The fast-growing use of gamification in e-learning underscores its potential to enhance individuals' learning performance and experience. However, the mechanisms through which key gamification element influences people's learning remain unclear. This study addresses this gap by investigating how distinct leaderboard directions influence individual learning performance and satisfaction. We conduct a randomized experiment to examine these effects and explore the underlying mechanisms. Our results show that upward leaderboard improves learning performance and satisfaction by fostering learning effort and active exploration. In contrast, downward leaderboard enhances learning performance and satisfaction through self-efficacy and self-expansion. Interestingly, the effect of lateral leaderboards on learning satisfaction appears not associated with the development of personal meaning. This study contributes to current research and practice by providing important insights for effective gamified e-learning design, implementation, and use.

Decentralized trading schemes involving energy prosumers have prevailed in recent years. Such schemes provide a pathway for increased energy efficiency and can be enhanced by the use of blockchain technology to address security concerns in decentralized trading. To improve transaction security and privacy protection while ensuring desirable social governance, this article proposes a novel two-stage blockchain-based operation and trading mechanism to enhance energy hubs connected with integrated energy systems (IESs). This mechanism includes multienergy aggregators (MAGs) that use a consortium blockchain and its enabled proof-of-work (PoW) to transfer and audit transaction records, with social governance principles for guiding prosumers’ decision-making in the peer-to-peer (P2P) transaction management process. The uncertain nature of renewable generation and load demand are adequately modeled in the two-stage Wasserstein-based distributionally robust optimization (DRO). The practicality of the proposed mechanism is illustrated by several case studies that jointly show its ability to handle an increased renewable generation capacity, achieve a 16.7% saving in the audit cost, and facilitate 2.4% more P2P interactions. Overall, the proposed two-stage blockchain-based trading mechanism provides a practical trading scheme and can reduce redundant trading amounts by 6.5%, leading to a further reduction of the overall operation cost. Compared to the state-of-the-art benchmark methods, our mechanism exhibits significant operation cost reduction and ensures social governance and transaction security for IES and energy hubs.

This article explores social manufacturing (SM) within cyber–physical–social systems (CPSSs), leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize energy prosumer networks. We introduce a blockchain-enabled operation and management mechanism for energy systems, incorporating energy aggregators for efficient transaction audits and employing consortium blockchain and proof-of-work for enhanced security. Guided by social governance principles and utilizing the soft actor–critic (SAC) approach for handling renewable generation and load demand uncertainties, our method offers a resilient and cost-effective solution. Simulated case studies reveal a 16.7% reduction in audit costs and a 2.4% increase in peer-to-peer transactions, highlighting improved network synergy. Our approach also reduces redundant trading by 6.5%and cuts operational costs by up to 6%, demonstrating the effectiveness of blockchain in improving cost-efficiency and enhancing social governance and security in energy manufacturing systems. The findings of this study contribute a novel vista to the ongoing discourse in SM, illustrating the formidable potential of advanced information and AI technologies in amplifying the operational acumen of contemporary manufacturing ecosystems.

OBJECTIVE: Estimating the deterioration paths of chronic hepatitis B (CHB) patients is critical for physicians' decisions and patient management. A novel, hierarchical multilabel graph attention-based method aims to predict patient deterioration paths more effectively. Applied to a CHB patient data set, it offers strong predictive utilities and clinical value. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The proposed method incorporates patients' responses to medications, diagnosis event sequences, and outcome dependencies to estimate deterioration paths. From the electronic health records maintained by a major healthcare organization in Taiwan, we collect clinical data about 177 959 patients diagnosed with hepatitis B virus infection. We use this sample to evaluate the proposed method's predictive efficacy relative to 9 existing methods, as measured by precision, recall, F-measure, and area under the curve (AUC). RESULTS: We use 20% of the sample as holdouts to test each method's prediction performance. The results indicate that our method consistently and significantly outperforms all benchmark methods. It attains the highest AUC, with a 4.8% improvement over the best-performing benchmark, as well as 20.9% and 11.4% improvements in precision and F-measures, respectively. The comparative results demonstrate that our method is more effective for predicting CHB patients' deterioration paths than existing predictive methods. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: The proposed method underscores the value of patient-medication interactions, temporal sequential patterns of distinct diagnosis, and patient outcome dependencies for capturing dynamics that underpin patient deterioration over time. Its efficacious estimates grant physicians a more holistic view of patient progressions and can enhance their clinical decision-making and patient management.

Research analyzing the growing, worrisome phenomenon of cyberbullying in social network sites (SNSs) tends to adopt a cognitive perspective. This study instead investigates SNS envy, an essential emotion often experienced by users, and its relationship with cyberbullying intentions. The authors apply appraisal theory of emotion as a framework to conceptualize the effects of SNS envy, then propose two competing views: a direct effect premised in general strain theory and an indirect effect rooted in moral disengagement theory. The examinations of these competing views use survey data gathered from Facebook. The results support the indirect but not the direct effect, suggesting that envy influences cyberbullying intentions through moral disengagement. This study explicates how envious users rationalize their cyberbullying behaviors by cognitively reinterpreting existing perceptions of the advantages exhibited by envied others in a SNS, which reveals the importance of considering negative emotions to explain the unsettling cyberbullying phenomenon more fully.

The rapid spread of the pandemic of coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) has created an unprecedented, global health disaster. During the outburst period, the paucity of knowledge and research aggravated devastating panic and fears that lead to social stigma and created serious obstacles to contain the disastrous epidemic. We propose a deep learning-based method to detect stigmatized contents on online social network (OSN) platforms in the early stage of COVID-19. Our method performs a semantic-based quantitative analysis to unveil essential spatial-temporal characteristics of COVID-19 stigmatization for timely alerts and risk mitigation. Empirical evaluations are carried out to examine our method’s predictive utilities. The visualization results of the co-occurrence network using Gephi indicate two distinct groups of stigmatized words that pertain to people in Wuhan and their dietary behaviors, respectively. Netizens’ participations and stigmatizations in the Hubei region, where the COVID-19 broke out, are twice ($p < 0.05$) and four ($p < 0.01$) times more frequent and intense than those in other parts of China, respectively. Also, the number of COVID-19 patients is correlated with COVID-19-related stigma significantly (correlation coefficient = 0.838,$p < 0.01$). The responses to individual users’ posts have the power law distribution, while posts by official media appear to attract more responses (e.g., likes, replies, and forward). Our method can help platforms and government agencies manage public health disasters through effective identification and detailed analyses of social stigma on social media.

Effective utility system management is fundamental and critical for ensuring the normal activities, operations, and services in cities and urban areas. In that regard, the advanced information and communication technologies underpinning smart cities enable close linkages and coordination of different subutility systems, which is now attracting research attention. To increase operational efficiency, we propose a two-stage optimal co-management model for an integrated urban utility system comprised of water, power, gas, and heating systems, namely, integrated water-energy hubs (IWEHs). The proposed IWEH facilitates coordination between multienergy and water sectors via close energy conversion and can enhance the operational efficiency of an integrated urban utility system. In particular, we incorporate social-aware peer-to-peer (P2P) resource trading in the optimization model, in which operators of an IWEH can trade energy and water with other interconnected IWEHs. To cope with renewable generation and load uncertainties and mitigate their negative impacts, a two-stage distributionally robust optimization (DRO) is developed to capture the uncertainties, using a semidefinite programming reformulation. To demonstrate our model’s effectiveness and practical values, we design representative case studies that simulate four interconnected IWEH communities. The results show that DRO is more effective than robust optimization (RO) and stochastic optimization (SO) for avoiding excessive conservativeness and rendering practical utilities, without requiring enormous data samples. This work reveals a desirable methodological approach to optimize the water–energy–social nexus for increased economic and system-usage efficiency for the entire (integrated) urban utility system. Furthermore, the proposed model incorporates social participations by citizens to engage in urban utility management for increased operation efficiency of cities and urban areas.

Physicians increasingly depend on electronic health records (EHRs) to manage their patients. However, many patient records have substantial missing values that pose a fundamental challenge to their clinical use. To address this prevailing challenge, we propose an unsupervised deep learning-based method that can facilitate physicians' use of EHRs to improve their management of cardiovascular patients. By building on the deep autoencoder framework, we develop a novel method to impute missing values in patient records. To demonstrate its clinical applicability and values, we use data from cardiovascular patients and evaluate the proposed method's imputation effectiveness and predictive efficacy, in comparison with six prevalent benchmark techniques. The proposed method can impute missing values and predict important patient outcomes more effectively than all the benchmark techniques. This study reinforces the importance of adequately addressing missing values in patient records. It further illustrates how effective imputations can enable greater predictive efficacy with regard to important patient outcomes, which are crucial to the use of EHRs and health analytics for improved patient management. Supported by the complete data imputed by the proposed method, physicians can make timely patient outcome estimations (predictions) and therapeutic treatment assessments.

Cultural considerations could affect individuals' behaviors, including their technology acceptance. This study analyzes the acceptance of computer technology by 1,088 workers in 56 Arabian organizations to reexamine and compare the theory of planned behavior (TPB), technology acceptance model (TAM), and innovation diffusion theory (IDT). The explanatory power of each theory or model seems lower among Arabian workers, as compared with users in Western, developed countries. The IDT appears capable of explaining workers' technology acceptance better than does TPB or TAM. Perceived behavioral control and subjective norms constitute more important acceptance determinants than does attitude. Both perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use remain significant determinants of attitude and intention; however, considering findings reported by previous research, their total effects are comparable in magnitude and statistical significance. The findings are incongruent with the results of several representative prior studies that examine the same theories and models, which in turn offer several implications from a sociocultural perspective.

We experimentally evaluated the Dark Web Forum Portal by focusing on user task performance, usability, cognitive processing requirements, and societal benefits. Our results show that the portal performs perform well when compared with a benchmark forum.

Abstract Influxes of new documents over time necessitate reorganization of document categories that a user has created previously. As documents are available in increasing quantities and accelerating frequencies, the manual approach to reorganizing document categories becomes prohibitively tedious and ineffective, thus making a system‐oriented approach appealing. Previous research (Larsen & Aone, 1999 ; Pantel & Lin, 2002 ) largely has followed the category‐discovery approach, which groups documents by using a document‐clustering technique to partition a document corpus. This approach does not consider existing categories a user created previously, which in effect reflect his or her document‐grouping preference. A handful of studies (Wei, Hu, & Dong, 2002 ; Wei, Hu, & Lee, 2009 ) have taken a category‐evolution approach to develop lexicon‐based techniques for preserving user preference in document‐category reorganizations, but have serious limitations. Responding to the significance of document‐category reorganizations and addressing the fundamental problems of salient, lexicon‐based techniques, we develop an ontology‐based category evolution (ONCE), a technique that first enriches a concept hierarchy by incorporating important concept descriptors (jointly referred to as an ontology) and then employs the resulting enriched ontology to support category evolutions at a concept level rather than analyzing and comparing feature vectors at the lexicon level. We empirically evaluate our proposed technique and compare it with two benchmark techniques: CE2 (a lexicon‐based category‐evolution technique) and hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC; a conventional hierarchical document‐clustering technique). Overall, our results show that the ONCE technique is more effective than are CE2 and HAC, across all the scenarios studied. Furthermore, the completeness of a concept hierarchy has important impacts on the performance of the proposed technique. Our results have some important implications for further research.

Abstract We investigated agency satisfaction with an electronic record management system (ERMS) that supports the electronic creation, archival, processing, transmittal, and sharing of records (documents) among autonomous government agencies. A factor model, explaining agency satisfaction with ERMS functionalities, offers hypotheses, which we tested empirically with a large‐scale survey that involved more than 1,600 government agencies in Taiwan. The data showed a good fit to our model and supported all the hypotheses. Overall, agency satisfaction with ERMS functionalities appears jointly determined by regulatory compliance, job relevance, and satisfaction with support services. Among the determinants we studied, agency satisfaction with support services seems the strongest predictor of agency satisfaction with ERMS functionalities. Regulatory compliance also has important influences on agency satisfaction with ERMS, through its influence on job relevance and satisfaction with support services. Further analyses showed that satisfaction with support services partially mediated the impact of regulatory compliance on satisfaction with ERMS functionalities, and job relevance partially mediated the influence of regulatory compliance on satisfaction with ERMS functionalities. Our findings have important implications for research and practice, which we also discuss.

Timely information access and effective knowledge support is crucial to law enforcement officers' crime fighting and investigations. An expanding array of e-government initiatives target the development of advanced information technologies and their deployment in law enforcement agencies. Abase in point is COPLINK, an integrated system that provides law enforcement officers with timely data access, effective information support, integrated knowledge sharing, and improved collaboration within or beyond the agency boundaries. In this study, we examine law enforcement officers' acceptance of COPLONK Mobile by proposing and testing a factor model premised in established theoretical foundations. According to our results, the model is capable of explaining or predicting officers' intentions to use the technology. Our survey data support the proposed model and the hypotheses it suggests. Among the acceptance determinants we investigated, perceived usefulness appears to have the most significant influence on individual officers' intention to use COPLONK Mobile.

Effective, personalized recommendations are central to cross-selling, a common business strategy that suggests additional items (products or services) to customers for their consideration. Content-based recommendation and collaborative filtering represent two salient approaches for automated recommendations. The content-based approach uses essential features (attributes) of items to make recommendations, without making reference to the preferences of other customers. Although content-based recommendation techniques have been shown effective in various scenarios, their utilities and value depend on the availability of a large number of training examples. In this study, we propose a collaborative content-based (COCO) recommendation technique that uses a collaboration-based expansion approach to address the small-size training set problem, a common challenge faced the content-based recommendation approach. We empirically examine the effectiveness of the proposed technique for book recommendations and include a pure content-based technique as a performance benchmark. According to our evaluation results, the proposed COCO technique substantially outperforms the benchmark technique.

Abstract Biomedical research is critical to biodefense, which is drawing increasing attention from governments globally as well as from various research communities. The U.S. government has been closely monitoring and regulating biomedical research activities, particularly those studying or involving bioterrorism agents or diseases. Effective surveillance requires comprehensive understanding of extant biomedical research and timely detection of new developments or emerging trends. The rapid knowledge expansion, technical breakthroughs, and spiraling collaboration networks demand greater support for literature search and sharing, which cannot be effectively supported by conventional literature search mechanisms or systems. In this study, we propose an integrated approach that integrates advanced techniques for content analysis, network analysis, and information visualization. We design and implement Arizona Literature Mapper, a Web‐based portal that allows users to gain timely, comprehensive understanding of bioterrorism research, including leading scientists, research groups, institutions as well as insights about current mainstream interests or emerging trends. We conduct two user studies to evaluate Arizona Literature Mapper and include a well‐known system for benchmarking purposes. According to our results, Arizona Literature Mapper is significantly more effective for supporting users' search of bioterrorism publications than PubMed. Users consider Arizona Literature Mapper more useful and easier to use than PubMed. Users are also more satisfied with Arizona Literature Mapper and show stronger intentions to use it in the future. Assessments of Arizona Literature Mapper's analysis functions are also positive, as our subjects consider them useful, easy to use, and satisfactory. Our results have important implications that are also discussed in the article.

Abstract This article examines the determinants of service quality and continuance intention of online services. We proposed and empirically tested a model with both service and technology characteristics as the main drivers of service quality and subsequent continuance intention of eTax, an electronic government (eGovernment) service that enables citizens to file their taxes online. Our data were collected via a two‐stage longitudinal online survey of 518 participants before and after they made use of the eTax service in Hong Kong. The results showed that both service characteristics (i.e., security and convenience) and one of the technology characteristics (i.e., perceived usefulness, but not perceived ease of use) were the key determinants of service quality. Another interesting and important finding that runs counter to the vast body of empirical evidence on predicting intention is that perceived usefulness was not the strongest predictor of continuance intention but rather service quality was. To provide a richer picture of these relationships, we also conducted a post‐hoc analysis of the effects of service and technology characteristics on the individual dimensions of service quality and their subsequent impact on continuance intention and found assurance and reliability to be the only significant predictors of continuance intention. We present implications for research and practice related to online services.

Skyrocketing patient-care costs demand that health-care institutions improve their resource-utilization effectiveness and efficiency. The length of an inpatient's stay has direct significant impacts on patient-care costs, service quality, and outcomes. Despite attempts to manage the length of stay (LOS) for frequently performed surgical procedures (e.g., appendectomies), many service providers cannot achieve the target range allowed by the managed care system. We take a data-driven approach to predict which appendectomy patients will likely have a LOS beyond that reimbursable by the underlying managed care system. We use a support vector machine to construct a generic prediction system and then extend that system by incorporating a resampling or cost-sensitive method to address the imbalanced sample problem. Using 557 appendectomy cases from a tertiary medical center in Taiwan, we examine the effectiveness of the generic prediction system compared with the effectiveness of its extensions. The results suggest the viability of a data-driven approach to manage LOS by enabling service providers to identify in advance those patients who will likely need extended stays. The comparative analyses also show the relative advantages of the oversampling and cost-sensitive methods for addressing the imbalanced sample problem. The findings have important implications for research and practice.

Motivated by the importance of infectious disease informatics (IDI) and the challenges to IDI system development and data sharing, we design and implement BioPortal, a Web-based IDI system that integrates cross-jurisdictional data to support information sharing, analysis, and visualization in public health. In this paper, we discuss general challenges in IDI, describe BioPortal's architecture and functionalities, and highlight encouraging evaluation results obtained from a controlled experiment that focused on analysis accuracy, task performance efficiency, user information satisfaction, system usability, usefulness, and ease of use.

Drug-related problems, particularly those that result from sub- or overtherapeutic doses of high-alert medications, have become a growing concern in clinical medicine. In this paper, we use a model-tree-based regression technique (namely, M5) and support vector machine (SVM) for regression to develop learning-based systems for predicting the adequacy of a vancomycin regimen. We empirically evaluate each system's accuracy in predicting patients' peak and trough concentrations in different clinical scenarios characterized by renal functions and regimen types. Our data consist of 1099 clinical cases that were collected from a major tertiary medical center in southern Taiwan. We also examine the use of Bagging for enhancing the prediction power of the respective systems and include in our evaluation a salient one-compartment model for performance benchmark purposes. Overall, our evaluation results suggest that both M5 and SVM are significantly more accurate than the benchmark one-compartment model in predicting patients' peak and trough concentrations across all investigated clinical scenarios. M5 appears to benefit considerably from Bagging, which has a positive but seemingly smaller effect on SVM. Taken together, our findings indicate supervised learning techniques that are capable of effectively supporting clinicians' use of vancomycin or similar high-alert drugs in their patient care and management.

From a student's perspective, technology-assisted learning provides convenient access to interactive contents in a hyperlinked multimedia environment that allows increased control over the pace and timing of the presented material. Previous research examining different aspects of technology-assisted learning has found equivocal results concerning its effectiveness and outcomes. We extend prior studies by conducting a longitudinal field experiment to compare technology-assisted with face-to-face learning for students' learning of English. Our comparative investigation focuses on learning effectiveness, perceived course learnability, learning-community support, and learning satisfaction. In addition, we analyze the effects of different learning styles in moderating the effectiveness of and satisfaction with technology-assisted learning. Overall, our results show significantly greater learning effectiveness with technology-assisted learning than with conventional face-to-face learning. Learning style has noticeable influences on the effectiveness and outcomes of technology-assisted learning. We also observe an apparently important interaction effect with the medium for delivery, which may partially explain the equivocal results of previous research.

Abstract The importance of Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI) has significantly increased with the rapid and large‐scale migration of local/national security information from physical media to electronic platforms, including the Internet and information systems. Motivated by the significance of ISI in law enforcement (particularly in the digital government context) and the limited investigations of officers' technology‐acceptance decision‐making, we developed and empirically tested a factor model for explaining law‐enforcement officers' technology acceptance. Specifically, our empirical examination targeted the COPLINK technology and involved more than 280 police officers. Overall, our model shows a good fit to the data collected and exhibits satisfactory power for explaining law‐enforcement officers' technology acceptance decisions. Our findings have several implications for research and technology management practices in law enforcement, which are also discussed.

The expanded role of radiology in clinical medicine and its emerging digital practice have made patient-image management a growing concern for health-care organizations. A fundamental aspect of patient-image management is to provide a radiologist with convenient access to prior images relevant to his or her reading of a recently taken radiological examination. For confirmation or evaluation purposes, radiologists often reference relevant prior images of the same patient when interpreting the images of a current examination. To alleviate the time and physical requirements on radiologists, many health-care organizations have taken a prefetching strategy for meeting their patient-image reference needs. Radiologists' patient-image reference knowledge understandably may exhibit subtle individual variations and dynamically evolves over time, thus making the artificial intelligence-based inductive learning approach appealing. Central to patient-image prefetching is a knowledge base of which knowledge elements need continual update and individual customization. In this study, we extended a decision rule induction technique (i.e., CN2 algorithm) to address the challenging characteristics of the targeted learning. We experimentally evaluated the extended algorithm using the learning performances achieved by backpropagation neural network as benchmarks. Overall, our evaluation results suggest that the extended algorithm exhibited satisfactory learning effectiveness and, at the same time, showed desirable noise tolerance, immunity to missing data, and robustness in relation to limited training data.

Management of textual documents obtained from various online sources represents a challenge in emerging e-commerce environments, where individuals and organisations have to perform continual surveillance of important events or trends pertinent to multiple topic areas of interest. Observations of textual document management by individuals and organisations have suggested the popularity of using categories to organise, archive and access documents. The sheer volume and availability of documents obtained from the internet make manual document-category management prohibitively tedious, if practicable or effective at all. An automated approach underpinned by appropriate artificial intelligence techniques has potential for solving this problem. In this vein, a critical challenge is the preservation of the user's perspective on semantic coherence in different documents and thus supports his or her preferred practice for document groupings. Motivated by the significance of, and the need for automated document-category management, the current research proposed and experimentally examined an evolution-based approach for supporting user-centric document-category management in e-commerce environments. Specifically, we designed and implemented the Category Evolution (CE) technique, capable of supporting personalised document-category management by taking into account categories previously established by the user. Our evaluation results suggest that CE exhibited satisfactory effectiveness and reasonable robustness in different scenarios and achieved a performance level better than that recorded by the benchmark technique using complete category discovery.

When performing primary reading on a newly taken radiological examination, a radiologist often needs to reference relevant prior images of the same patient for confirmation or comparison purposes. Support of such image references is of clinical importance and may have significant effects on radiologists' examination reading efficiency, service quality, and work satisfaction. To effectively support such image reference needs, we proposed and developed a knowledge-based patient image pre-fetching system, addressing several challenging requirements of the application that include representation and learning of image reference heuristics and management of data-intensive knowledge inferencing. Moreover, the system demands an extensible and maintainable architecture design capable of effectively adapting to a dynamic environment characterized by heterogeneous and autonomous data source systems. In this paper, we developed a synthesized object-oriented entity- relationship model, a conceptual model appropriate for representing radiologists' prior image reference heuristics that are heuristic oriented and data intensive. We detailed the system architecture and design of the knowledge-based patient image pre-fetching system. Our architecture design is based on a client-mediator-server framework, capable of coping with a dynamic environment characterized by distributed, heterogeneous, and highly autonomous data source systems. To adapt to changes in radiologists' patient prior image reference heuristics, ID3-based multidecision-tree induction and CN2-based multidecision induction learning techniques were developed and evaluated. Experimentally, we examined effects of the pre-fetching system we created on radiologists' examination readings. Preliminary results show that the knowledge-based patient image pre-fetching system more accurately supports radiologists' patient prior image reference needs than the current practice adopted at the study site and that radiologists may become more efficient, consultatively effective, and better satisfied when supported by the pre-fetching system than when relying on the study site's pre-fetching practice.