To promote climate adaptation and mitigation, it is crucial to understand stakeholder perspectives and knowledge gaps on land use and climate changes. Stakeholders across 21 European islands were consulted on climate and land use change issues affecting ecosystem services. Climate change perceptions included temperature, precipitation, humidity, extremes, and wind. Land use change perceptions included deforestation, coastal degradation, habitat protection, renewable energy facilities, wetlands, and others. Additional concerns such as invasive species, water or energy scarcity, infrastructure problems, and austerity were also considered. Climate and land use change impact perceptions were analysed with machine learning to quantify their influence. The predominant climatic characteristic is temperature, and the predominant land use characteristic is deforestation. Water-related problems are top priorities for stakeholders. Energy-related problems, including energy deficiency and issues with wind and solar facilities, rank high as combined climate and land use risks. Stakeholders generally perceive climate change impacts on ecosystem services as negative, with natural habitat destruction and biodiversity loss identified as top issues. Land use change impacts are also negative but more complex, with more explanatory variables. Stakeholders share common perceptions on biodiversity impacts despite geographic disparity, but they differentiate between climate and land use impacts. Water, energy, and renewable energy issues pose serious concerns, requiring management measures.

Achieving consistency in immersive learning case descriptions is essential but challenging due to variations in research focus, methodology, and researchers' background. We address these challenges by leveraging the Immersive Learning Case Sheet (ILCS), a methodological instrument to standardize case descriptions, that we applied to an immersive learning case on ancient Greek technology in VRChat. Research team members had differing levels of familiarity with the ILCS and the case content, so we developed a custom ChatGPT assistant to facilitate consistent terminology and process alignment across the team. This paper constitutes an example of how structured case reports can be a novel contribution to immersive learning literature. Our findings demonstrate how the ILCS supports structured reflection and interpretation of the case. Further we report that the use of a ChatGPT assistant significantly sup-ports the coherence and quality of the team members development of the final ILCS. This exposes the potential of employing AI-driven tools to enhance collaboration and standardization of research practices in qualitative educational research. However, we also discuss the limitations and challenges, including reliance on AI for interpretive tasks and managing varied levels of expertise within the team. This study thus provides insights into the practical application of AI in standardizing immersive learning research processes.

Real-time lightweight time series anomaly detection has become increasingly crucial in cybersecurity and many other domains. Its ability to adapt to unforeseen pattern changes and swiftly identify anomalies enables prompt responses and critical decision-making. While several such anomaly detection approaches have been introduced in recent works years, they primarily utilize a single type of recurrent neural net (RNNs) and have been implemented in only one deep learning framework. It is unclear how the use of different types of RNNs available in various deep learning frameworks affects the performance of these anomaly detection approaches due to the absence of comprehensive evaluations. Arbitrarily choosing a RNN variant and a deep learning framework to implement an anomaly detection approach may not reflect its true performance and could potentially mislead users into favoring one approach over another. In this paper, we aim to study the influence of various types of RNNs available in popular deep learning frameworks on real-time lightweight time series anomaly detection. We reviewed several state-of-the-art approaches and implemented a representative anomaly detection approach using well-known RNN variants supported by three widely recognized deep learning frameworks. A comprehensive evaluation is then conducted to analyze the performance of each implementation across real-world, open-source time series datasets. The evaluation results provide valuable guidance for selecting the appropriate RNN variant and deep learning framework for real-time, lightweight time series anomaly detection.

The rapid advancement of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, particularly Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models such as ChatGPT, has the potential to significantly impact cybersecurity. In this study, we investigated the impact of GPTs, specifically ChatGPT, on tertiary education in cybersecurity, and provided recommendations for universities to adapt their curricula to meet the evolving needs of the industry. Our research highlighted the importance of understanding the alignment between GPT's ``mental model'' and human cognition, as well as the enhancement of GPT capabilities to human skills based on Bloom's taxonomy. By analyzing current educational practices and the alignment of curricula with industry requirements, we concluded that universities providing practical degrees like cybersecurity should align closely with industry demand and embrace the inevitable generative AI revolution, while applying stringent ethics oversight to safeguard responsible GPT usage. We proposed a set of recommendations focused on updating university curricula, promoting agility within universities, fostering collaboration between academia, industry, and policymakers, and evaluating and assessing educational outcomes.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in recent years has shown an unprecedentedly impressive development, tending to play a catalytic role in all aspects of life. The interest of the academic community, but also of governments, is huge in the dynamics of AI and is reflected by the truly explosive amount of investment and research that is underway. Enthusiastic opinions and statements about AI are made every day, but at the same time they also bring to the fore alarming predictions about its effects. This paper aims to describe the opportunities emerging from the use of artificial intelligence and ChatGPT to improve education, but also to identify the challenges and ethical issues that arise.

Group decision making is an important field with interesting applications in various disciplines, among which environmental economics. Group decision, often requires that all or the majority of agents in the group agree to a single proposal or opinion, i.e. consensus. This is particularly true in cases where there is no coercion involved in the implementation of the decision made, so that the implementation of the decision depends on the good will, or rather the acceptance of the common decision by all members of the group. To make the discussion more concrete we consider the following generic situation: Assume that a group of agents, G, has to reach a common decision concerning policies regarding a future contingency X. Policies may refer for instance to the cost of abatement measures for protection against X, which clearly require the acceptance of a commonly acceptable estimate for the value of X by every member of the group as well as the acceptance of a commonly acceptably discount factor. Typically, different member of the group will have different valuations for X, therefore report different costs for the adverse effects of X. Moreover, different members of the group will have different discount rates for calculating the present value of the future adverse effect X.

In this paper, we present a dataset for the computational study of a number of Modern Greek dialects. It consists of raw text data from four dialects of Modern Greek, Cretan, Pontic, Northern Greek and Cypriot Greek. The dataset is of considerable size, albeit imbalanced, and presents the first attempt to create large scale dialectal resources of this type for Modern Greek dialects. We then use the dataset to perform dialect idefntification. We experiment with traditional ML algorithms, as well as simple DL architectures. The results show very good performance on the task, potentially revealing that the dialects in question have distinct enough characteristics allowing even simple ML models to perform well on the task. Error analysis is performed for the top performing algorithms showing that in a number of cases the errors are due to insufficient dataset cleaning.

Recommender systems have become indispensable tools in the hotel hospitality industry, enabling personalized and tailored experiences for guests. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, and persuasive technologies, have opened new avenues for enhancing the effectiveness of those systems. This paper explores the potential of integrating ChatGPT and persuasive technologies for automating and improving hotel hospitality recommender systems. First, we delve into the capabilities of ChatGPT, which can understand and generate human-like text, enabling more accurate and context-aware recommendations. We discuss the integration of ChatGPT into recommender systems, highlighting the ability to analyze user preferences, extract valuable insights from online reviews, and generate personalized recommendations based on guest profiles. Second, we investigate the role of persuasive technology in influencing user behavior and enhancing the persuasive impact of hotel recommendations. By incorporating persuasive techniques, such as social proof, scarcity and personalization, recommender systems can effectively influence user decision-making and encourage desired actions, such as booking a specific hotel or upgrading their room. To investigate the efficacy of ChatGPT and persuasive technologies, we present a pilot experi-ment with a case study involving a hotel recommender system. We aim to study the impact of integrating ChatGPT and persua-sive techniques on user engagement, satisfaction, and conversion rates. The preliminary results demonstrate the potential of these technologies in enhancing the overall guest experience and business performance. Overall, this paper contributes to the field of hotel hospitality by exploring the synergistic relationship between LLMs and persuasive technology in recommender systems, ultimately influencing guest satisfaction and hotel revenue.

Marine litter poses significant threats to marine and coastal environments, with its impacts ever-growing. Remote sensing provides an advantageous supplement to traditional mitigation techniques, such as local cleaning operations and trawl net surveys, due to its capabilities for extensive coverage and frequent observation. In this study, we used Radiative Transfer Model (RTM) simulated data and data from the Multispectral Instrument (MSI) of the Sentinel-2 mission in combination with machine learning algorithms. Our aim was to study the spectral behavior of marine plastic pollution and evaluate the applicability of RTMs within this research area. The results from the exploratory analysis and unsupervised classification using the KMeans algorithm indicate that the spectral behavior of pollutants is influenced by factors such as the type of polymer and pixel coverage percentage. The findings also reveal spectral characteristics and trends of association and differentiation among elements. The applied methodology is strongly dependent on the data, and if reapplied in new, more diverse, and detailed datasets, it can potentially generate even better results. These insights can guide future research in remote sensing applications for detecting marine plastic pollution.

High-resolution images taken by satellites in orbit around Earth can detect swathes of plastic pollution in the world's oceans, a study has found for the first time. The European Space Agency's Sentinel-2 satellites are able to spot floating plastics and tell them apart from other materials such as seaweed and driftwood. Astronomers say the imaging technique can automatically spot the difference with 86 per cent accuracy. In one location where the method was tested, Canada's Gulf Islands, the method was 100 per cent accurate. Conservationists are calling for similar technology to be used in the fight to clean up the world of humanity's litter.