Rhodora Abadia, Sisi Liu, Qiaoling Sun

Most of the studies in identifying the factors contributing to high academic performance of students focus on both traditional and blended learning environments. This study explores the online engagement behaviours of high-performing online students. Three years of data derived from students' online activities and academic performance across six computing courses was analysed. Our findings reveal a continuity of high-performance among students who excel in online introductory programming courses, extending their success to subsequent online computing courses. Furthermore, we establish a positive association between programming experience and improved performance. High-performing s tudents exhibit engagement levels that exceed their peers by at least 100% in o nline formative learning activities, with particular emphasis on forum participation and quiz contribution. This study also looked into the predictive potential of past academic performances in anticipating future achievements. It demonstrated a predictive accuracy of 75% for programming courses and 91% for non -programming ones. When combined with student engagement data, the predictive accuracy for programming courses increases to 81%. This approach requires substantial data until at least week 7 or 8 of a 10 -week course, potentially delaying intervention until the latter stage of the course. To address this, exploring models exclusively reliant on engagement data is recommended. Our research offers actionable insights for educators, enabling them to identify critical content design elements that enhance academic performance across diverse student profiles, fostering improved online engagement and narrowing performance gaps . Moreover, this study calls for a re-evaluation of learning analytics tools within educational institutions to better understand and enhance student behaviours and patters, ultimately improving the overall online learning experience.

Satoshi Yazawa, Masashi Inutsuka, Terutaka Komahashi, Kento Kanemura, Kazuo Hiraki

On-demand lecture videos play an important role in an increasingly online learning environment. However, there have not been many studies that conducted intervention experiments focusing on optimal methods of lecture video production. Most of these studies performed statistical analyses of indices such as video length, playback speed, and number of video player operations based on viewing records of existing lecture videos, such as massive open online courses. We therefore collaborated with an English lecture specialist to conduct an intervention experiment by creating two videos with the same topics, lecturers, and studios, but different editing policies. The results showed that for the video with clear chapter segmentation (but not the video without such segmentation), knowledge scores increased according to learning time. Detailed log analysis revealed that learners who viewed the lecture video with explicit chapter segmentation changed their behavior, such as seeking, changing playback speed, and skipping topics, depending on their own abilities. Based on the results, we propose that it is important for lecture video producers to organize chapters and design user interfaces based on the assumption that learners actively attempt to optimize their viewing behavior according to their abilities.

Efrem Mbaki Luzayisu, Jean-Pierre Zamwangana Tungu

For several years now, the literature has been reporting an increase in aggression via the Internet among young people living in developed countries. Despite the financial and technical difficulties due to the situation in the country, young Congolese are also very open to ICTs and fun of all kinds of online applications that make them vulnerable to cyber -attacks. In this context, this study aims to examine the prevalence and factors affecting online aggression in Congolese acad emia. Indeed, with a field survey of 1500 students, we found that students who engage in high -risk online behaviors, such as sharing the Internet connection with others, posting content online, or dating virtual friends, are among those who have a higher probability of being victims and/or perpetrators of online assault. Based on the findings we formulated some recommendations that can help reduce the prevalence of cyberaggression.

Philipp Neuschwander, Frank Elberzhager, Patrick Mennig, Arian Ajdari, Phil Stüpfert, Balthasar Weitzel

Cities have to increasingly consider topics such as climate change and digitalization. Ideally, the digital transformation should support becoming more climate-friendly. New digital services are being developed and made available to citizens. However, it is often difficult to test ideas for new services from both a technical and a user -centric perspective. Reasons for this are, among others, that existing technical infrastructures provide a complex environment where deployment is often time-consuming. Furthermore, certain qualities such as performance or data protection have to be ensured, which is something a prototypical solution might not be able to offer. We are developing digital sol utions for a climate-neutral smart city district, and one of our main challenges is that the area is still under construction and no technical infrastructure exists yet. Therefore, we developed a mock environment for a digital ecosystem in which we can easily test new ideas and early service prototypes. In this publication, we share our experiences on how we used this environment in a hackathon event and provide results from the participants who used our smart city district simulator. We provide three concrete examples of different implementations and discuss how our technical solution support s the development of new digital solutions and how it might also be a solution for other cities. As we would also like to apply the technical environment in other contexts, we then describe one concrete use case in the area of heavy rain and elaborate what this means regarding further development of our simulator and the technical infrastructure.

Gabriella Francesca Amalia Pernice, Valeria Orso, Luciano Gamberini

In recent years, there has been a noticeable shift in how consumers receive information when purchasing household appliances, with a strong focus on environmental aspects. As consumers become more aware of their negative impact on the environment, companie s have adapted their marketing strategies to emphasize sustainability and energy efficiency. However, this influx of information can overwhelm consumers during the decision -making process. Companies use "green marketing" to convey environmental information about their own products, while governments provide this kind of information through standardized data, the energy labels. Nevertheless, effectively communicating this information remains a challenge because consumers often struggle to comprehend overly technical details or assess the reliability of these sources. Moreover, when the information is insufficient or difficult to access, it can lead to negative consumer attitudes, resulting in a phenomenon known as green scepticism. This scepticism can hinder the translation of consumer awareness into actual sustainable behaviors and exacerbate their concerns about companies' unsustainable practices known as "greenwashing". Although awareness of green scepticism in sustainable marketing is growing, existing res earch is still limited. This study aimed to understand the perspectives of 16 Italian consumers regarding the purchase of highly energy -efficient household appliances. These were well -educated, working -age adults who had bought a household appliance in the last six months. We explored their attitudes and beliefs about the sustainable information in the household appliances market. Preliminary findings reveal that these well -educated consumers care about the environment and consider themselves knowledgeable about energy efficiency. However, they have doubts about the information provided during the purchase phase by companies and industry experts. The lack of clear and transparent information could influence not only their purchase decisions but also their da ily use of energy -efficient household appliances. This study offers insights for companies and researchers on how to address the issue related to sustainability information and encourage energy-saving behaviors.

Abderrahim Derouiche, Ghazi Bouaziz, Damien Brulin, Eric Campo, Antoine Piau

Addressing the health challenges faced by the aging population, particularly undernutrition, is of paramount importance, given the significant representation of older individuals in society. Undernutrition arises from a disbalance between nutritional intake and energy expenditure, making its diagnosis crucial. Advances in technology allowed a better precision and efficiency of biomarker measurements, making it easier to detect undernutrition in the elderly. This article introduces an innovative system developed as part of the CART initiative at Toulouse University Hospital in France. This system takes a comprehensive approach to monitor health and well -being, collecting data that can provide insights, shape health outcomes, and even predict them. A key focus of this system is on identifying nutrition-related behaviors. By integrating quantitative and clinical asses sments, which include biannual nutritional evaluations, as well as physical and physiological measurements like mobility and weight, this approach improves the diagnosis and prevention of undernutrition risks. It offers a more holistic perspective aligned with physiological standards. An example is given with the data collection of an elderly person followed at home for 3 months. We believe that this advance could make a significant contribution to the overall improvement of health and well-being, particularly in the elderly population.

Kingsley Attai, Okure Obot, Daniel Asuquo, Ekemini Johnson, Kiirya Arnold, Mercy Edoho, Moses Ekpenyong, Christy Akwaowo, Owoidoho Udoh, Victoria Usen, Faith-Michael Uzoka

Febrile diseases have contributed to a very large extent to the high mortality and morbidity rate in the tropical regions especially in the low -to-middle-income countries (LMIC). Among other reasons is the confusion arising from the differentiation of the various symptoms that look alike and overlapping. This is in addition to the fact that there is an acute shortage of experienced medical personnel to diagnose cases of febrile diseases. A solution is proffered to this problem in this study by developing a medical decision support system (MDSS) for the diagnosis of febrile diseases. T he system is based on the A gile software life cycle model that allows all the stakeholders to interact in the course of developing the software. Here, the medical doctors, the frontline health workers (FHWs), and the information scientists meet regularly to elicit the requirements, and plan, design , and implement the system. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) model was used to aggregate the knowledge elicited from the medical doctors which they gathered after interaction with 3253 patients with febrile diseases. The AHP result showed a 90% accuracy with the diagnosis conducted by 60 medical doctors from the collected patients’ data. The developed MDSS is an app deployed for use by the FHWs in an Android -based device with a user -friendly graphical user interface.

Sin Ying Ng, Pik Yin Mok

The landscape of fashion online shopping has undergone rapid transformation since the pandemic. Unlike traditional offline shopping experiences, customers engaging in online shopping are unable to physically interact with the products they intend to purchase. As a result, the display of comprehensive and accurate product information plays a primary role in facilitating fashion online shopping experience. This paper aims to gain insights from consumer perspective to investigate their preferences for online fashion platforms and individualized fashion by conducting online questionnaire survey. The survey involved 162 respondents who were asked to rate opinion questions using a seven-point Likert scale. The results highlighted the importance of displaying products from different angles, providing close-up details with zoom-in functions, and presenting clothing on human models along with size information, such as size charts and size recommendation tools. Credibility cues, including product reviews and comments, seller reputation and ratings, and consumer-submitted photos, were also valued by consumers. The study also revealed a high expectation on the mobile body measuring technology. This paper provided valuable insights for prioritizing product information and features in the design of an online custom clothing marketplace platform. Additionally, it offered valuable customer insights for fashion brands and tech companies assisting with e-shop launches.

Honghong He, Zhengwentai Sun, Jintu Fan, Pik Yin Mok

Creating seamless textures is crucial to attain realistic 3D virtual objects and environments. This is because when stochastic textures are tiled in a straightforward manner, they produce cluttered visuals with noticeable seams that lack authenticity. This paper proposes GAN -based method for automatic seamless texture synthesis by designing th ree main components in generator block: (i) the texture style encoder, (ii) residual tiling blocks and (iii) the BRDFs tileable decoder in the generator of an adversarial expansion network, resulting in a continuous texture output at the seam intersection area. In addition, considering the different properties of virtual environment rendering materials, the spatially varying BRDFs (albedo, normal, roughness and displacement map) are all designed in the proposed model to handle multi -layer texture representation. Furthermore, the proposed method for generating seamless multi-layer texture maps that incorporates different loss functions, allowing us to control both the geometric shape and visual fidelity of the synthesized textures. Qualitative and quantitati ve experiments on the describable textures dataset (DTD) show that the generated texture maps are not only seamlessly tiled but also exhibit superior visual quality in preserving details compared to previous deep texture synthesis methods.

Fukun Wu, Yi Cao, Qingli Dong

We introduce a surface streamline generation approach for visualizing vector fields defined on curved surfaces. This approach performs the intersection calculation on curved surface s with complex topology to achieve the highly detailed underlying vector. Then, an extended Runge -Kutta streamline integration technology is applied for performing streamline tracing on an unstructured mesh, where the adaptive stepsize strategy and intersection acceleration structure are presented for sake of simplicity and efficiency. Finally, this algorithm applies the ball feature to improve its visual intuitiveness and is integrated into the general visual analysis platform. Experimental results show that our method can generate continuous and consistent geometric surface streamlines by tracing streamlines on curved surfaces.

André Freitas, Filipe Santos, Pedro Santana

An individual can observe one’s surrounding space. The space can contain various elements (e.g., objects, furniture), which in turn convey visual information to the individual, giv ing the sense of being present within the space. The space can be filled by additional individuals who also aim to observe their surroundings. The human ability to observe and interact with the surrounding elements plays a vital role in creating a feeling of being socially present and connected in a physical space , also know as co-presence. In the virtual world, similar sensations of co-presence are often conveyed through graphical representations. These representations, along with other methods aimed at enhancing co-presence (such as interfaces designed to foster a sense of shared presence), have been extensively researched and utilized in single player and multip layer video games. Th e present study explores the application of some of those strategies to enhance the feeling of co -presence among individuals during virtual group house tours , which is a relevant application scenario to the real estate industry and arc hitectural participatory design. To this aim, a tool was developed and evaluated in a user study involving 33 participants. The findings indicate that all the implemented strategies effectively enhance the sense of co-presence within the virtual environment and encourage meaningful collaborative interactions.

JaeJun Lee, So-Youn Eom, JunHee Lee

This paper explores how AI-based game design affects the game development process and the role structure of game development teams, with a particular focus on the changes it brings during the early game project proposal phase. We present a comparison of game design proposal cases conducted by a game designer over a span of four years, showcasing how the utilization of artificial intelligence is re-empowering game designers. We envision a empowered game designer capable of market sensing, artwork creation, playable prototype development, subsequent game analysis, and operations all by oneself or with a very small team, a "super game designer". This paper illustrates how AI is ushering in a new era for game designers, and discusses the potential to stimulate innovation within the game industry by fostering creativity and imagination of game designers.

Federica Nenna, Davide Zanardi, Luciano Gamberini

Patterns of human motion were found to mirror cognitive processes in both psychological studies and applied research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Notably, the behavioral entropy of movement trajectories of users was identified as a reflection of workload and fatigue across different settings, including Virtual Reality (VR). In the context of VR particularly, this metric is predominantly derived from the movements of VR controllers, denoted as the Entropy of Controller Movements (ECM). Despite its promising sensitivity and unobtrusive nature as a metric for human workload, ECM's application and proven efficacy in practical and authentic VR-based applications, such as industrial teleoperation platforms, has not been validated yet. Additionally, current literature predominantly features younger experimental samples, leaving unresolved the potential impact of age-related alterations in motor performance on using ECM as a workload metric. This study explored these dimensions by examining the relationship between workload and ECM among 15 young and 15 senior participants who manually operated an industrial robot within a VR environment. Participants were instructed to navigate the robot through a pick-and-place task by using their physical movements in VR. Our research identified unexpected variations in ECM values, particularly in older users, revealing an inverse relationship between movement entropy and task complexity in our scenario. High levels of behavioral entropy were also observed in younger participants. These findings unveil some criticalities in using ECM as a measure of workload in our VR-based industrial contexts, posing new questions regarding its applicability and effectiveness.

Pedro Isaías

Editorial preface for Volume 18, Issue 2 of the IADIS International Journal on Computer Science and Information Systems (IJCSIS). This issue brings together peer-reviewed original research contributions covering the wide spectrum of Information Systems, Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, and Digital Transformation.