Online learners participate in various educational activities including reading, writing, watching video tutorials, online exams, and online meetings. During the participation in these educational activities, they show various engagement levels, such as boredom, frustration, delight, neutral, confusion, and learning gain. To provide personalized pedagogical support through interventions to online learners, it is important for online educators to detect their online learners’ engagement status precisely and efficiently. This paper presents a review of the state of the art in engagement detection in the context of online learning. We classify the existing methods into three main categories—automatic, semi-automatic and manual—considering the methods’ dependencies on learners’ participation. Methods in each category are then divided into subcategories based on the data types (e.g., audio, video, texts for learner log data etc.) they process for the engagement detection. In particular, the computer vision based methods in the automatic category that use facial expressions are examined in more details because they are found to be promising in the online learning environment. These methods are nonintrusive in nature, and the hardware and the software that these methods use to capture and analyze video data are cost-effective and easily achievable. Different techniques in the field of computer vision and machine learning are applied in these methods for the engagement detection. We then identify their challenges of engagement detection and explore available datasets and performance metrics for engagement detection, and provide recommendations for the future to advance the technology of engagement detection for online education.

With the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), machine-learning (ML), and chatbot technologies, the field of education has been transformed drastically. The latest advancements in AI chatbots (such as ChatGPT) have proven to offer several benefits for students and educators. However, these benefits also come with inherent challenges, that can impede students’ learning and create hurdles for educators. The study aims to explore the benefits and challenges of AI chatbots in educational settings, with the goal of identifying how they can address existing barriers to learning. The paper begins by outlining the historical evolution of chatbots along with key elements that encompass the architecture of an AI chatbot. The paper then delves into the challenges and limitations associated with the integration of AI chatbots into education. The research findings from this narrative review reveal several benefits of using AI chatbots in education. AI chatbots like ChatGPT can function as virtual tutoring assistants, fostering an adaptive learning environment by aiding students with various learning activities, such as learning programming languages and foreign languages, understanding complex concepts, assisting with research activities, and providing real-time feedback. Educators can leverage such chatbots to create course content, generate assessments, evaluate student performance, and utilize them for data analysis and research. However, this technology presents significant challenges concerning data security and privacy. Additionally, ethical concerns regarding academic integrity and reliance on technology are some of the key challenges. Ultimately, AI chatbots offer endless opportunities by fostering a dynamic and interactive learning environment. However, to help students and teachers maximize the potential of this robust technology, it is essential to understand the risks, benefits, and ethical use of AI chatbots in education.

The current advancement towards retinal disease detection mainly focused on distinct feature extraction using either a convolutional neural network (CNN) or a transformer-based end-to-end deep learning (DL) model. The individual end-to-end DL models are capable of only processing texture or shape-based information for performing detection tasks. However, extraction of only texture- or shape-based features does not provide the model robustness needed to classify different types of retinal diseases. Therefore, concerning these two features, this paper developed a fusion model called ‘Conv-ViT’ to detect retinal diseases from foveal cut optical coherence tomography (OCT) images. The transfer learning-based CNN models, such as Inception-V3 and ResNet-50, are utilized to process texture information by calculating the correlation of the nearby pixel. Additionally, the vision transformer model is fused to process shape-based features by determining the correlation between long-distance pixels. The hybridization of these three models results in shape-based texture feature learning during the classification of retinal diseases into its four classes, including choroidal neovascularization (CNV), diabetic macular edema (DME), DRUSEN, and NORMAL. The weighted average classification accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score of the model are found to be approximately 94%. The results indicate that the fusion of both texture and shape features assisted the proposed Conv-ViT model to outperform the state-of-the-art retinal disease classification models.

Current deep learning-assisted brain tumor classification models sustain inductive bias and parameter dependency problems for extracting texture-based image information. Thereby concerning these problems, the recent development of the vision transformer model has substituted the DL model for classification tasks. However, the high performance of the vision transformer model depends on a large-scale dataset as well as self-attention calculations between the number of image patches which result in a quadratic computational complexity. To address these problems, the vision transformer must be data-efficient to be well-trained with a limited amount of data, and the computational complexity must be linear with the number of image patches. Consequently, this paper presents a novel linear-complexity data-efficient image transformer called LCDEiT for training with small-size datasets by using a teacher-student strategy and linear computational complexity concerning the number of patches using an external attention mechanism. The teacher model comprised a custom gated-pooled convolutional neural network to provide knowledge to the transformer-based student model for the classification of MRI brain tumors. The average classification accuracy and F1-score for two benchmark datasets including Figshare and BraTS-21 are found 98.11% and 97.86% and 93.69% and 93.68% respectively. The results indicate that the proposed model could have a great impact on medical imaging-based diagnosis where data availability and faster computations are the main concern.

Neuromarketing is an emerging research field that aims to understand consumers’ decision-making processes when choosing which product to buy. This information is highly sought after by businesses looking to improve their marketing strategies by understanding what leaves a positive or negative impression on consumers. It has the potential to revolutionize the marketing industry by enabling companies to offer engaging experiences, create more effective advertisements, avoid the wrong marketing strategies, and ultimately save millions of dollars for businesses. Therefore, good documentation is necessary to capture the current research situation in this vital sector. In this article, we present a systematic review of EEG-based Neuromarketing. We aim to shed light on the research trends, technical scopes, and potential opportunities in this field. We reviewed recent publications from valid databases and divided the popular research topics in Neuromarketing into five clusters to present the current research trend in this field. We also discuss the brain regions that are activated when making purchase decisions and their relevance to Neuromarketing applications. The article provides appropriate illustrations of marketing stimuli that can elicit authentic impressions from consumers' minds, the techniques used to process and analyze recorded brain data, and the current strategies employed to interpret the data. Finally, we offer recommendations to upcoming researchers to help them investigate the possibilities in this area more efficiently in the future.