The current exponential advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies pave a vast intelligent computing platform by integrating smart objects with sensing, processing and communication capabilities. The core element of IoT is the complex big data generated from different interconnected sources at real-time, presenting divergent processing and analysis challenges. Best practices in software engineering have been continuously addressed in IoT technologies to handle such big data efficiently at different domains. Despite of the massive studies dedicated for IoT, no explicit processing architecture is proposed based on real investigation of software engineering concepts and big data analytics characteristics in IoT. This paper provides a systematic literature review for the current state-of-the-art of IoT systems in different domains. The study investigates the current techniques and technologies that serve IoT systems from the big data analytics and software engineering perspectives, revealing a matrix for the specific IoT data features and their encountered challenges and gaps for each domain. The review deduces a proposed domain-independent software architecture for big IoT data analytics, maintaining various IoT data processing challenges, including data scalability, timeliness, heterogeneity, inconsistency, confidentiality and correlations. Finally, the main research gaps are emphasized for future considerations.

During the Coronavirus pandemic, e-learning systems have proven to be an essential pillar for education. This raises to surface what many studies have addressed earlier; creating a platform that completes the traditional classroom work and maximizes the effectiveness of learning outcomes. Striving to achieve such platform, studies have considered gamifying and personalizing the educational resources for the adaptation of educational systems as per the intended learners through intensive learning analytics. But was the learner really a part of the adaptation process taking place? Learning analytics are usually designed to the course’s adaptation and solely for the teachers. Thus, learning analytics in gamified adaptive educational systems involving the course, teachers and learners together are still under investigation. In this study, the Personalized Adaptive Gamified E-learning (PAGE) model is introduced to extend MOOCs by providing new satisfactory levels of learning analytics and visualization in the rich e-learning process that supports the learner’s intervention in the resultant learning analytics. The proposed Learning analytics have been developed to make the necessary adaptation to the course and learner’s learning flow, as well as visualizing the process and adaptation decisions to the learners. Results show a positive potential towards learning adaptation and visualization, and a necessity to provide an additional focus for the gamification concept.

Academic advising is inhibited at most of the high schools to help students identify appropriate academic pathways. The choice of a career domain is significantly influenced by the complexity of life and the volatility of the labor market. Thus, high school students feel confused during the shift period from high school to university, especially with the enormous amounts of data available on the Web. In this paper, an extensive comparative study is conducted to investigate five approaches of recommender systems for university study field and career domain guidance. A novel ontology is constructed to include all the needed information for this purpose. The developed approaches considered user-based and item-based collaborative filtering, demographic-based recommendation, knowledge base supported by case-based reasoning, ontology, as well as different hybridizations of them. A case study on Lebanese high school students is analyzed to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the implemented approaches. The experimental results indicate that the knowledge-based hybrid recommender system, combined with the user-based collaborative filtering and braced with case-based reasoning as well as ontology, generated 98% of similar cases, 95% of them are personalized based on the interests of the high school students. The average usefulness feedback and satisfaction level of the students concerning this proposed hybrid approach reached 95% and 92.5% respectively, which could be a solution to similar problems, regardless of the application domain. Besides, the constructed ontology could be reused in other systems in the educational domain.

Tremendous systems are rapidly evolving based on the trendy Internet of Things (IoT) in various domains. Different technologies are used for communication between the massive connected devices through all layers of the IoT system, causing many security and performance issues. Regression and integration testing are considered repeatedly, in which the vast costs and efforts associated with the frequent execution of these inflated test suites hinder the adequate testing of such systems. This necessitates the focus on exploring innovative scalable testing approaches for large test suites in IoT-based systems. In this paper, a scalable framework for continuous integration and regression testing in IoT-based systems (IoT-CIRTF) is proposed, based on IoT-related criteria for test case prioritization and selection. The framework utilizes search-based techniques to provide an optimized prioritized set of test cases to select from. The selection is based on a trained prediction model for IoT standard components using supervised deep learning algorithms to continuously ensure the overall reliability of IoT-based systems. The experiments are held on two GSM datasets. The experimental results achieved prioritization accuracy up to 90% and 92% for regression testing and integration testing respectively. This provides an enhanced and efficient framework for continuous testing of IoT-based systems, as per IoT-related criteria for the prioritization and selection purposes.