online academic paper, with specific guidelines to be tailored to each student.

Concrete Futures: Technology and Modernization in Chile and Brazil (1955–1975)

How did reinforced concrete contribute to the materialization of sociotechnical imaginaries of the future in Chile and Brazil between 1955 and 1975? This Undergraduate Research Fellowship (IPRE) project proposes a historical and documentary study of reinforced concrete as a pivotal technology that shaped the urban, architectural, and cultural modernization of Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century. Although concrete has been extensively studied from technical and structural perspectives, a critical gap remains regarding its cultural dimension and its role in producing futures imagined through scientific progress and industrial development (Forty, 2012; Cohen, 2011). A comparative analysis between Chile and Brazil reveals how a single material was appropriated within distinct national contexts, uncovering diverse trajectories of articulating the future through the circulation of technical expertise and discursive practices. In the post-war era, concrete became the paradigmatic material for modern planning, the expansion of public infrastructure, and a widespread faith in the technical rationalization of territory. Furthermore, both nations represent critical case studies due to the intensity of their industrialization and urban planning, as well as their active participation in transnational networks of technological knowledge (Gorelik, 2005; Liernur, 2001). This comparative framework contributes to a Latin American genealogy of innovation, framed not as a linear technology transfer from global centers, but as situated processes of appropriation, translation, and resignification of development materials, techniques, and forms.This research operates at the intersection of the history of technology, material culture, innovation studies, and new materialisms. Methodologically, the study relies on the qualitative documentary analysis of historical archives and specialized architecture, engineering, and design journals published between 1955 and 1975. This corpus will allow for the reconstruction of innovation discourses, the mapping of technical knowledge networks, and the semantic deconstruction of the future as embedded in concrete. The empirical material will be systematized using conceptual profiles, content analysis, and digital data visualization tools.The project aims to advance the understanding of the genealogy of innovation in Latin America by shifting the scholarly focus from abstract definitions toward concrete material substrates. Additionally, it offers a critical reading of concrete as a technology that not only transformed the built landscape but also materialized the socio-political futures of developmentalist modernization. Furthermore, this research enhances engineering education by fostering a sociotechnical understanding of material innovations as phenomena that are simultaneously technical, aesthetic, political, and socio-environmental. Ultimately, the project contributes to the interdisciplinary reappraisal of twentieth-century concrete heritage.
Research Lines
Line 1: Literatur Rewiew. Development of an academic dossier that compiles, classifies, and critically analyzes specialized literature on concrete across the fields of innovation, material culture, history of technology, modernization, developmentalism, and technological optimism. Deliverables: Analytical index cards reviewing books, scientific papers, theses, journals, and relevant archival collections.Line 2: Digital Analytical Repository and Evidence ArchiveConstruction of a structured database consisting of analytical case profiles that link architectural, design, and artistic works executed in concrete with their primary documentary sources (including project files, historical photographs, blueprints, technical specs, and institutional records).Final Deliverables: Analytical case-study profiles and digital data visualizations mapping technological circulation patterns, timelines, actor-networks, and geographical clusters.Impact on Academic TrainingCultivation of interdisciplinary competencies that enable students to evaluate material innovations as multifaceted phenomena that operate simultaneously across technical, aesthetic, political, and socio-environmental registers.

Computers, Programming, and Human Rights

We are working on a research project focused on analyzing the role of early computing systems as technologies of solidarity and humanitarian support during the 1970s and 1980s. The objective is to study how the use of punched cards, first-generation microcomputers, and relational databases enabled the tracking of victims, the unification of testimonies, and the cross-referencing of legal data for the defense of human rights.There are multiple specific research lines within the project. Among the tasks you could collaborate on are: (i) Identifying and studying historical technical documents, user manuals, and logic diagrams in memory archives; (ii) Implementing ad hoc methods and digital tools to systematize and visualize the computing workflows of the era; (iii) Designing and conducting qualitative interviews with pioneering engineers, mathematicians, and archivists who operated these systems.