Sustainability in software engineering encompasses environmental, human, social, and economic dimensions, each essential for ensuring software’s positive and lasting impact. This paper presents an innovative Internet of Things (IoT)-based Smart Waste Management (SWM) system. The proposed system addresses key limitations in existing solutions, including lack of real-time responsiveness, inefficient routing, inadequate emergency detection, and limited user-centric design. While prior studies have investigated IoT applications in SWM, challenges remain in achieving dynamic, integrated, and scalable systems for sustainable urban development. The proposed solution introduces a holistic architecture that enables real-time monitoring of waste bin levels and fire incidents through Waste Bin Level Monitoring Units (BLMUs) equipped with ultrasonic and flame sensors. Data is transmitted via Wi-Fi to a centralized City Command and Control Center (4C), allowing for automated alerts and dynamic route optimization. A dual-platform software suite supports both administrative and operational workflows: a desktop web application and a role-based Android mobile app developed in Flutter, and integrated with Google Cloud Firestore, enabling centralized data management and efficient resource allocation. We validated the system through a working prototype, demonstrating notable contributions including enhanced emergency responsiveness, optimized waste collection routes, and improved stakeholder engagement. This research contributes to the advancement of sustainable urban infrastructure by offering a scalable, data-driven SWM framework grounded in software engineering principles and aligned with smart city objectives. This paper presents an innovative IoT-based Smart Waste Management (SWM) system that addresses key limitations in existing solutions, including insufficient real-time responsiveness, inefficient routing, inadequate emergency detection, and limited user-centric design.

App reviews are crucial in influencing user decisions and providing essential feedback for developers to improve their products. Automating the analysis of these reviews is vital for efficient review management. While traditional machine learning (ML) models rely on basic word-based feature extraction, deep learning (DL) methods, enhanced with advanced word embeddings, have shown superior performance. This research introduces a novel aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) framework to classify app reviews based on key non-functional requirements, focusing on usability factors: effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. We propose a hybrid DL model, combining BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) with BiLSTM (Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory) and CNN (Convolutional Neural Networks) layers, to enhance classification accuracy. Comparative analysis against state-of-the-art models demonstrates that our BERT-BiLSTM-CNN model achieves exceptional performance, with precision, recall, F1-score, and accuracy of 96%, 87%, 91%, and 94%, respectively. The significant contributions of this work include a refined ABSA-based relabeling framework, the development of a high-performance classifier, and the comprehensive relabeling of the Instagram App Reviews dataset. These advancements provide valuable insights for software developers to enhance usability and drive user-centric application development.

Healthy living applications have been proposed as an ideal tool for behavior change. The use of gamification in healthcare interventions is gaining popularity, but there is still a need to clarify how to employ the benefit of this technology for managing children’s behavior. This paper proposes a new approach for mapping Gamification Mechanism (GM) to User Behavior Techniques (UBTs) considering User Experience (UX) factors. The reason for this mapping is to provide a list of recommendations for the gamification designers to include new design features in designing and developing the user interface for mobile games to sustain user engagement and to keep using the game for the benefit of changing behavior. The proposed design aims to provide a solution for both the provider (designer) and consumer (user) of the healthcare application. The benefits of the proposed approach help to increase the usability, awareness and attention of the user through engaging in the gamification.

Road object segmentation is crucial for autonomous driving, as it enables vehicles to perceive their surroundings. While deep learning models show promise, their generalization across diverse road conditions, weather variations, and lighting changes remains challenging. Different approaches have been proposed to address this limitation. However, these models often struggle with the varying appearance of road objects under diverse environmental conditions. Foundation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) offer a potential avenue for improved generalization in complex visual tasks. Thus, this study presents a pioneering comprehensive evaluation of the SAM for zero-shot road object segmentation, without explicit prompts. This study aimed to determine the inherent capabilities and limitations of the SAM in accurately segmenting a variety of road objects under the diverse and challenging environmental conditions encountered in real-world autonomous driving scenarios. We assessed the SAM’s performance on the KITTI, BDD100K, and Mapillary Vistas datasets, encompassing a wide range of environmental conditions. Using a variety of established evaluation metrics, our analysis revealed the SAM’s capabilities and limitations in accurately segmenting various road objects, particularly highlighting challenges posed by dynamic environments, illumination changes, and occlusions. These findings provide valuable insights for researchers and developers seeking to enhance the robustness of foundation models such as the SAM in complex road environments, guiding future efforts to improve perception systems for autonomous driving.

Interactive learning tools can facilitate the learning process and increase student engagement, especially tools such as computer programs that are designed for human-computer interaction. Thus, this paper aims to help students learn five different methods for solving nonlinear equations using an interactive learning tool designed with common principles such as feedback, visibility, affordance, consistency, and constraints. It also compares these methods by the number of iterations and time required to display the result. This study helps students learn these methods using interactive learning tools instead of relying on traditional teaching methods. The tool is implemented using the MATLAB app and is evaluated through usability testing with two groups of users that are categorized by their level of experience with root-finding. Users with no knowledge in root-finding confirmed that they understood the root-finding concept when interacting with the designed tool. The positive results of the user evaluation showed that the tool can be recommended to other users.