Retention and dropout of higher education students is a subject that must be analysed carefully. Learning analytics can be used to help prevent failure cases. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the scientific production in this area in higher education in journals indexed in Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science and Elsevier’s Scopus. We use a bibliometric and systematic study to obtain deep knowledge of the referred scientific production. The information gathered allows us to perceive where, how, and in what ways learning analytics has been used in the latest years. By analysing studies performed all over the world, we identify what kinds of data and techniques are used to approach the subject. We propose a feature classification into several categories and subcategories, regarding student and external features. Student features can be seen as personal or academic data, while external factors include information about the university, environment, and support offered to the students. To approach the problems, authors successfully use data mining applied to the identified educational data. We also identify some other concerns, such as privacy issues, that need to be considered in the studies.

This study was developed under the scope of a Portuguese project focused on the entrepreneur’s perspective and perception on the internationalization process of his company: more specifically, about the factors that enhanced the company entry into foreign markets as well as the constraints found in this process. This work focuses on the importance of using digital transformation to integrate technological tools in international business practice and strategy and the obstacles encountered with introducing these new technologies. This study aims to determine the relationships between technology categories and obstacles. The final goal is to assess the impact of these characteristics of the companies by the sector of economic activity, size, and percentage of profits resulting from international expansion. A questionnaire was designed and sent by email to 8183 companies from the AICEP database, distributed by three main activity sectors. A total of 310 valid answers were gathered from the Portuguese internationalized companies. The research limitations are related to the reduced number of interviews. These interviews showed that managers were not aware of the concept of digital transformation and misunderstood the use of digital technologies in the internationalization process of the business. This limitation can add some bias to the qualitative results. In addition to these limitations, the number of responses per sector was also not homogeneous. The practical implications of this study are that managers and top-level executives can use that to better understand how companies could use digital tools and what obstacles they should avoid when they want to internationalize their business. This paper is one of the first research contributions to analyze the impact of digital transformation in the internalization of Portuguese companies.

The advancement of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) has transformed healthcare delivery by enabling real-time health monitoring. However, it introduces critical challenges related to latency and, more importantly, the secure handling of sensitive patient data. Traditional cloud-based architectures often struggle with latency and data protection, making them inefficient for real-time healthcare scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose a Hybrid Fog-Edge Computing Architecture tailored for effective real-time health monitoring in IoMT systems. Fog computing enables processing of time-critical data closer to the data source, reducing response time and relieving cloud system overload. Simultaneously, edge computing nodes handle data preprocessing and transmit only valuable information—defined as abnormal or high-risk health signals such as irregular heart rate or oxygen levels—using rule-based filtering, statistical thresholds, and lightweight machine learning models like Decision Trees and One-Class SVMs. This selective transmission optimizes bandwidth without compromising response quality. The architecture integrates robust security measures, including end-to-end encryption and distributed authentication, to counter rising data breaches and unauthorized access in IoMT networks. Real-life case scenarios and simulations are used to validate the model, evaluating latency reduction, data consolidation, and scalability. Results demonstrate that the proposed architecture significantly outperforms cloud-only models, with a 70% latency reduction, 30% improvement in energy efficiency, and 60% bandwidth savings. Additionally, the time required for threat detection was halved, ensuring faster response to security incidents. This framework offers a flexible, secure, and efficient solution ideal for time-sensitive healthcare applications such as remote patient monitoring and emergency response systems.

Cloud computing is a rapidly growing technology that has been implemented in various fields in recent years, such as business, research, industry, and computing. Cloud computing provides different services over the internet, thus eliminating the need for personalized hardware and other resources. Cloud computing environments face some challenges in terms of resource utilization, energy efficiency, heterogeneous resources, etc. Tasks scheduling and virtual machines (VMs) are used as consolidation techniques in order to tackle these issues. Tasks scheduling has been extensively studied in the literature. The problem has been studied with different parameters and objectives. In this article, we address the problem of energy consumption and efficient resource utilization in virtualized cloud data centers. The proposed algorithm is based on task classification and thresholds for efficient scheduling and better resource utilization. In the first phase, workflow tasks are pre-processed to avoid bottlenecks by placing tasks with more dependencies and long execution times in separate queues. In the next step, tasks are classified based on the intensities of the required resources. Finally, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is used to select the best schedules. Experiments were performed to validate the proposed technique. Comparative results obtained on benchmark datasets are presented. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm over that of the other algorithms to which it was compared in terms of energy consumption, makespan, and load balancing.

This paper introduces a study employing artificial intelligence (AI) to utilize computer vision algorithms for detecting human emotions in video content during user interactions with diverse visual stimuli. The research aims to unveil the creation of software capable of emotion detection by leveraging AI algorithms and image processing pipelines to identify users' facial expressions. The process involves assessing users through images and facilitating the implementation of computer vision algorithms aligned with psychological theories defining emotions and their recognizable features. The study demonstrates the feasibility of emotion recognition through convolutional neural networks (CNN) and software development and training based on facial expressions. The results highlight successful emotion identification; however, precision improvement necessitates further training for contexts with more diverse images and additional algorithms to distinguish closely related emotional patterns. The discussion and conclusions emphasize the potential of A.I. and computer vision algorithms in emotion detection, providing insights into software development, ongoing training, and the evolving landscape of emotion recognition technology. Further training is necessary for contexts with more diverse images, alongside additional algorithms that can effectively distinguish between facial expressions depicting closely related emotional patterns, enhancing certainty and accuracy.