Educational programming games (EPGs) build computational thinking (CT), a vital 21st-century skill. A core design challenge is how pedagogical and gameplay challenges are integrated to balance educational objectives with player engagement. This study formalizes two contrasting challenge design patterns that reflect distinct integration strategies: extrinsic programming challenges (C1), a pedagogy-oriented design where programming is the core challenge enforced through external constraints; and intrinsic programming challenges (C2), a gameplay-oriented design where programming serves as a tool for overcoming gameplay challenges raised by in-game puzzles. To examine these challenge design patterns, we developed two isomorphic EPGs WannaBone1 (C1) and WannaBone2 (C2), each featuring 20 levels introducing sequences, loops, conditionals, and global variables. A controlled classroom study with 306 primary school students reveals that both designs improve CT, whereas C2 yields significantly higher intrinsic learning motivation and high-order immersion of flow. These findings indicate that a gameplay-oriented rather than pedagogy-oriented design perspective better unites education and entertainment, guiding future EPGs design.

Recently, edge-assisted methods have been proposed as a promising technique to deliver fast and accurate on-device video analytics by partitioning frame data and dispatching them to edge servers for parallel execution. However, the data partition (DP) reduces the detection latency but decreases accuracy since objects may cross the boundaries of adjacent blocks. The effect of DP on the accuracy and latency depends on multiple vital parameters (e.g., target size, density, network, and computing resources) in an unknown and time-varying fashion. Moreover, these parameters are determined by the application scenarios and edge environment, which are uncertain and heterogeneous at the edge. Hence, how to partition frames to strike a balance between accuracy and latency is a nontrivial and intractable problem. To this end, we propose an online learning-based device-edge–cloud collaboration framework, ADPTD, to guide DP at the edge. We propose an optimal task dispatching algorithm (OTD) to minimize detection latency. Then, we propose a multiarmed bandit-based algorithm to pick a DP strategy and invoke OTD to dispatch tasks in each time slot. Theoretical analysis reveals that ADPTD achieves sublinear regret. Extensive experimental results show that ADPTD outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, achieving a latency reduction of up to$2.53\times $and improving accuracy by up to 49.4%.

Emerging live video streaming applications, e.g., Ultra High Definition videos and interactive video streaming, have put forward new demands for ultra-high bandwidth and reduced delay to match the desired quality of experience. Since current on-device Super-Resolution (SR) approaches are hindered by the limited end-device capabilities, we are motivated to take advantage of Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) and Computing in the Network technologies, such that SR videos can be processed on a more powerful infrastructure by integrating the resources from end-devices through the edge and all the way to the cloud. However, the integration of SR and MEC is non-trivial due to the challenges introduced by the features of SR tasks, and the heterogeneous nature of MEC resources. In this paper, we endeavor to explore and solve these challenges by presenting AVSA, which renders SR live video streaming efficiently with in-network computing. AVSA can adaptively allocate SR work-loads under heterogeneous resources and yield a cost-effective workload allocation with theoretical performance guarantees. Simulation results show that, compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our method achieves up to 13.06× speedup in terms of end-to-end latency.

Video has become the primary source of Internet traffic due to the advance of streaming media technology and the surge in user demand for real-time video streaming applications. In this case, neural-enhanced video streaming and mobile edge computing are proposed to improve video content quality on nearby MEC (Mobile Edge Computing) devices and to maintain low interaction delay under limited bandwidth. In order to maximize the architectural advantages brought by MEC, we designed HyperRTV, a terminal-edge collaborative real-time video transmission system with neural-enhanced streaming. HyperRTV consists of three key components: 1) a video super-resolution structure that uses hardware-accelerated DNNs to satisfy latency limits; 2) an adaptive bitrate controller that can dynamically adjust the bitrate under various network conditions; 3) a heuristic task offloading strategy based on the ant colony algorithm to further meet the heterogeneity and dynamics of the MEC environment. Experiments show that HyperRTV decreases bandwidth consumption by 46% on average and achieves a 48%-65% reduction in latency, consistently maintaining better visual quality and higher stability in unpredictable networks. Our task offloading strategy can reduce the execution and transfer time by 16.1%-19.5% in a MEC environment with multi-task requests.

The World Health Organization has reported a significant increase in mental health problems globally in 2022. In response, there has been a boom in the development of applications for physical and mental health regulation. However, many of these applications lack transparency in their dialogue process logic. To address this issue, this research proposes a communication flow based on the theory of psychological empathy and implemented it using positive psychology content and NLP techniques. Through a two-week pretest-posttest experiment with 25 participants, we found that this chatbot design not only improves the user's well-being but also makes the user feel understood.

For providing accurate and fast on-device high-resolution video analytics, edge-assisted methods are widely proposed by using lower-resolution frames and splitting them with overlap padding. The use of low-resolution frames can significantly reduce the computational workload of video analytics. Dividing a frame into multiple overlapping parts simultaneously improves parallelism and maintains processing accuracy. However, accuracy and latency serve as a pair of tradeoff metrics, and prioritizing one to optimize overlap padding or resolution selection will compromise the other metric. Fortunately, we have discovered that in real-world video analytics scenarios with varying object sizes, it is not necessary to simultaneously achieve a high overlap padding size and high resolution. Hence, how to set appropriate overlap padding size and resolution to strike a balance between accuracy and latency in practical scenarios is a nontrivial and intractable problem. To this end, we propose an online learning-based method to achieve adaptive overlap padding and resolution selection, called APR. We model the problem as an integer programming and propose a Muli-armed bandit (MAB) theory-based algorithm to solve it. We discretize the continuum overlap padding size into a finite set to narrow explore space and set the frame split strategy as context information to achieve fast convergence. Theoretical analysis reveals APR achieves sub-linear regret. Extensive experimental results show APR outperforms the benchmark methods, achieving up to 2.06 × speedup in terms of latency and 0.18× increase in accuracy.

Live video streaming is increasingly popular for its rich content and real-time interactions, but its demand for bandwidth has put a heavy burden on backbone networks. To save bandwidth, recent studies have proposed neural-enhanced live video streaming that deploys deep neural networks (DNNs) for video super-resolution (VSR) on end devices or nearby edge devices to enhance video quality by taking low-resolution frames as input and producing high-resolution output frames. In this solution, the high computational demands of high-quality VSR DNNs make them difficult to support on single end or edge device, necessitating the use of distributed resources in edge facilities. However, the distributed deployment of high-quality VSR DNNs for low-latency inference remains challenging due to the inherent data dependencies of VSR DNNs and the heterogeneity and dynamics of edge facilities. In this paper, we present WAEVSR, a novel collaborative neural-enhanced live video super-resolution system that enables effective leverage of distributed resources to maximize the latency-bounded quality in wide-area MEC environments. WAEVSR consists of two key components: 1) It deploys a parallel-friendly video super-resolution DNN among edge devices, 2) with an inference controller based on the variable-size sliding window to balance the latency and quality of distributed inference in the heterogeneous and dynamics MEC environment. Prototype-based evaluation shows that WAEVSR can achieve 2.5 × lower end-to-end latency than traditional super-resolution serving with a 0.01 drop in SSIM score. The case study also demonstrates its higher stability on latency than vanilla distributed MEC deployment.