This study analyzes the effects of COVID-19 confinement on the autonomous learning performance of students in higher education. Using a field experiment with 458 students from three different subjects at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain), we study the differences in assessments by dividing students into two groups. The first group (control) corresponds to academic years 2017/2018 and 2018/2019. The second group (experimental) corresponds to students from 2019/2020, which is the group of students that had their face-to-face activities interrupted because of the confinement. The results show that there is a significant positive effect of the COVID-19 confinement on students’ performance. This effect is also significant in activities that did not change their format when performed after the confinement. We find that this effect is significant both in subjects that increased the number of assessment activities and subjects that did not change the student workload. Additionally, an analysis of students’ learning strategies before confinement shows that students did not study on a continuous basis. Based on these results, we conclude that COVID-19 confinement changed students’ learning strategies to a more continuous habit, improving their efficiency. For these reasons, better scores in students’ assessment are expected due to COVID-19 confinement that can be explained by an improvement in their learning performance.

Precision Medicine implies a deep understanding of inter-individual differences in health and disease that are due to genetic and environmental factors. To acquire such understanding there is a need for the implementation of different types of technologies based on artificial intelligence (AI) that enable the identification of biomedically relevant patterns, facilitating progress towards individually tailored preventative and therapeutic interventions. Despite the significant scientific advances achieved so far, most of the currently used biomedical AI technologies do not account for bias detection. Furthermore, the design of the majority of algorithms ignore the sex and gender dimension and its contribution to health and disease differences among individuals. Failure in accounting for these differences will generate sub-optimal results and produce mistakes as well as discriminatory outcomes. In this review we examine the current sex and gender gaps in a subset of biomedical technologies used in relation to Precision Medicine. In addition, we provide recommendations to optimize their utilization to improve the global health and disease landscape and decrease inequalities.

In face-to-face and online learning, emotions and emotional intelligence have an influence and play an essential role. Learners’ emotions are crucial for e-learning system because they promote or restrain the learning. Many researchers have investigated the impacts of emotions in enhancing and maximizing e-learning outcomes. Several machine learning and deep learning approaches have also been proposed to achieve this goal. All such approaches are suitable for an offline mode, where the data for emotion classification are stored and can be accessed infinitely. However, these offline mode approaches are inappropriate for real-time emotion classification when the data are coming in a continuous stream and data can be seen to the model at once only. We also need real-time responses according to the emotional state. For this, we propose a real-time emotion classification system (RECS)-based Logistic Regression (LR) trained in an online fashion using the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithm. The proposed RECS is capable of classifying emotions in real-time by training the model in an online fashion using an EEG signal stream. To validate the performance of RECS, we have used the DEAP data set, which is the most widely used benchmark data set for emotion classification. The results show that the proposed approach can effectively classify emotions in real-time from the EEG data stream, which achieved a better accuracy and F1-score than other offline and online approaches. The developed real-time emotion classification system is analyzed in an e-learning context scenario.

This research characterized how Facebook deals with rare diseases. This characterization included a content-based and temporal analysis, and its purpose was to help users interested in rare diseases to maximize the engagement of their posts and to help rare diseases organizations to align their priorities with the interests expressed in social networks. This research used Netvizz to download Facebook data, word clouds in R for text mining, a log-likelihood measure in R to compare texts and TextBlob Python library for sentiment analysis. The Facebook analysis shows that posts with photos and positive comments have the highest engagement. We also observed that words related to diseases, attention, disability and services have a lot of presence in the decalogue of priorities (which serves for all associations to work on the same objectives and provides the lines of action to be followed by political decision makers) and little on Facebook, and words of gratitude are more present on Facebook than in the decalogue. Finally, the temporal analysis shows that there is a high variation between the polarity average and the hour of the day.

Emotions play a crucial role in learning. To improve and optimize electronic learning (e-Learning) outcomes, many researchers have investigated the role of emotions. Also, researchers have come up with many approaches to utilize one or many data modalities to achieve this goal, and they have been successful. But the recent advancements in technology and the internet of things (IoT) devices have brought a new dimension in e-Learning, with many input devices (such as webcams, fit-bands etc.) for interacting with e-Learners. This new dimension brings not only massive amounts of data with volume, variety, and velocity called multimodal data streams but also more challenges of mining those data in real-time. In this work, we have focused on state-of-the-art emotion recognition in e-Learning utilizing the multimodal data streams of learners. Also, we have thoroughly investigated the past research and surveys on emotion recognition methods in e-Learning to find the affecting emotions and their relations with the emotion measurement channels; and we have compared several data-stream classifiers for emotion recognition by utilizing multimodal physiological data streams. Finally, the future research opportunities to be addressed are also discussed.