Deep Learning and Collaborative Filtering-Based Methods for Students’ Performance Prediction and Course Recommendation

At the beginning of a new semester, due to the limited understanding of the new courses, it is difficult for students to make predictive choices about the courses of the current semester. In order to help students solve this problem, this paper proposed a hybrid prediction model based on deep learning and collaborative filtering. The proposed model can automatically generate personalized suggestions about courses in the next semester to assist students in course selection. The two important tasks of this study are course recommendation and student ranking prediction. First, we use a user-based collaborative filtering model to give a list of recommended courses by calculating the similarity between users. Then, for the courses in the list, we use a hybrid prediction model to predict the student’s performance in each course, that is, ranking prediction. Finally, we will give a list of courses that the student is good at or not good at according to the predicted ranking of the courses. Our method is evaluated on students’ data from two departments of our university. Through experiments, we compared the hybrid prediction model with other nonhybrid models and confirmed the good effect of our model. By using our model, students can refer to the different recommendation lists given and choose courses that they may be interested in and good at. The proposed method can be widely applied in Internet of Things and industrial vocational learning systems.

A multi-task learning based hybrid prediction algorithm for privacy preserving human activity recognition framework

There is ever increasing need to use computer vision devices to capture videos as part of many real-world applications. However, invading privacy of people is the cause of concern. There is need for protecting privacy of people while videos are used purposefully based on objective functions. One such use case is human activity recognition without disclosing human identity. In this paper, we proposed a multi-task learning based hybrid prediction algorithm (MTL-HPA) towards realising privacy preserving human activity recognition framework (PPHARF). It serves the purpose by recognizing human activities from videos while preserving identity of humans present in the multimedia object. Face of any person in the video is anonymized to preserve privacy while the actions of the person are exposed to get them extracted. Without losing utility of human activity recognition, anonymization is achieved. Humans and face detection methods file to reveal identity of the persons in video. We experimentally confirm with joint-annotated human motion data base (JHMDB) and daily action localization in YouTube (DALY) datasets that the framework recognises human activities and ensures non-disclosure of privacy information. Our approach is better than many traditional anonymization techniques such as noise adding, blurring, and masking.