Centro Escolar University (CEU) (Tagalog: Pamantasang Centro Escolar) is a private university in Manila, Philippines. It was founded in 1907 by Librada Avelino and Carmen de Luna as the Centro Escolar de Señoritas. CEU has six campuses: the main campus, Mendiola; the Malolos campus; the Las Piñas campus; the Cebu City campus; and the Makati campuses (Gil Puyat and Legaspi Village campuses). More than 50 academic programs are offered.CEU is accredited by the Federation of Accrediting Agencies of the Philippines and the Philippine Association of Colleges and Universities' Commission on Accreditation (as a Level IV school), and has full autonomous status from the Commission on Higher Education (CHED). It is certified by the Institute of Corporate Directors, Department of Trade and Industry, SGS S.A., International Organization for Standardization, and the ASEAN University Network In 2022, CEU was awarded with the Safety Seal from the Department of the Interior and Local Government for meeting minimum public health standards following the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns.
Fully decentralised federated learning enables collaborative model training among edge devices without relying on a central coordinator, thereby avoiding single points of failure and supporting spontaneous collaboration in pervasive environments. However, the absence of coordination introduces challenges that go beyond data heterogeneity alone. In realistic decentralised settings, devices often start from different model initializations, possess limited and non-IID local data, and interact over unstructured communication graphs, making naive parameter averaging ineffective and potentially destructive. In this paper, we address decentralised learning under combined data and initial model heterogeneity by proposing DecDiff+VT, a coordination-free decentralised learning algorithm specifically designed for such environments. DecDiff+VT integrates two complementary mechanisms: DecDiff, a disruption-aware aggregation strategy that updates local models towards their neighborhood average with a magnitude inversely proportional to model disagreement, and a lightweight virtual teacher (VT) mechanism based on soft-label regularization to improve local generalization in the absence of strong or centralized teacher models. Extensive experiments on image classification and activity recognition benchmarks (MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, EMNIST, CIFAR-10, and UCI-HAR) show that DecDiff+VT consistently outperforms or matches state-of-the-art decentralised baselines, achieving faster convergence, improved generalization, and greater robustness to overfitting, without incurring additional communication or memory overhead compared to standard decentralised averaging.
BACKGROUND:People living with and beyond cancer frequently experience cognitive and psychosocial difficulties, yet structured rehabilitation remains limited. Extended reality offers immersive and adaptable tools that may help address these supportive care needs. AIM:To synthesise evidence on extended reality interventions for cognitive and psychosocial rehabilitation in cancer care. METHODS:An integrative review was conducted using Whittemore and Knafl's framework. Literature published between 2014 and 2025 was identified through searches of major electronic databases and manual reference screening. Study quality was appraised using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool, and findings were synthesised thematically. RESULTS:A total of 14 studies met the inclusion criteria. Two primary functional domains emerged: cognitive rehabilitation, including improvements in attention, executive function and psychosocial rehabilitation, including reductions in anxiety, depression, fatigue and improvements in quality of life. Across studies, extended reality interventions-predominantly virtual reality-were generally feasible, well accepted and associated with high engagement and minimal adverse effects, although methodological heterogeneity remained substantial. CONCLUSIONS:Extended reality, particularly virtual reality, shows promise as a feasible and acceptable approach to supporting cognitive and psychosocial rehabilitation in cancer care. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE:Extended reality, particularly virtual reality, may be considered as a complementary approach to support cognitive and psychosocial rehabilitation in people living with and beyond cancer. Clinicians may consider integrating extended reality into supportive cancer care while recognising that further high-quality evidence is needed to inform routine clinical implementation.
Organizations face critical decisions regarding work models for digital presence management (DPM) teams, where onsite and remote operations present distinct trade-offs in cost, security, collaboration, and engagement. This study developed and compared scenario-based cost-benefit models for four staffing configurations (30, 60, 90, 150 workers) across onsite and remote DPM operations. We employed a scenario-based comparative analysis using projected operational data for hardware, software, licensing, staffing, and infrastructure costs (denominated in PHP). Social media engagement projections were based on a 3.5% organic reach rate, benchmarked to the dominant Philippine platform, Instagram. Sensitivity analysis was included. Remote operations demonstrated 21–28% monthly cost savings (PHP 669,850–1,337,250 vs. PHP 850,600–1,860,600 onsite). Cost per 1,000 projected reach was lower for remote models (PHP 2.66–3.18) compared to onsite (PHP 3.37–4.43). Onsite models incurred substantial upfront infrastructure costs (PHP 532,428–2,002,256). While remote DPM offers significant cost advantages, achieving equivalent security requires investment in advanced frameworks, which may offset a portion of the savings. The decision framework must therefore prioritize organizational security requirements, governance needs, and budget constraints alongside cost efficiency.
