Topic modeling is an integral text mining component, employing diverse algorithms to uncover hidden themes within texts. This study examines the comparative performance of prominent topic modeling techniques on news headlines, which is characterized by brevity and specific linguistic style. Given the corpus originates from a non-native English-speaking country, an additional layer of complexity is introduced to the task. Our research explores the feasibility of employing a committee approach for topic modeling, evaluating the efficacy and challenges of various methods in practical settings. We applied three techniques—Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), and BERTopic—to create models with a fixed number of topics (n=40). These models were then tested on approximately 150,000 news headlines. To assess topic coherence, we utilized Word2Vec, human evaluators, and two large language models. Statistical tests confirmed the significance and impact of our findings. BERTopic demonstrated superior coherence compared to NMF, though slightly, but consistently outperformed NMF and LDA according to human and LLM evaluations. The notable disparity in LDA's performance relative to BERTopic and NMF underscores the importance of carefully selecting a topic modeling technique, as the choice can significantly influence the outcome of the analysis.

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) spreads rapidly and is easily contracted by individuals who come near infected persons. With this nature and rapid spread of the contagion, different types of research have been conducted to investigate how non-pharmaceutical interventions can be employed to contain and prevent COVID-19. In this review, we analyzed the key elements of digital contact tracing strategies developed for the prevention and containment of the dreaded epidemic since its outbreak. We carried out a scoping review through relevant studies indexed in three databases, namely Google Scholar, PubMed, and ACM Digital Library. Using some carefully defined search terms, a total of 768 articles were identified. The review shows that 86.32% (n = 101) of the works focusing on contact tracing were published in 2020, suggesting there was an increased awareness that year, increased research efforts, and the fact that the pandemic was given a very high priority by most journals. We observed that many (47.86%, n = 56) of the studies were focused on design and implementation issues in the development of COVID-19 contact tracing systems. In addition, has been established that most of the studies were conducted in 41 countries and that contract tracing app development are characterized by some sensitive issues, including privacy-preserving and case-based referral characteristics.

Nigeria and China were probably experiencing roughly similar economic fortunes only about two decades ago. Then, both had large populations and very low per capita incomes. But their socio-economic fortunes and growth rates have diverged dramatically since, with China now being a superpower and the second largest economy in the world, while Nigeria is still tottering along as one of the poorest countries in the world in terms of various global human development indices and rankings. The rapid economic transformations that China has experienced should normally be expected to be accompanied by equally dramatic socio-cultural changes, including the emancipation and greater participation of women in national economic activities. This study sought to investigate the extent to which women in China participate now in the ICT sector of their country compared to women in Nigeria. Data were collected through a questionnaire administered to cross sections of 123 and 151 women surveyed in purposively selected cities in Nigeria and China respectively. Women in both countries recognize the importance of ICT, but those in Nigeria were constrained from full utilization of ICT benefits due to electricity supply problems, financial constraints and inadequate training for ICT. The study found that improved levels of education of women promote the adoption and use of ICT by women in both countries, and that owning personal computers and the availability of time for women helped to increase participation of women in ICT. Some recommendations were made based on the findings.

Recommender systems (RSs) effectively curb information overload by providing personalized suggestions of items to users across different online domains. Their widespread use in e-commerce enhances user engagement, personalizes shopping experiences, and drives sales growth. However, despite the effectiveness of these systems at generating recommendations for users, they still raise major privacy and security concerns as their data could be exploited for malicious purposes, which can lead to data breaches and misuse. Therefore, this paper presents a comprehensive and systematic review of the underlying causes of privacy and security challenges in RS. It also provides a detailed taxonomy categorizing these concerns based on their targets and the risks they create. It further presents potential solutions that have been used in the literature while identifying challenges and possible research directions to pursue in a bid to address privacy and security concerns in RSs. This paper will be a useful resource for current and upcoming researchers in the domain of RSs. It will support knowledge advancement and steer appropriate research directions.

This research presents a personalized, context-aware recommender system to suggest Places of Interest (POIs) using a hybrid approach combining Bayesian inference and collaborative filtering. The system explicitly addresses the cold-start problem that new users face and improves recommendation accuracy by considering contextual variables such as user mood, budget, companion, and location. The system collects real-time contextual inputs for new users with no historical data and applies Bayesian inference to generate relevant POI suggestions. As users begin to interact and provide ratings, the system progressively shifts to a collaborative filtering mechanism, leveraging cosine similarity to identify similar users within comparable contexts. The recommender system focuses on three categories of POIs: restaurants, hotels, and landmarks. These locations are retrieved through the Google Maps API, and only mapped locations are considered. The system was implemented on Android devices and evaluated through a user study involving 25 participants from diverse backgrounds, including software developers, IT students, and general users. Evaluation metrics such as normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (nDCG) and classification accuracy were used to assess recommendation quality. Results demonstrate that the system performs better than traditional methods, with nDCG improvements reaching up to 83 percent. Users reported high satisfaction regarding the recommendations' accuracy, ease of use, and contextual relevance. While the system offers significant improvements, it also has certain limitations. Its dependency on Google Maps data may restrict its scope, and using only four contextual factors limits the system’s adaptability to more complex user preferences. Future enhancements could include additional dynamic contexts such as weather, POI popularity, and time-related trends, as well as integrating more advanced models to increase personalization and flexibility in real-world applications.