Abstract
The indicators of student success at higher education institutions are continuously analysed to increase the students' enrolment in multiple scientific areas. Every semester, the students respond to a pedagogical survey that aims to collect the student opinion of curricular units in terms of content and teaching methodologies. Using this information, we intend to anticipate the success in higher-level courses and prevent dropouts. Specifically, this paper contributes with an interpretable student classification method. The proposed solution relies on (i) a pedagogical survey to collect student's opinions; (ii) a statistical data analysis to validate the reliability of the survey; and (iii) machine learning algorithms to classify the success of a student. In addition, the proposed method includes an explainable mechanism to interpret the classifications and their main factors. This transparent pipeline was designed to have implications in both digital and sustainable education, impacting the three pillars of sustainability, i.e.,economic, social, and environmental, where transparency is a cornerstone. The work was assessed with a dataset from a Portuguese higher-level institution, contemplating multiple courses from different departments. The most promising results were achieved with Random Forest presenting 98% in accuracy and F-measure.

Abstract
Accurate predictions of time series are increasingly required to support judgments in a variety of decisions. Several predictive models are available to support these predictions, depending on how each field offers a data variety with varied behavior. The use of artificial neural networks (ANN) at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic was significant since the tool may offer forecasting data for various conditions and hence assist in governing critical choices. In this context, this paper describes a system for predicting the daily number of cases, fatalities, and Intensive Care Unit (ICU) patients for the next 28 days in five European countries: Portugal, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Germany. The database selection is based on comparable mitigation processes to analyze the impact of safety procedure flexibilization with the most recent numbers of COVID-19. Additionally, it is intended to check the algorithm's adaptability to different variants throughout time. The network's input data has been normalized to account for the size of the countries in the study and smoothed by seven days. The mean absolute error (MAE) was employed as a comparing criterion of two datasets, one with data from the beginning of the pandemic and another with data from the last year, since all variables (cases, deaths, and ICU patients) may be tendentious in percentage analysis. The best architecture produced a general MAE prediction for the 28 days ahead of 256,53 daily cases, 0,59 daily deaths, and 1,63 ICU patients, all numbers normalized by million people. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Abstract
Narratives are used to convey information and are an important way of understanding the world through information sharing. With the increasing development in Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence, it becomes relevant to explore new techniques to extract, process, and visualize narratives. Narrative visualization tools enable a news story reader to have a different perspective from the traditional format, allowing it to be presented in a schematic way, using representative symbols to summarize it. We propose a new narrative visualization approach using icons to represent important narrative elements. The proposed visualization is integrated in Brat2Viz, a narrative annotation visualization tool that implements a pipeline that transforms text annotations into formal representations leading to narrative visualizations. To build the icon visualization, we present a narrative element extraction process that uses automatic sentence extraction, automatic translation methods, and an algorithm that determines the actors' most adequate descriptions. Then, we introduce a method to create an icon dictionary, with the ability to automatically search for icons. Furthermore, we present a critical analysis and user-based evaluation of the results resorting to the responses collected in two separate surveys.

Abstract
ABSTR A C T Since energy hubs meet the needs of customers for different energies, their construction rate has increased in recent years. The annual growth of load demand on the one hand and the declining efficiency of hub converters on the other hand have posed many challenges for hub designers. Therefore, this study develops a multi-objective model for the design of hub considering converters' variable efficiency, degradation of equipment and annual growth of the load and energy prices. The proposed hub is equipped by a power-to-gas (P2G) technology and its consumers participate in an integrated demand response (IDR) program. The problem is formulated in mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP) format and is solved via DICOPT in GAMS environment. The simu-lation results substantiate that dynamic framework has led to the much more accurate determination of equipment capacity. Besides, the results indicate that the P2G technology reduces CO2 emissions by 9.89% through consuming CO2 emitted from the CHP and boiler. The results also illustrate that P2G increases the ef-ficiency of gas-fired converters by injecting hydrogen into them, thus reducing losses by 9.2%.

Abstract

Abstract
Vocational high school is a secondary education whose practice portion is larger than its theoretical portion. This allows students to do more hands-on practice in the laboratory, as skill competency is very important in vocational education. Through practice, students have the skills to become competent and skilled technicians in the future. When students practice in a hands-on laboratory, errors may occur that can injure students, equipment, and components. In addition, short circuits can also endanger student safety. Therefore, to improve practical skills in the laboratory, teachers must find innovative ways to incorporate these methods into the learning process. One of the things that can be done to improve students’ practical skills is to use simulation software before doing direct practice in the laboratory. In-depth interviews were conducted with three electrical engineering teachers to verify the perspective of the proposed model. The results suggest that the proposed design is likely to improve problem-solving skills when an error occurs during the simulation, and it will improve practical skills when using hands-on laboratories so that students learn more about hands-on lab practice in vocational high school. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.