Toward using Speech to Sense Student Emotion in Remote Learning Environments

With advancements in multimodal communication technologies, remote learning environments such as, distance universities are increasing. Remote learning typically happens asynchronously. As a consequence, unlike face-to-face in-person classroom teaching, this lacks availability of sufficient emotional cues for making learning a pleasant experience. Motivated by advances made in the paralinguistic speech processing community on emotion prediction, in this paper we explore use of speech for sensing students' emotions by building upon speech-based self-control tasks developed to aid effective remote learning. More precisely, we investigate: (a) whether speech acquired through self-control tasks exhibit perceptible variation along valence, arousal, and dominance dimensions? and (b) whether those dimensional emotion variations can be automatically predicted? We address these two research questions by developing a dataset containing spontaneous monologue speech acquired as open responses to self-control tasks and by carrying out subjective listener evaluations and automatic dimensional emotion prediction studies on that dataset. Our investigations indicate that speech-based self-control tasks can be a means to sense student emotion in remote learning environment. This opens potential venues to seamlessly integrate paralinguistic speech processing technologies in the remote learning loop for enhancing learning experiences through instructional design and feedback generation.

SCAR: State-Space Compression for AI-Driven Resource Management in 6G-Enabled Vehicular Infotainment Systems

The advent of 6G networks opens new possibilities for connected infotainment services in vehicular environments. However, traditional Radio Resource Management (RRM) techniques struggle with the increasing volume and complexity of data such as Channel Quality Indicators (CQI) from autonomous vehicles. To address this, we propose SCAR (State-Space Compression for AI-Driven Resource Management), an Edge AI-assisted framework that optimizes scheduling and fairness in vehicular infotainment. SCAR employs ML-based compression techniques (e.g., clustering and RBF networks) to reduce CQI data size while preserving essential features. These compressed states are used to train 6G-enabled Reinforcement Learning policies that maximize throughput while meeting fairness objectives defined by the NGMN. Simulations show that SCAR increases time in feasible scheduling regions by 14\% and reduces unfair scheduling time by 15\% compared to RL baselines without CQI compression. Furthermore, Simulated Annealing with Stochastic Tunneling (SAST)-based clustering reduces CQI clustering distortion by 10\%, confirming its efficiency. These results demonstrate SCAR's scalability and fairness benefits for dynamic vehicular networks.

Detection of Disengagement from Voluntary Quizzes: An Explainable Machine Learning Approach in Higher Distance Education

Students disengaging from their tasks can have serious long-term consequences, including academic drop-out. This is particularly relevant for students in distance education. One way to measure the level of disengagement in distance education is to observe participation in non-mandatory exercises in different online courses. In this paper, we detect student disengagement in the non-mandatory quizzes of 42 courses in four semesters from a distance-based university. We carefully identified the most informative student log data that could be extracted and processed from Moodle. Then, eight machine learning algorithms were trained and compared to obtain the highest possible prediction accuracy. Using the SHAP method, we developed an explainable machine learning framework that allows practitioners to better understand the decisions of the trained algorithm. The experimental results show a balanced accuracy of 91\%, where about 85\% of disengaged students were correctly detected. On top of the highly predictive performance and explainable framework, we provide a discussion on how to design a timely intervention to minimise disengagement from voluntary tasks in online learning.

Prediction of Dilatory Behavior in eLearning: A Comparison of Multiple Machine Learning Models

Procrastination, the irrational delay of tasks, is a common occurrence in online learning. Potential negative consequences include higher risk of drop-outs, increased stress, and reduced mood. Due to the rise of learning management systems and learning analytics, indicators of such behavior can be detected, enabling predictions of future procrastination and other dilatory behavior. However, research focusing on such predictions is scarce. Moreover, studies involving different types of predictors and comparisons between the predictive performance of various methods are virtually non-existent. In this study, we aim to fill these research gaps by analyzing the performance of multiple machine learning algorithms when predicting the delayed or timely submission of online assignments in a higher education setting with two categories of predictors: subjective, questionnaire-based variables and objective, log-data based indicators extracted from a learning management system. The results show that models with objective predictors consistently outperform models with subjective predictors, and a combination of both variable types perform slightly better. For each of these three options, a different approach prevailed (Gradient Boosting Machines for the subjective, Bayesian multilevel models for the objective, and Random Forest for the combined predictors). We conclude that careful attention should be paid to the selection of predictors and algorithms before implementing such models in learning management systems.