In coastal and port engineering, wind-generated waves have always been a crucial, fundamental, and important topic. As a result, various methods for estimating wave parameters, including field measurement and numerical methods, have been proposed over time. This study evaluates the wave height at Sri-Lanka Hambantota Port using soft computing models such as Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and the M5 model tree (M5MT). In order to overcome its nonstationarity, the primary wave height time series were divided into subtime series using the wavelet transform. The collected subtime series were then utilized as input data for ANN and M5MT in order to determine the wave height. For the sake of the model performance, the daily wind and wave data from the Acoustic Wave and Current (AWAC) sensor for Hambantota Port in 2020 and Sanmen Bay in 2017 were used in this study. The training state utilizes 80 of the available data, while the test state uses 20. The Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of the ANN, M5, WANN, and Wavelet-M5 models in the Hambantota Port for the test stage are 0.12, 0.11, 0.04, and 0.06, respectively. While in Sanmen Bay, the RMSE of the ANN, M5, WANN, and Wavelet-M5 models for the test stage are 0.14, 0.16, 0.06, and 0.08, respectively. According to the findings of this study, the accuracy of WANN and Wavelet-M5 hybrid models in evaluating wave height is superior to that of classic ANN and M5MT, and it is recommended that WANN and Wavelet-M5 hybrid models be used to estimate wave height.

The purpose of this study is to determine the direction of causality between the quality of education and technological development for the selected Northern European countries over the period 2006–2017. To this end, we employ the bootstrap panel causality test. The findings of our study indicate that the quality of education leads to changes in technological readiness in the long run. Interestingly, the reverse direction causal effect is not detected. These findings provide further evidence on – other – positive impacts of the Nordic educational system and are likely to stimulate the interest of policymakers in this field.

Education is the great investment for the future. When investing in education, predicting future parameters and moving according to predictions is an essential part in the education process. In such an important subject, the use of technology cannot be avoided at all. ICT-based educations serves the purpose of both attended and non-attended (distance) education types. The aim of this research is to determine and find out the perceptions of students, motivations and their success rate those study with Information and Communication Technology Based technology supported environments and universities and evaluate these outcomes to find out potential issues of ICT applications through learning process in higher education institutes by conducting survey analysis