The COVID-19 pandemic led universities to transform the traditional teaching methodologies into distance education. Therefore, social media has become progressively prominent as teaching and learning resources in universities. Several studies have been conducted for the development of social media as a learning tool. However, there is limited empirical evidence supporting this claim. The present study bridges the gap in the literature concerning the value of the use of social media in higher education. This research seeks to examine the impact of the use of social media in (a) enhancing teaching and learning in universities, (b) motivating and supporting students and (c) developing community connection. A qualitative methodology was adopted. Specifically, in-depth interviews were conducted to assess the effectiveness of social media on students learning in higher education. The results showed that the use of social media by higher educational institutions positively impacts the educational process by (a) promoting teaching and learning, (b) motivating students to be active participants, and (c) establishing connections in the university community. Some obstacles in the teaching and learning process were also identified. Future areas of research are proposed.

In the first days of social networking, the typical view of a community was a set of user profiles of the same interests and likes, and this community kept enlarging by searching, proposing, and adding new members with the same characteristics that were likely to interfere with the existing members. Today, things have changed dramatically. Social networking platforms are not restricted to forming similar user profiles: The vast amounts of data produced every day have given opportunities to predict and suggest relationships, behaviors, and everyday activities like shopping, food, traveling destinations, etc. Every day, vast data amounts are generated by the famous social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and so on. For example, Facebook alone generates 4 petabytes of data per day. The analysis of such data is of high importance to many aspects like recommendation systems, businesses, health organizations, etc. The community detection problem received considerable attention a long time ago. Communities are represented as clusters of an entire network. Most of the community detection techniques are based on graph structures. In this paper, we present the recent advances of deep learning techniques for community detection. We describe the most recent strategies presented in this field, and we provide some general discussion and some future trends.

The purpose of the current research seeks to explore the influence of sustainable Human Resource Management (HRM) practices on customer satisfaction, service quality, and institutional performance in inner-city hotel businesses. The information was gathered by studying Cypriot inner-city hotels. A quantitative method was used to gather data from HRM managers, staff, and patrons at every inner-city hotel under study. The questionnaires were specifically employed by the researchers. Based on the findings of this study, human resource management techniques have a substantial effect on customer satisfaction. The most important relationship was discovered between customer satisfaction and institutional performance, which is an important result. This finding has tremendous importance since it is the first time that it has been demonstrated in a study pertaining to the inner-city hotel business. Customer satisfaction is influenced by both HRM and service quality practices. Ultimately, this research supports the close association between HRM practices and hotel performance. Both human resource management methods and service quality practices have shown their impact on client happiness. Lastly, the research provides evidence for the close relationship between hotel performance and HRM practices.

The Petri net (PN) formalism is a suitable tool for modeling parallel systems due to its basic characteristics, such as synchronization. The extension of PN, the Colored Petri Nets (CPN) allows the incorporation of more details of the real system into the model (for example, contention for shared resources). The CPNs have been widely used in a variety of fields to produce suitable models. One of their biggest strengths is that their overall philosophy is quite similar to the philosophy of the object-oriented paradigm. In this regard, the CPN models can be used to implement simulators in a rather straightforward way. In this paper, the CPN framework is employed to implement a new resource allocation simulator, which is used to verify the performance of our previous work, where we proposed a fair resource allocation scheme with flow control and maximum utilization of the system’s resources.

We are currently living in the big data era, in which it has become more necessary than ever to develop “smart” schedulers. It is common knowledge that the default Storm scheduler, as well as a large number of static schemes, has presented certain deficiencies. One of the most important of these deficiencies is the weakness in handling cases in which system changes occur. In such a scenario, some type of re-scheduling is necessary to keep the system working in the most efficient way. In this paper, we present a pipeline-based dynamic modular arithmetic-based scheduler (PMOD scheduler), which can be used to re-schedule the streams distributed among a set of nodes and their tasks, when the system parameters (number of tasks, executors or nodes) change. The PMOD scheduler organizes all the required operations in a pipeline scheme, thus reducing the overall processing time.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Excellence Model on education and its contribution to ensuring high-quality education equality. Design/Methodology/Approach: A systematic literature review was conducted based on data from three academic publishers (Taylor & Francis, Emerald, and Elsevier Science Direct). Of the 69 journal articles, 61 were published between 2003 and 2023 and documented the results of the EFQM quality tool, and 8 articles were removed. Findings: The study highlights the results of applying the EFQM Excellence Model in the educational sector. Based on the bibliographic review, the feasibility of using the model in primary, secondary, and tertiary education is identified. We examine the findings related to using the model to ensure equality in high-quality education and the challenges faced by educational systems, with the ultimate goal of meeting student expectations. Research limitations/Implications: An important limitation is that the data were only drawn from three major publishers and the authors did not have access to all the relevant databases, since the search for articles was carried out in English only. The search for articles was limited by the keywords, as the EFQM Excellence Model was originally designed for the private sector. Practical implications: The results and limitations recorded in the study and the presentation of the 88 articles motivate academic researchers to conduct further study and fill the gap left by the limited number of publications on the application of the EFQM Excellence Model in the educational sector. Originality/Value: The EFQM Excellence Model has not been widely implemented in the high-quality educational sector and the existing literature reviews are limited. More research in the field of education is needed to determine the contribution of the excellence model to the evaluation of high-quality education.