With the rise of online and virtual learning, monitoring and enhancing student engagement have become an important aspect of effective education. Traditional methods of assessing a student's involvement might not be applicable directly to virtual environments. In this study, we focused on this problem and addressed the need to develop an automated system to detect student engagement levels during online learning. We proposed a novel training method which can discourage a model from leveraging sensitive features like gender for its predictions. The proposed method offers benefits not only in the enforcement of ethical standards, but also to enhance interpretability of the model predictions. We applied an attribute-orthogonal regularization technique to a split-model classifier, which uses multiple transfer learning strategies to achieve effective results in reducing disparity in the distribution of prediction for sensitivity groups from a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.897 for the unmitigated model, to 0.999 for the mitigated model. The source code for this project is available on https://github.com/ashiskb/elearning-engagement-study .

This study investigates the integration of individual human traits into an empathetically adaptive educational robot tutor system designed to improve student engagement and learning outcomes with corresponding Engagement Vector measurement. While prior research in the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) has examined the integration of the traits, such as emotional intelligence, memory-driven personalization, and non-verbal communication, by themselves, they have thus-far neglected to consider their synchronized integration into a cohesive, operational education framework. To address this gap, we customize a Multi-Modal Large Language Model (LLaMa 3.2 from Meta) deployed with modules for human-like traits (emotion, memory and gestures) into an AI-Agent framework. This constitutes to the robot's intelligent core mimicing the human emotional system, memory architecture and gesture control to allow the robot to behave more empathetically while recognizing and responding appropriately to the student's emotional state. It can also recall the student's past learning record and adapt its style of interaction accordingly. This allows the robot tutor to react to the student in a more sympathetic manner by delivering personalized verbal feedback synchronized with relevant gestures. Our study investigates the extent of this effect through the introduction of Engagement Vector Model which can be a surveyor's pole for judging the quality of HRI experience. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that such an empathetic responsive approach significantly improves student engagement and learning outcomes compared with a baseline humanoid robot without these human-like traits. This indicates that robot tutors with empathetic capabilities can create a more supportive, interactive learning experience that ultimately leads to better outcomes for the student.

Time perception research has advanced significantly over the years. However, some areas remain largely unexplored. This study addresses two such under-explored areas in timing research: (1) A quantitative analysis of time perception at an individual level, and (2) Time perception in an ecological setting. In this context, we trained a machine learning model to predict the direction of change in an individual's time production. The model's training data was collected using an ecologically valid setup. We moved closer to an ecological setting by conducting an online experiment with 995 participants performing a time production task that used naturalistic videos (no audio) as stimuli. The model achieved an accuracy of 61%. This was 10 percentage points higher than the baseline models derived from cognitive theories of timing. The model performed equally well on new data from a second experiment, providing evidence of its generalization capabilities. The model's output analysis revealed that it also contained information about the magnitude of change in time production. The predictions were further analysed at both population and individual level. It was found that a participant's previous timing performance played a significant role in determining the direction of change in time production. By integrating attentional-gate theories from timing research with feature importance techniques from machine learning, we explained model predictions using cognitive theories of timing. The model and findings from this study have potential applications in systems involving human-computer interactions where understanding and predicting changes in user's time perception can enable better user experience and task performance.

In e-commerce, high consideration search missions typically require careful and elaborate decision making, and involve a substantial research investment from customers. We consider the task of identifying High Consideration (HC) queries. Identifying such queries enables e-commerce sites to better serve user needs using targeted experiences such as curated QA widgets that help users reach purchase decisions. We explore the task by proposing an Engagement-based Query Ranking (EQR) approach, focusing on query ranking to indicate potential engagement levels with query-related shopping knowledge content during product search. Unlike previous studies on predicting trends, EQR prioritizes query-level features related to customer behavior, finance, and catalog information rather than popularity signals. We introduce an accurate and scalable method for EQR and present experimental results demonstrating its effectiveness. Offline experiments show strong ranking performance. Human evaluation shows a precision of 96% for HC queries identified by our model. The model was commercially deployed, and shown to outperform human-selected queries in terms of downstream customer impact, as measured through engagement.

For public health programs with limited resources, the ability to Public health programs play an essential role in improving the predict how behaviors change over time and in response to interventions health outcomes of individuals and communities, often through education is crucial for deciding when and to whom interventions and subsequent behavioral change. Some health programs should be allocated. Using data from a real-world maternal interact with their intended beneficiaries in a broad and infrequent health program, we demonstrate how a cognitive model based on manner. For example, a campaign about the health risks of smoking Instance-Based Learning (IBL) Theory can augment existing purely may address a general population of smokers through scattered computational approaches. Our findings show that, compared to advertisements in the media [18]. Others rely on repeated direct interactions general time-series forecasters (e.g., LSTMs), IBL models, which with their intended beneficiaries. For example, maternal reflect human decision-making processes, better predict how individuals' health programs that send automated messages about exercise and behaviors change over time (transition-consistency) and nutrition to enrolled expectant mothers [13]. In this case, it is crucial in response to receiving an intervention (intervention-sensitivity).

The analysis of students' emotions and behaviors is crucial for enhancing learning outcomes and personalizing educational experiences. Traditional methods often rely on intrusive visual and physiological data collection, posing privacy concerns and scalability issues. This paper proposes a novel method leveraging large language models (LLMs) and prompt engineering to analyze textual data from students. Our approach utilizes tailored prompts to guide LLMs in detecting emotional and engagement states, providing a non-intrusive and scalable solution. We conducted experiments using Qwen, ChatGPT, Claude2, and GPT-4, comparing our method against baseline models and chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. Results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the baselines in both accuracy and contextual understanding. This study highlights the potential of LLMs combined with prompt engineering to offer practical and effective tools for educational emotion and behavior analysis.

Considering learner engagement has a mutual benefit for both learners and instructors. Instructors can help learners increase their attention, involvement, motivation, and interest. On the other hand, instructors can improve their instructional performance by evaluating the cumulative results of all learners and upgrading their training programs. This paper proposes a general, lightweight model for selecting and processing features to detect learners' engagement levels while preserving the sequential temporal relationship over time. During training and testing, we analyzed the videos from the publicly available DAiSEE dataset to capture the dynamic essence of learner engagement. We have also proposed an adaptation policy to find new labels that utilize the affective states of this dataset related to education, thereby improving the models' judgment. The suggested model achieves an accuracy of 68.57\% in a specific implementation and outperforms the studied state-of-the-art models detecting learners' engagement levels.

Online learning is a rapidly growing industry due to its convenience. However, a major challenge in online learning is whether students are as engaged as they are in face-to-face classes. An engagement recognition system can significantly improve the learning experience in online classes. Current challenges in engagement detection involve poor label quality in the dataset, intra-class variation, and extreme data imbalance. To address these problems, we present the CMOSE dataset, which contains a large number of data in different engagement levels and high-quality labels generated according to the psychological advice. We demonstrate the advantage of transferability by analyzing the model performance on other engagement datasets. We also developed a training mechanism, MocoRank, to handle the intra-class variation, the ordinal relationship between different classes, and the data imbalance problem. MocoRank outperforms prior engagement detection losses, achieving a 1.32% enhancement in overall accuracy and 5.05% improvement in average accuracy. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-modality by conducting ablation studies on features such as pre-trained video features, high-level facial features, and audio features.

The monotonous nature of repetitive cognitive training may cause losing interest in it and dropping out by older adults. This study introduces an adaptive technique that enables a Socially Assistive Robot (SAR) to select the most appropriate actions to maintain the engagement level of older adults while they play the serious game in cognitive training. The goal is to develop an adaptation strategy for changing the robot's behaviour that uses reinforcement learning to encourage the user to remain engaged. A reinforcement learning algorithm was implemented to determine the most effective adaptation strategy for the robot's actions, encompassing verbal and nonverbal interactions. The simulation results demonstrate that the learning algorithm achieved convergence and offers promising evidence to validate the strategy's effectiveness.

Automatic measurement of student engagement provides helpful information for instructors to meet learning program objectives and individualize program delivery. Students' behavioral and emotional states need to be analyzed at fine-grained time scales in order to measure their level of engagement. Many existing approaches have developed sequential and spatiotemporal models, such as recurrent neural networks, temporal convolutional networks, and three-dimensional convolutional neural networks, for measuring student engagement from videos. These models are trained to incorporate the order of behavioral and emotional states of students into video analysis and output their level of engagement. In this paper, backed by educational psychology, we question the necessity of modeling the order of behavioral and emotional states of students in measuring their engagement. We develop bag-of-words-based models in which only the occurrence of behavioral and emotional states of students is modeled and analyzed and not the order in which they occur. Behavioral and affective features are extracted from videos and analyzed by the proposed models to determine the level of engagement in an ordinal-output classification setting. Compared to the existing sequential and spatiotemporal approaches for engagement measurement, the proposed non-sequential approach improves the state-of-the-art results. According to experimental results, our method significantly improved engagement level classification accuracy on the IIITB Online SE dataset by 26% compared to sequential models and achieved engagement level classification accuracy as high as 66.58% on the DAiSEE student engagement dataset.