In the past decade, we have experienced a massive boom in the usage of digital solutions in higher education. Due to this boom, large amounts of data have enabled advanced data analysis methods to support learners and examine learning processes. One of the dominant research directions in learning analytics is predictive modeling of learners' success using various machine learning methods. To build learners' and teachers' trust in such methods and systems, exploring the methods and methodologies that enable relevant stakeholders to deeply understand the underlying machine-learning models is necessary. In this context, counterfactual explanations from explainable machine learning tools are promising. Several counterfactual generation methods hold much promise, but the features must be actionable and causal to be effective. Thus, obtaining which counterfactual generation method suits the student success prediction models in terms of desiderata, stability, and robustness is essential. Although a few studies have been published in recent years on the use of counterfactual explanations in educational sciences, they have yet to discuss which counterfactual generation method is more suitable for this problem. This paper analyzed the effectiveness of commonly used counterfactual generation methods, such as WhatIf Counterfactual Explanations, Multi-Objective Counterfactual Explanations, and Nearest Instance Counterfactual Explanations after balancing. This contribution presents a case study using the Open University Learning Analytics dataset to demonstrate the practical usefulness of counterfactual explanations. The results illustrate the method's effectiveness and describe concrete steps that could be taken to alter the model's prediction.

This work aims to tackle the labor-intensive and resource-consuming task of indoor positioning by proposing an efficient approach. The proposed approach involves the introduction of a semi-supervised learning (SSL) with a biased teacher (SSLB) algorithm, which effectively utilizes both labeled and unlabeled channel data. To reduce measurement expenses, unlabeled data is generated using an updated channel simulator (UCHS), and then weighted by adaptive confidence values to simplify the tuning of hyperparameters. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed strategy achieves superior performance while minimizing measurement overhead and training expense compared to existing benchmarks, offering a valuable and practical solution for indoor positioning.

Large language models (LLMs) bear great potential for automating tedious development tasks such as creating and maintaining code documentation. However, it is unclear to what extent developers can effectively prompt LLMs to create concise and useful documentation. We report on a controlled experiment with 20 professionals and 30 computer science students tasked with code documentation generation for two Python functions. The experimental group freely entered ad-hoc prompts in a ChatGPT-like extension of Visual Studio Code, while the control group executed a predefined few-shot prompt. Our results reveal that professionals and students were unaware of or unable to apply prompt engineering techniques. Especially students perceived the documentation produced from ad-hoc prompts as significantly less readable, less concise, and less helpful than documentation from prepared prompts. Some professionals produced higher quality documentation by just including the keyword Docstring in their ad-hoc prompts. While students desired more support in formulating prompts, professionals appreciated the flexibility of ad-hoc prompting. Participants in both groups rarely assessed the output as perfect. Instead, they understood the tools as support to iteratively refine the documentation. Further research is needed to understand which prompting skills and preferences developers have and which support they need for certain tasks.

Long-tailed data is a special type of multi-class imbalanced data with a very large amount of minority/tail classes that have a very significant combined influence. Long-tailed learning aims to build high-performance models on datasets with long-tailed distributions, which can identify all the classes with high accuracy, in particular the minority/tail classes. It is a cutting-edge research direction that has attracted a remarkable amount of research effort in the past few years. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of latest advances in long-tailed visual learning. We first propose a new taxonomy for long-tailed learning, which consists of eight different dimensions, including data balancing, neural architecture, feature enrichment, logits adjustment, loss function, bells and whistles, network optimization, and post hoc processing techniques. Based on our proposed taxonomy, we present a systematic review of long-tailed learning methods, discussing their commonalities and alignable differences. We also analyze the differences between imbalance learning and long-tailed learning approaches. Finally, we discuss prospects and future directions in this field.

In recent years, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has undergone a profound transformation in addressing intricate tasks involving diverse modalities such as textual, auditory, visual, and pictorial generation. Within this spectrum, text-to-image (TTI) models have emerged as a formidable approach to generating varied and aesthetically appealing compositions, spanning applications from artistic creation to realistic facial synthesis, and demonstrating significant advancements in computer vision, image processing, and multimodal tasks. The advent of Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) signifies a paradigm shift in the domain of AI capabilities. This article delves into the feasibility of employing the Stable Diffusion LDM to illustrate literary works. For this exploration, seven classic Brazilian books have been selected as case studies. The objective is to ascertain the practicality of this endeavor and to evaluate the potential of Stable Diffusion in producing illustrations that augment and enrich the reader's experience. We will outline the beneficial aspects, such as the capacity to generate distinctive and contextually pertinent images, as well as the drawbacks, including any shortcomings in faithfully capturing the essence of intricate literary depictions. Through this study, we aim to provide a comprehensive assessment of the viability and efficacy of utilizing AI-generated illustrations in literary contexts, elucidating both the prospects and challenges encountered in this pioneering application of technology.

The rampant fraudulent activities on Ethereum hinder the healthy development of the blockchain ecosystem, necessitating the reinforcement of regulations. However, multiple imbalances involving account interaction frequencies and interaction types in the Ethereum transaction environment pose significant challenges to data mining-based fraud detection research. To address this, we first propose the concept of meta-interactions to refine interaction behaviors in Ethereum, and based on this, we present a dual self-supervision enhanced Ethereum fraud detection framework, named Meta-IFD. This framework initially introduces a generative self-supervision mechanism to augment the interaction features of accounts, followed by a contrastive self-supervision mechanism to differentiate various behavior patterns, and ultimately characterizes the behavioral representations of accounts and mines potential fraud risks through multi-view interaction feature learning. Extensive experiments on real Ethereum datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our framework in detecting common Ethereum fraud behaviors such as Ponzi schemes and phishing scams. Additionally, the generative module can effectively alleviate the interaction distribution imbalance in Ethereum data, while the contrastive module significantly enhances the framework's ability to distinguish different behavior patterns. The source code will be released on GitHub soon.

Prime Day wasn't your only chance to score some awesome deals just in time for the back to school season. If you're on the hunt for a way to make your computer feel new before the new semester, then see if it's compatible with Windows 11 Pro. Normally, it'd cost 199 to upgrade to the latest Windows Operating System, but you can do it for only 19.97. Windows 11 Pro is a full productivity, security, and even aesthetic overhaul. It features a sleek interface with integrated tools like Microsoft Teams and Windows Copilot, an AI assistant that can answer questions or generate text and images.

In order to assess damage and properly allocate relief efforts, mapping the extent of flood events is a necessary and important aspect of disaster management. In recent years, deep learning methods have evolved as an effective tool to quickly label high-resolution imagery and provide necessary flood extent mappings. These methods, though, require large amounts of annotated training data to create models that are accurate and robust to new flooded imagery. In this work, we provide FloodTrace, an application that enables effective crowdsourcing for flooded region annotation for machine learning training data, removing the requirement for annotation to be done solely by researchers. We accomplish this through two orthogonal methods within our application, informed by requirements from domain experts. First, we utilize elevation-guided annotation tools and 3D rendering to inform user annotation decisions with digital elevation model data, improving annotation accuracy. For this purpose, we provide a unique annotation method that uses topological data analysis to outperform the state-of-the-art elevation-guided annotation tool in efficiency. Second, we provide a framework for researchers to review aggregated crowdsourced annotations and correct inaccuracies using methods inspired by uncertainty visualization. We conducted a user study to confirm the application effectiveness in which 266 graduate students annotated high-resolution aerial imagery from Hurricane Matthew in North Carolina. Experimental results show the accuracy and efficiency benefits of our application apply even for untrained users. In addition, using our aggregation and correction framework, flood detection models trained on crowdsourced annotations were able to achieve performance equal to models trained on expert-labeled annotations, while requiring a fraction of the time on the part of the researcher.

This issue usually stems from the assumption that crowdworkers are a homogeneous group [56], neglecting their diverse cultural backgrounds [90]. Moreover, a notable trend in design has emerged advocating for minimizing cultural impact in work interfaces, aiming for global uniformity in their design rather than customizing these systems to accommodate cultural nuances [133, 134, 193]. Consequently, many work interfaces have strived for uniform standards, and have ignored worker diversity [76, 84, 88]. However, interfaces often reflect the cultural biases of their designers [18], inadvertently embedding their cultural norms [146, 150, 177]. This can lead to designs that unintentionally require "outside workers" to adapt or modify their behaviors [126, 177], potentially hindering their success and effectiveness in their jobs [24, 60, 64, 85]. A solution can be to create culturally aware tools for crowdworkers, yet research into integrating culture theory into such designs remains limited [108, 118, 163]. Further research is crucial to assess these systems' effectiveness and their potential benefits for crowdworkers from varied cultural backgrounds. To address this knowledge gap, we focus on designing a tool that aims to enhance crowdworkers' experiences by incorporating cultural considerations.

Proteins play a vital role in biological processes and are indispensable for living organisms. Accurate representation of proteins is crucial, especially in drug development. Recently, there has been a notable increase in interest in utilizing machine learning and deep learning techniques for unsupervised learning of protein representations. However, these approaches often focus solely on the amino acid sequence of proteins and lack factual knowledge about proteins and their interactions, thus limiting their performance. In this study, we present GOProteinGNN, a novel architecture that enhances protein language models by integrating protein knowledge graph information during the creation of amino acid level representations. Our approach allows for the integration of information at both the individual amino acid level and the entire protein level, enabling a comprehensive and effective learning process through graph-based learning. By doing so, we can capture complex relationships and dependencies between proteins and their functional annotations, resulting in more robust and contextually enriched protein representations. Unlike previous fusion methods, GOProteinGNN uniquely learns the entire protein knowledge graph during training, which allows it to capture broader relational nuances and dependencies beyond mere triplets as done in previous work. We perform a comprehensive evaluation on several downstream tasks demonstrating that GOProteinGNN consistently outperforms previous methods, showcasing its effectiveness and establishing it as a state-of-the-art solution for protein representation learning.