Gamification is the use of game elements in domains other than games. Gamification use is often suggested for difficult activities because it enhances users’ engagement and motivation level. Due to such benefits, the use of gamification is also proposed in education environments to improve students’ performance, engagement, and satisfaction. Computer science in higher education is a tough area of study and thus needs to utilize various already explored benefits of gamification. This research develops an empirical study to evaluate the effectiveness of gamification in teaching computer science in higher education. Along with the learning outcomes, the effect of group size on students’ satisfaction level is also measured. Furthermore, the impact of gamification over time is analyzed throughout a semester to observe its effectiveness as a long-term learning technique. The analysis, covering both learning outcome and students’ satisfaction, suggests that gamification is an effective tool to teach tough courses at higher education level; however, group size should be taken into account for optimal classroom size and better learning experience.

The advancement in automation and medical care technologies in recent decade has changed the traditional medical treatment of patients. Although, these technologies have increased the treatment’s precision but the growing number and the complexity of IoT healthcare devices are impacting accuracy along with several other challenges. Moreover, the use of different programming languages, operating platforms and data management methodologies are creating restrictions in safe exchange, integration and reuse of information across different applications. However, with the advent of the semantic web, the semantic technologies are growing in healthcare systems due to the capability of machine interpretation and processing by overcoming the restriction of languages and data heterogeneity. The most common shortcoming in the existing systems are the context-awareness and quality of services and the absence of rich patient ontology; leading towards low accuracy of results. To this aim, this paper provides a smart health framework, consisting on the collection and processing of IoT data (related to patient conditions and context). The framework is supported by the patient ontology along with SWRL rules for better decision making that consider different features (context-awareness and quality of services) differently that results in the improved accuracy. In the evaluation process the proposed work has achieved an accuracy of 89.81%. This work will help the practitioners to treat the patients in a better way.

The management and estimation of agile projects are challenging tasks for software companies due to their high failure rates. This paper emphasizes how to improve management and estimation challenges in the context of scrum, which is an agile process widely used for the development of small to medium size software projects. The scrum emphasis on code results in spending inadequate time on the estimation process. Mostly, the scrum master, along with the scrum team, estimates the upcoming software projects based on experience or historical data. Many issues can arise in a case where expert judgment is not available or historical data are not properly organized. In this paper, an Intelligent Recommender and Decision Support System (IRDSS) is proposed that can help the scrum master to better estimate an upcoming software project in terms of cost, time, and recommendations of human resources. Formal specification of IRDSS is also performed using the formalism known as Z language. Furthermore, an experiment on fifteen web projects was performed to validate the proposed approach and compared it with Delphi and Planning Poker estimation methods. The overall results indicate that the proposed system can produce better estimation than Planning Poker and Delphi methods by applying MMRE and PRED evaluation. This research opens new directions for the scrum community for the development of software projects within the allocated time and cost.

Software projects are failing for several decades due to multiple reasons. In this regard a lot of research has been done to investigate the reasons behind the failure. However, most of this research was executed in developed countries while under-developed and developing countries got little attention. The main objective of this study is to assess the impact of critical factors on the success of software projects for under-developed countries (like Pakistan), because enterprise environmental factors along with staff working habits, their experience and expertise level also have an impact on the success of a project. To accomplish this, a survey was conducted through the Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB), and logistic regression enquiry was executed to measure the relationship between various factors affecting software. The results reflect that improper planning along with wrong cost and time estimation are positively and significantly associated with software failure. Based on the finding of the survey, a model is proposed for intelligent decision support system (IDSs). The proposed model keeps track of the previous knowledge and behavior in a well-structured manner that might be helpful for project managers in the estimation and decision-making process of upcoming software projects. This research adds new knowledge from an under-developed country which will open new dimensions for the IT industry and project manager working under similar circumstances.

In healthcare, the analysis of patients’ activities is one of the important factors that offer adequate information to provide better services for managing their illnesses well. Most of the human activity recognition (HAR) systems are completely reliant on recognition module/stage. The inspiration behind the recognition stage is the lack of enhancement in the learning method. In this study, we have proposed the usage of the hidden conditional random fields (HCRFs) for the human activity recognition problem. Moreover, we contend that the existing HCRF model is inadequate by independence assumptions, which may reduce classification accuracy. Therefore, we utilized a new algorithm to relax the assumption, allowing our model to use full-covariance distribution. Also, in this work, we proved that computation wise our method has very much lower complexity against the existing methods. For the experiments, we used four publicly available standard datasets to show the performance. We utilized a 10-fold cross-validation scheme to train, assess, and compare the proposed model with the conditional learning method, hidden Markov model (HMM), and existing HCRF model which can only use diagonal-covariance Gaussian distributions. From the experiments, it is obvious that the proposed model showed a substantial improvement with p value ≤0.2 regarding the classification accuracy.