Objective: Digital twins (DTs) emerged in the wake of Industry 4.0 and the creation of cyber-physical systems, motivated by the increased availability and variability of machine and sensor data. DTs are a concept to create a digital representation of a physical entity and imitate its behavior, while feeding real-world data to the digital counterpart, thus allowing enabling digital simulations related to the real-world entity. The availability of new data sources raises the potential for developing structured approaches for prediction and analysis. Similarly, in the field of medicine and digital healthcare, the collection of patient-focused data is rising. Medical DTs, a new concept of structured, exchangeable representations of knowledge, are increasingly used for capturing personal health, targeting specific illnesses, or addressing complex healthcare scenarios in hospitals. Methods: This article surveys the current state-of-the-art in applying DTs in healthcare, and how these twins are generated to support smart, personalized medicine. These concepts are applied to a DT for a simulated health-monitoring scenario. Results: The DT use case is implemented using AnyLogic multi-agent simulation, monitoring the patient’s personal health indicators and their development. Conclusion: The results indicate both possibilities and challenges and provide important insights for future DT implementations in healthcare. They have the potential to optimize healthcare in various ways, such as providing patient-centered health-monitoring.

In the era of personalized education, the provision of comprehensible explanations for learning recommendations is of great value to enhance the learner's understanding and engagement with the recommended learning content. Large language models (LLMs) and generative AI have recently opened new doors for generating human-like explanations, for and along learning recommendations. However, their precision is still far away from acceptable in a sensitive field like education. To harness the abilities of LLMs, while still ensuring a high level of precision towards the intent of the learners, this paper proposes an approach to utilize knowledge graphs (KG) as a source of factual context for LLM prompts, reducing the risk of model hallucinations, and safeguarding against wrong or imprecise information, while maintaining an application-intended learning context. We utilize the semantic relations in the knowledge graph to offer curated knowledge about learning recommendations. With domain-experts in the loop, we design the explanation as a textual template, which is filled and completed by the LLM. Domain experts were integrated in the prompt engineering phase as part of a study, to ensure that explanations include information that is relevant to the learner. We evaluate our approach quantitatively using Rouge-N and Rouge-L measures, as well as qualitatively with experts and learners. Our results show an enhanced recall and precision of the generated explanations compared to those generated solely by the GPT model, with a greatly reduced risk of generating imprecise information in the final learning explanation.

In modern industrial systems, collected textual data accumulates over time, offering an important source of information for enhancing present and future industrial practices. Although many AI-based solutions have been developed in the literature for a domain-specific information retrieval (IR) from this data, the explainability of these systems was rarely investigated in such domain-specific environments. In addition to considering the domain requirements within an explainable intelligent IR, transferring the explainable IR algorithm to other domains remains an open-ended challenge. This is due to the high costs, which are associated with intensive customization and required knowledge modelling, when developing new explainable solutions for each industrial domain. In this article, we present a transferable framework for generating domain-specific explanations for intelligent IR systems. The aim of our work is to provide a comprehensive approach for constructing explainable IR and recommendation algorithms, which are capable of adopting to domain requirements and are usable in multiple domains at the same time. Our method utilizes knowledge graphs (KG) for modeling the domain knowledge. The KG provides a solid foundation for developing intelligent IR solutions. Utilizing the same KG, we develop graph-based components for generating textual and visual explanations of the retrieved information, taking into account the domain requirements and supporting the transferability to other domain-specific environments, through the structured approach. The use of the KG resulted in minimum-to-zero adjustments when creating explanations for multiple intelligent IR algorithms in multiple domains. We test our method within two different use cases, a semiconductor manufacturing centered use case and a job-to-applicant matching one. Our quantitative results show a high capability of our approach to generate high-level explanations for the end users. In addition, the developed explanation components were highly adaptable to both industrial domains without sacrificing the overall accuracy of the intelligent IR algorithm. Furthermore, a qualitative user-study was conducted. We recorded a high level of acceptance from the users, who reported an enhanced overall experience with the explainable IR system.

While learning personalization offers great potential for learners, modern practices in higher education require a deeper consideration of domain models and learning contexts, to develop effective personalization algorithms. This paper introduces an innovative approach to higher education curriculum modelling that utilizes large language models (LLMs) for knowledge graph (KG) completion, with the goal of creating personalized learning-path recommendations. Our research focuses on modelling university subjects and linking their topics to corresponding domain models, enabling the integration of learning modules from different faculties and institutions in the student's learning path. Central to our approach is a collaborative process, where LLMs assist human experts in extracting high-quality, fine-grained topics from lecture materials. We develop a domain, curriculum, and user models for university modules and stakeholders. We implement this model to create the KG from two study modules: Embedded Systems and Development of Embedded Systems Using FPGA. The resulting KG structures the curriculum and links it to the domain models. We evaluate our approach through qualitative expert feedback and quantitative graph quality metrics. Domain experts validated the relevance and accuracy of the model, while the graph quality metrics measured the structural properties of our KG. Our results show that the LLM-assisted graph completion approach enhances the ability to connect related courses across disciplines to personalize the learning experience. Expert feedback also showed high acceptance of the proposed collaborative approach for concept extraction and classification.

Modelling learning objects (LO) within their context enables the learner to advance from a basic, remembering-level, learning objective to a higher-order one, i.e., a level with an application- and analysis objective. While hierarchical data models are commonly used in digital learning platforms, using graph-based models enables representing the context of LOs in those platforms. This leads to a foundation for personalized recommendations of learning paths. In this paper, the transformation of hierarchical data models into knowledge graph (KG) models of LOs using text mining is introduced and evaluated. We utilize custom text mining pipelines to mine semantic relations between elements of an expert-curated hierarchical model. We evaluate the KG structure and relation extraction using graph quality-control metrics and the comparison of algorithmic semantic-similarities to expert-defined ones. The results show that the relations in the KG are semantically comparable to those defined by domain experts, and that the proposed KG improves representing and linking the contexts of LOs through increasing graph communities and betweenness centrality.

A smart city is a modern and visionary approach for a city to provide intelligent and smart urban services by using information and communication technologies (ICT). The Internet of Things (IoT), emerging through intelligent networking and sensing technologies, is seen as the data-driven enabler for smart cities with current and future infrastructures. The Open Data Aarhus datasets have been created from sensor data in the city Aarhus in Denmark. This paper presents how big data technologies in the context of smart cities are used to implement a framework with a prototype R Shiny application to analyze road traffic and pollution data to make a step towards smart mobility. The main objective of the approach is the calculation and visualization of the least polluted route from a chosen start to an end point by applying an algorithm utilizing the MapReduce framework running on a Hadoop cluster.