Abstract-The Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, is deploying a flexible learning scheme for selected pilot courses in engineering education. In such a scheme, traditional lectures and written exercises are combined with additional Web-based learning resources. The main objective of this initiative is to sustain the evolution from traditional teaching to active learning and to better integrate the increasing number of educational resources available online. In engineering education, a key activity to sustain the learning process is hands-on experimentation carried out using either simulation tools or real equipment. This paper describes how a collaborative Web-based experimentation environment has been introduced at the EPFL for providing more flexibility to students performing laboratory experiments in automatic control, biomechanics, and fluid mechanics. It particularly describes the eJournal, a Web service integrated in the proposed learning environment that enables the collection and sharing of preparatory notes and experimental results with both peers and teaching assistants.

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International audienceThis paper proposes two systems for offline signature verification based on a global and on a local approach respectively. The features used consist of different kinds of geometrical, statistical and structural features. For comparison purposes, we used two baseline systems (global and local), both based on a larger number of features encoding the orientations of the strokes using mathematical morphology. Experiments are performed on two offline signature databases, namely DS2-50 and GPDS-104. The obtained results show that we may obtain similar performances even when using a much smaller but more discriminant set of features and that stability of the performance across different databases can be a real challeng