Search Results (99)

Generative AI enables personalized computer science education at scale, yet questions remain about whether such personalization supports or undermines learning. This scoping review synthesizes 32 studies (2023–2025) purposively sampled from 259 records to map personalization mechanisms and effectiveness signals in higher-education CS contexts. We identify five application domains—intelligent tutoring, personalized materials, formative feedback, AI-augmented assessment, and code review—and analyze how design choices shape learning outcomes. Designs incorporating explanation-first guidance, solution withholding, graduated hint ladders, and artifact grounding (student code, tests, and rubrics) consistently show more positive learning processes than unconstrained chat interfaces. Successful implementations share four patterns: context-aware tutoring anchored in student artifacts, multi-level hint structures requiring reflection, composition with traditional CS infrastructure (autograders and rubrics), and human-in-the-loop quality assurance. We propose an exploration-firstadoption framework emphasizing piloting, instrumentation, learning-preserving defaults, and evidence-based scaling. Four recurrent risks—academic integrity, privacy, bias and equity, and over-reliance—are paired with operational mitigation. Critical evidence gaps include longitudinal effects on skill retention, comparative evaluations of guardrail designs, equity impacts at scale, and standardized replication metrics. The evidence supports generative AI as a mechanism for precision scaffolding when embedded in exploration-first, audit-ready workflows that preserve productive struggle while scaling personalized support. Full article

Feature selection is pivotal in enhancing the efficiency of credit scoring predictions, where misclassifications are critical because they can result in financial losses for lenders and exclusion of eligible borrowers. While traditional feature selection methods can improve accuracy and class separation, they often struggle to maintain consistent performance aligned with institutional preferences across datasets of varying size and imbalance. This study introduces a FastTree-Guided Genetic Algorithm (FT-GA) that combines gradient-boosted learning with evolutionary optimization to prioritize class separability and minimize false-risk exposure. In contrast to traditional approaches, FT-GA provides fine-grained search guidance by acknowledging that false positives and false negatives carry disproportionate consequences in high-stakes lending contexts. By embedding domain-specific weighting into its fitness function, FT-GA favors separability over raw accuracy, reflecting practical risk sensitivity in real credit decision settings. Experimental results show that FT-GA achieved similar or higher AUC values ranging from 76% to 92% while reducing the average feature set by 21% when compared with the strongest baseline techniques. It also demonstrated strong performance on small to moderately imbalanced datasets and more resilience on highly imbalanced ones. These findings indicate that FT-GA offers a risk-aware enhancement to automated credit assessment workflows, supporting lower operational risk for financial institutions while showing potential applicability to other high-stakes domains. Full article

Harmful language in conversational AI poses distinct safety and governance challenges, as Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots interact in private, one-to-one settings. Understanding the types of harm and their temporal concentration is crucial for responsible deployment and time-aware moderation. This study investigates the types and diurnal dynamics of harmful speech, comparing patterns between play-oriented chit-chat and task-oriented LLM services.We analyze two large-scale, real-world English corpora: a chit-chat service (SimSimi; 8.7 M utterances) and an LLM service (WildChat; 610 K utterances). Using the Perspective API for multi-label classification (Toxicity, Profanity, Insult, Identity Attack, Threat), we estimate the incidence of harm categories and compare their distribution across five dayparts. Our analysis shows that harmful speech is significantly more prevalent in the chit-chat context than in the LLM service. Across both platforms, Toxicity and Profanity are the dominant categories. Temporally, harmful speech concentrates most frequently during the dawn daypart. We contribute an empirical baseline on how harm varies by chatbot modality and time of day, offering practical guidance for designing dynamic, platform-specific moderation policies. Full article

Background/Objectives: Thirdhand smoke (THS), residual tobacco pollutants persisting on surfaces, dust, and fabrics, poses specific risks to infants and children, yet its implications for nursing remain underexplored. This scoping review mapped existing evidence on THS in neonatal and pediatric contexts and synthesized nursing implications, focusing on nurses’ knowledge, unintentional environmental contamination, and educational roles. Methods: Following JBI methodology and reported according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines, a three-step search was performed across MEDLINE, CINAHL, Scopus, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, Google Scholar, and OpenGrey. Studies were included if they addressed (1) nurses’ knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes toward THS-related risks in infants and children; (2) nurses’ contribution to unintentional environmental THS contamination; or (3) nurse-led educational or preventive interventions targeting parents or communities. Results: Among 563 records, 8 met inclusion criteria. Four investigated nurses’ awareness and perceptions, revealing limited understanding of THS despite recognition of its harmfulness. One study examined contamination, detecting nicotine residues on nurses’ fingers, suggesting possible in-hospital transmission. No nurse-led interventions specifically targeting THS were found, though broader smoke-exposure education programs showed benefits when supported by nursing staff. Conclusions: Evidence is scarce but underscores significant gaps in nurses’ knowledge, clinical guidance, and educational initiatives concerning THS. Strengthening nursing education and research is essential to mitigate THS exposure in neonatal and pediatric settings and enhance nurses’ preventive and advocacy roles. Full article

Precision agriculture increasingly recognizes the transformative potential of unmanned aerial systems (UASs) for crop monitoring and field assessment, yet research consistently highlights significant usability barriers as the main constraints to widespread adoption. Complex mission planning processes, including detailed flight plan creation and way point management, pose substantial technical challenges that mainly affect non-expert operators. Farmers and their teams generally prefer user-friendly, straightforward tools, as evidenced by the rapid adoption of GPS guidance systems, which underscores the need for simpler mission planning in UAS operations. To enhance accessibility and safety in UAS control, especially for non-expert operators in agriculture and related fields, we propose a Secure UAS Control Framework (SAUCF): a comprehensive system for natural-language-driven UAS mission management with integrated dual-factor biometric authentication. The framework converts spoken user instructions into executable flight plans by leveraging a language-model-powered mission planner that interprets transcribed voice commands and generates context-aware operational directives, including takeoff, location monitoring, return-to-home, and landing operations. Mission orchestration is performed through a large language model (LLM) agent, coupled with a human-in-the-loop supervision mechanism that enables operators to review, adjust, or confirm mission plans before deployment. Additionally, SAUCF offers a manual override feature, allowing users to assume direct control or interrupt missions at any stage, ensuring safety and adaptability in dynamic environments. Proof-of-concept demonstrations on a UAS plat-form with on-board computing validated reliable speech-to-text transcription, biometric verification via voice matching and face authentication, and effective Sim2Real transfer of natural-language-driven mission plans from simulation environments to physical UAS operations. Initial evaluations showed that SAUCF reduced mission planning time, minimized command errors, and simplified complex multi-objective workflows compared to traditional waypoint-based tools, though comprehensive field validation remains necessary to confirm these preliminary findings. The integration of natural-language-based interaction, real-time identity verification, human-in-the-loop LLM orchestration, and manual override capabilities allows SAUCF to significantly lower the technical barrier to UAS operation while ensuring mission security, operational reliability, and operator agency in real-world conditions. These findings lay the groundwork for systematic field trials and suggest that prioritizing ease of operation in mission planning can drive broader deployment of UAS technologies. Full article

Plant tissues exhibit a layered architecture that makes spatial context decisive for interpreting transcriptional changes. This review explains why the location of gene expression is as important as its magnitude and synthesizes advances uniting single-cell/nucleus RNA-seq with spatial transcriptomics in plants. Surveyed topics include platform selection and material preparation; plant-specific sample processing and quality control; integration with epigenomic assays such as single-nucleus Assay for Transposase-Accessible Chromatin using sequencing (ATAC) and Multiome; and computational workflows for label transfer, deconvolution, spatial embedding, and neighborhood-aware cell–cell communication. Protoplast-based single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) enables high-resolution profiling but introduces dissociation artifacts and cell-type biases, whereas ingle-nucleus RNA sequencing (snRNA-seq) improves the representation of recalcitrant lineages and reduces stress signatures while remaining compatible with multiomics profiling. Practical guidance is provided for mitigating ambient RNA, interpreting organellar and intronic metrics, identifying doublets, and harmonizing batches across chemistries and studies. Spatial platforms (Visium HD, Stereo-seq, bead arrays) and targeted imaging (Single-molecule fluorescence in situ hybridization (smFISH), Hairpin-chain-reaction FISH (HCR-FISH), Multiplexed Error-Robust Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization (MERFISH)) are contrasted with plant-specific adaptations and integration pipelines that anchor dissociated profiles in anatomical coordinates. Recent atlases in Arabidopsis, soybean, and maize illustrate how cell identities, chromatin accessibility, and spatial niches reveal developmental trajectories and stress responses jointly. A roadmap is outlined for moving from atlases to interventions by deriving gene regulatory networks, prioritizing cis-regulatory targets, and validating perturbations with spatial readouts in crops. Together, these principles support a transition from descriptive maps to mechanism-informed, low-pleiotropy engineering of agronomic traits. Full article

The contemporary digital landscape overwhelms visitors with fragmented and dynamic information, complicating travel planning and often leading to decision paralysis. This paper presents a real-world case study on the design and deployment of an intelligent tourism assistant for Valencia, Spain, built upon a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture. To address the complexity of integrating static attraction data, live events, and geospatial context, we implemented a multi-agent system orchestrated via the ReAct (Reason + Act) paradigm, comprising specialized Retrieval, Events, and Geospatial Agents. Powered by a large language model, the system unifies heterogeneous data sources—including official tourism repositories and OpenStreetMap—within a single conversational interface. Our contribution centers on practical insights and engineering lessons from developing RAG in an operational urban tourism environment. We outline data preprocessing strategies, such as coreference resolution, to improve contextual consistency and reduce hallucinations. System performance is evaluated using Retrieval Augmented Generation Assessment (RAGAS) metrics, yielding quantitative results that assess both retrieval efficiency and generation quality, with the Mistral Small 3.1 model achieving an Answer Relevancy score of 0.897. Overall, this work highlights both the challenges and advantages of using agent-based RAG to manage urban-scale information complexity, providing guidance for developers aiming to build trustworthy, context-aware AI systems for smart destination management. Full article

Change detection in high-resolution remote sensing imagery is vital for applications such as urban expansion monitoring, land-use analysis, and disaster assessment. However, existing methods often underutilize the differential features of bi-temporal images and struggle with complex backgrounds, illumination variations, and pseudo-changes, which hinder accurate identification of true changes. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a Siamese change detection network that integrates an adaptive scanning state-space model with frequency-domain enhancement. The backbone is constructed using Visual State Space (VSS) Blocks, and a Cross-Spatial Guidance Attention (CSGA) module is designed to explicitly guide cross-temporal feature alignment, thereby enhancing the reliability of differential feature representation. Furthermore, a Frequency-guided Adaptive Difference Module (FADM) is developed to apply adaptive low-pass filtering, effectively suppressing textures, noise, illumination variations, and sensor discrepancies while reinforcing spatial-domain differences to emphasize true changes. Finally, a Dual-Stage Multi-Scale Residual Integrator (DS-MRI) is introduced, incorporating both VSS Blocks and the newly designed Attention-Guided State Space (AGSS) Blocks. Unlike fixed scanning mechanisms, AGSS dynamically generates scanning sequences guided by CSGA, enabling a task-adaptive and context-aware decoding strategy. Extensive experiments on three public datasets (LEVIR-CD, WHU-CD, and SYSU-CD) demonstrate that the proposed method surpasses mainstream approaches in both accuracy and efficiency, exhibiting superior robustness under complex backgrounds and in weak-change scenarios. Full article

Recent advances in underwater image enhancement (UIE) have achieved notable progress using deep learning techniques; however, existing methods often struggle with limited receptive fields, inadequate frequency modeling, and poor structural perception, leading to sub-optimal visual quality and weak generalization in complex underwater environments. To tackle these issues, we propose FACMamba, a Mamba-based framework augmented with frequency-aware mechanisms, enabling efficient modeling of long-range spatial relations for underwater image restoration. Specifically, FACMamba incorporates three key components: a Multi-Directional Vision State-Space Module (MVSM) to model directional spatial context via the proposed 8-direction selective scan block (SS8D), a Frequency-Aware Guidance Module (FAGM) for learning informative frequency representations with low overhead, and a Structure-Aware Fusion Module (SAFM) to preserve fine-grained structural cues through adaptive multi-scale integration. Recognizing the importance of spatial-frequency interaction, our model fuses these representations via lightweight architecture to enhance both texture and color fidelity. Experiments on standard UIE benchmarks demonstrate that FACMamba achieves a favorable balance between enhancement quality and computational efficiency, outperforming many existing UIE methods. Full article

Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) requires modeling spatially extensive and interdependent degradations across large pixel regions, while directly equipping diffusion-based LLIE with heavy global modules inside the iterative denoising backbone leads to prohibitive computational overhead. To enhance long-range context modeling without inflating the per-step cost of diffusion, we propose ECA-Diff, a diffusion framework augmented with a deep External Context-Aware Encoder (ECAE). A latent-space context network built with hybrid Transformer–Convolution blocks extracts holistic cues from the input, generates multi-scale context features once, and injects them into the diffusion backbone as lightweight conditional guidance across all sampling steps. In addition, a CIELAB-space Luminance-Adaptive Chromaticity Loss regularizes conditional diffusion training and mitigates the cool color cast frequently observed in low-luminance regions. Experiments on paired and unpaired benchmarks show that ECA-Diff consistently outperforms recent state-of-the-art LLIE methods in both full-reference (PSNR/SSIM/LPIPS) and no-reference (NIQE/BRISQUE) metrics, with the external context path introducing only modest overhead relative to the baseline diffusion backbone. These results indicate that decoupling global context estimation from the iterative denoising process is an effective way to boost diffusion-based LLIE and provides a general compute-once conditioning paradigm for low-level image restoration. Full article

Electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring on low-power edge devices requires models that balance accuracy, latency, and energy consumption. This study evaluates abrupt change detection in ECG using spiking neural networks (SNNs) trained on spike-encoded signals that preserve salient cardiac dynamics. This study used 4910 ECG segments from 290 subjects (PTB Diagnostic Database; 2.5-s windows at 1 kHz), providing context for the reported results. Under a unified architecture, preprocessing pipeline, and training schedule, we compare two representative neuron models—leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) and adaptive exponential integrate-and-fire (AdEx). We report balanced accuracy, sensitivity, inference latency, and an energy proxy based on spike-event counts, and we examine robustness to input noise and temporal distortions. Across operating points, AdEx yields the highest overall accuracy and sensitivity, whereas LIF achieves the lowest energy cost and shortest latency, favoring deployment on resource-constrained hardware. Both SNN variants substantially reduce computational events—hence estimated energy—relative to conventional artificial neural network baselines, supporting their suitability for real-time, on-device diagnostics. These findings provide practical guidance for selecting neuron dynamics and decision thresholds to meet target accuracy–sensitivity trade-offs under energy and latency budgets. Overall, combining spike-encoded ECG with appropriately chosen SNN dynamics enables reliable abrupt change detection with notable efficiency gains, offering a path toward scalable edge-level cardiovascular monitoring. While lightweight CNNs and shallow transformers are important references, to keep the scope focused on SNN design choices and policy-aware thresholding for edge constraints, we refrain from reporting additional ANN numbers here. A seed-controlled head-to-head benchmark is reserved for future work. Full article

The rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) deployments has created an urgent need for energy-efficient communication strategies that can adapt to dynamic operational conditions. This study presents a novel adaptive protocol selection framework that dynamically optimizes IoT communication energy consumption through context-aware decision making, achieving up to 34% energy reduction compared to static protocol selection. The framework is grounded in a comprehensive empirical evaluation of three widely used IoT communication protocols—MQTT, CoAP, and HTTP—using Intel’s Running Average Power Limit (RAPL) for precise energy measurement across varied network conditions including packet loss (0–20%) and latency variations (1–200 ms). Our key contribution is the design and validation of an adaptive selection mechanism that employs multi-criteria decision making with hysteresis control to prevent oscillation, dynamically switching between protocols based on six runtime metrics: message frequency, payload size, network conditions, packet loss rate, available energy budget, and QoS requirements. Results show MQTT consumes only 40% of HTTP’s energy per byte at high volumes (>10,000 messages), while HTTP remains practical for low-volume traffic (<10 msg/min). A novel finding reveals receiver nodes consistently consume 15–20% more energy than senders, requiring new design considerations for IoT gateways. The framework demonstrates robust performance across simulated real-world conditions, maintaining 92% of optimal performance while requiring 85% less computation than machine learning approaches. These findings offer actionable guidance for IoT architects and developers, positioning this work as a practical solution for energy-aware IoT communication in production environments. Full article

This review surveys how contemporary machine learning is reshaping financial and economic forecasting across markets, macroeconomics, and corporate planning. We synthesize evidence on model families, such as regularized linear methods, tree ensembles, and deep neural architecture, and explain their optimization (with gradient-based training) and design choices (activation and loss functions). Across tasks, Random Forest and gradient-boosted trees emerge as robust baselines, offering strong out-of-sample accuracy and interpretable variable importance. For sequential signals, recurrent models, especially LSTM ensembles, consistently improve directional classification and volatility-aware predictions, while transformer-style attention is a promising direction for longer contexts. Practical performance hinges on aligning losses with business objectives (for example cross-entropy vs. RMSE/MAE), handling class imbalance, and avoiding data leakage through rigorous cross-validation. In high-dimensional settings, regularization (such as ridge/lasso/elastic-net) stabilizes estimation and enhances generalization. We compile task-specific feature sets for macro indicators, market microstructure, and firm-level data, and distill implementation guidance covering hyperparameter search, evaluation metrics, and reproducibility. We conclude in open challenges (accuracy–interpretability trade-off, limited causal insight) and outline a research agenda combining econometrics with representation learning and data-centric evaluation. Full article

The persistent gap between consumers’ pro-environmental attitudes and their sustainable behavior continues to challenge both scholars and practitioners. While social norms are often viewed as a lever for encouraging sustainable behavior, empirical results remain inconsistent. This paper develops a conceptual model of sustainable behavior that integrates insights from prior research on social norms, culture, and self-construal. Specifically, the paper links social norms, self-construal, macro-culture, and environmental awareness to explain their combined influence on sustainable behavior. Drawing from social norms theory, self-construal theory, cross-cultural psychology, and environmental psychology, the model proposes that appeals combining specific types of norms (injunctive vs. descriptive) with targeted self-construal activation (independent vs. interdependent) can strengthen purchase intentions, moderated by cultural context and environmental awareness. Eight testable propositions that distinguish established effects from novel extensions are advanced, thereby clarifying boundary conditions and guiding future empirical testing. By synthesizing insights from fragmented literature, the framework positions social norms as the central explanatory construct and provides practical guidance for designing culturally attuned, norm-based sustainability communications. Full article

As a fundamental low-level vision task, image restoration plays a pivotal role in reconstructing authentic visual information from corrupted inputs, directly impacting the performance of downstream high-level vision systems. Current approaches frequently exhibit two critical limitations: (1) Progressive texture degradation and blurring during iterative refinement, particularly in irregular damage patterns. (2) Structural incoherence when handling cross-domain artifacts. To address these challenges, we present a semantic-aware hierarchical network (SAHN) that synergistically integrates multi-scale semantic guidance with structural consistency constraints. Firstly, we construct a Dual-Stream Feature Extractor. Based on a modified U-Net backbone with dilated residual blocks, this skip-connected encoder–decoder module simultaneously captures hierarchical semantic contexts and fine-grained texture details. Secondly, we propose the semantic prior mapper by establishing spatial–semantic correspondences between damaged areas and multi-scale features through predefined semantic prototypes through adaptive attention pooling. Additionally, we construct a multi-scale fusion generator, by employing cascaded association blocks with structural similarity constraints. This unit progressively aggregates features from different semantic levels using deformable convolution kernels, effectively bridging the gap between global structure and local texture reconstruction. Compared to existing methods, our algorithm attains the highest overall PSNR of 34.99 with the best visual authenticity (with the lowest FID of 11.56). Comprehensive evaluations of three datasets demonstrate its leading performance in restoring visual realism. Full article