This article looks at how the Academic Rating Index (ARI) can be integrated with a variety of academic platforms to improve data collection and increase access to supervisors' academic records and competency. The ARI aims to address challenges faced by postgraduate students in South Africa, such as an increasing student-to-supervisor ratio, insufficient assessment of supervisor effectiveness, and limited digital forums for student participation. The ARI uses cross-platform data collection and powerful search functions to help students locate and interact with distinguished supervisors who share their research interests. Supervisors can assert and amend their profiles using the site, ensuring that the information is accurate and up to date. This study builds on previous research and emphasizes the importance of a central directory for academic supervisory expertise.
Aerial acoustic communication enables low-rate data exchange using audible or inaudible acoustic waves and has the advantage of operating on virtually all smart devices without additional hardware, unlike NFC, whose adoption remains limited by hardware and platform constraints. Standard microphones and speakers can therefore be used for both transmission and reception, making the technology an appealing and practical complement to existing wireless methods.However, commodity devices primarily support the audible band, much of which overlaps with speech and ambient noise, leaving only a narrow portion suitable for reliable communication. To address this limitation, the proposed approach utilizes a frequency region that is broadly supported across devices yet minimally influenced by everyday acoustic environments, thereby enhancing overall stability and robustness.Furthermore, this paper introduces a Zoom-FFT-based narrow-band acoustic communication technique that improves robustness and frequency resolution within this constrained spectrum. By exploiting its high-resolution spectral analysis, the system can reliably extract communication signals even in noisy indoor settings, supporting practical short-range data exchange applications across diverse usage scenarios.
Vision Transformers (ViTs) offer strong performance but face high computational costs from processing all tokens through their full depth. Standard ViTs lack adaptivity. This work introduces Adaptive Halting Transformer (AHT-ViT) to enhance efficiency by dynamically adjusting processing depth per token. AHT-ViT employs hierarchical ”planner” modules predicting token-specific target halting depths and an extremely parameter-efficient ”supervisor” mechanism (two shared parameters) generating per-layer halting scores. Tokens halt when their cumulative score crosses a threshold. A novel KL divergence-based loss, Ltarget depth, explicitly aligns executed halting distributions with planned depths. Evaluation on ImageNet, Places365, and CIFAR-100 using DeiT-S shows AHT-ViT achieves an improved accuracy-efficiency trade-off compared to its static baseline and demonstrates competitive performance against other adaptive methods (DynamicViT, A-ViT) evaluated under the same conditions, while significantly reducing FLOPs. Key hyperparameters were selected via grid search on a validation split.
This paper examines the impact of gamification in improving student engagement and learning outcomes in diverse educational contexts. Grounded in psychological theories, including Self-Determination Theory, Flow Theory, Constructivist Learning Theory, and Behaviorism, the review synthesizes evidence on how game-design elements, such as points, badges, leaderboards, challenges, and storytelling, influence motivation, academic performance, and retention. Case studies of widely used platforms like Duolingo, Classcraft, Kahoot, Minecraft, and ABCmouse illustrate practical implementations and highlight both benefits and challenges. While research generally supports the positive impact of gamification on engagement, findings are inconsistent across different age groups, disciplines, and cultural settings. Limitations include an excessive reliance on extrinsic rewards, limited long-term studies, and insufficient focus on accessibility and equity. The review highlights lessons learned and offers detailed recommendations for designing inclusive, adaptive, and pedagogically aligned gamified interventions. The findings show that although gamification offers considerable promise, its effectiveness depends greatly on thoughtful integration with sound instructional objectives and ongoing evaluation.
This paper presents a case study on developing and implementing metaverse-based VR simulations for training interprofessional health and human service students to work with vulnerable populations. Key challenges and strategies are discussed and include the need and justification for the simulation programs, the challenge of changing technology and educational trends over time and plans for enhancing existing programs and creating new programs and cases.
