Big data analytics has shown tremendous success in several fields such as businesses, agriculture, health, and meteorology, and education is no exception. Concerning its role in education, it is used to boost students’ learning process by predicting their performance in advance and adapting the relevant instructional design strategies. This study primarily intends to develop a system that can predict students’ performance and help teachers to timely introduce corrective interventions to uplift the performance of low-performing students. As a secondary part of this research, it also explores the potential of collaborative learning as an intervention to act in combination with the prediction system to improve the performance of students. To support such changes, a visualization system is also developed to track and monitor the performance of students, groups, and overall class to help teachers in the regrouping of students concerning their performance. Several well-known machine learning models are applied to predict students performance. Results suggest that experimental groups performed better after treatment than before treatment. The students who took part in each class activity, prepared and submitted their tasks perform much better than other students. Overall, the study found that collaborative learning methods play a significant role to enhance the learning capability of the students.

Mobile cloud computing and edge computing-based solutions provide means to offload tasks for resource-limited mobile devices. Mobile cloud computing provides remote cloud solutions while edge computing provides closer proximity-based solutions. Remote cloud solutions suffer from network latency and limited bandwidth challenges due to distance and dependency on the Internet. However, these challenges are addressed by edge-based solutions since the edge node is available in the same network. The use of Internet of Things-based solutions considering future Information Communication Technology infrastructure is on the rise resulting in the massive growth of digital equipment increasing the load at edge devices. Hence, some load balancing mechanism is required at the edge level to avoid resource congestion. The load balancing at the edge must consider the user’s preferences about edge resources such as personal computers or mobile devices. A user must declare which resources can be spared for other devices to avoid overprovisioning essential resources. We present Load Balancing for Resource Optimization (LBRO), a collaborative cloudlet platform to address load balancing challenges in edge computing considering users’ preferences. A comparative analysis of the proposed approach with the conventional edge-based approach yields that the proposed approach provides significantly improved results in terms of CPU, memory, and disk utilization.

Climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic have disrupted the food supply chain across the globe and adversely affected food security. Early estimation of staple crops can assist relevant government agencies to take timely actions for ensuring food security. Reliable crop type maps can play an essential role in monitoring crops, estimating yields, and maintaining smooth food supplies. However, these maps are not available for developing countries until crops have matured and are about to be harvested. The use of remote sensing for accurate crop-type mapping in the first few weeks of sowing remains challenging. Smallholder farming systems and diverse crop types further complicate the challenge. For this study, a ground-based survey is carried out to map fields by recording the coordinates and planted crops in respective fields. The time-series images of the mapped fields are acquired from the Sentinel-2 satellite. A deep learning-based long short-term memory network is used for the accurate mapping of crops at an early growth stage. Results show that staple crops, including rice, wheat, and sugarcane, are classified with 93.77% accuracy as early as the first four weeks of sowing. The proposed method can be applied on a large scale to effectively map crop types for smallholder farms at an early stage, allowing the authorities to plan a seamless availability of food.

Sentiment analysis is a widely researched area due to its various applications in customer services, brand monitoring, and market research. Automatic sentiment classification is an important but challenging task. Contrary to the English language, sentiment analysis for low-resource languages like Urdu is an under-explored research area. Most of the work on sentiment analysis in the Urdu language is domain-dependent where models are mostly trained and tested on the same dataset on limited domains. However, sentiments in different domains are expressed differently, and manually annotating the datasets for all possible domains is unfeasible. Training a sentiment classifier using annotated data on one domain and testing it on another domain results in poor performance as the terms appearing in the source domain (training data) might not appear in the target (testing data) domain. In this paper, we present a baseline method for cross-domain sentiment analysis in the Urdu language using two different domains. Feature extraction is performed using n-grams and word embedding techniques. Sentiment classification is performed using machine learning and deep learning classifiers. The proposed method achieves an accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 scores of 0.77, 0.83, 0.68, and 0.75, respectively.