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Publications

Publications by Álvaro Figueira

2022

Do Top Higher Education Institutions' Social Media Communication Differ Depending on Their Rank?

Authors
Figueira, A; Nascimento, LV;

Publication
Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies, WEBIST 2022, Valletta, Malta, October 25-27, 2022.

Abstract
Higher Education Institutions use social media as a marketing channel to attract and engage users so that the institution is promoted and thus a wide range of benefits can be achieved. These institutions are evaluated globally on various success parameters, being published in rankings. In this paper, we analyze the publishing strategies and compare the results with their overall ranking positions. The results show that there is a tendency to find a particular strategy in the top ranked universities. We also found cases where the strategies are less prominent and do not match the ranking positions. Copyright © 2022 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved.

2023

PROGpedia: Collection of source-code submitted to introductory programming assignments

Authors
Paiva, JC; Leal, JP; Figueira, A;

Publication
DATA IN BRIEF

Abstract
Learning how to program is a difficult task. To acquire the re-quired skills, novice programmers must solve a broad range of programming activities, always supported with timely, rich, and accurate feedback. Automated assessment tools play a major role in fulfilling these needs, being a common pres-ence in introductory programming courses. As programming exercises are not easy to produce and those loaded into these tools must adhere to specific format requirements, teachers often opt for reusing them for several years. There-fore, most automated assessment tools, particularly Mooshak, store hundreds of submissions to the same programming ex-ercises, as these need to be kept after automatically pro-cessed for possible subsequent manual revision. Our dataset consists of the submissions to 16 programming exercises in Mooshak proposed in multiple years within the 2003-2020 timespan to undergraduate Computer Science students at the Faculty of Sciences from the University of Porto. In particular, we extract their code property graphs and store them as CSV files. The analysis of this data can enable, for instance, the generation of more concise and personalized feedback based on similar accepted submissions in the past, the identifica-tion of different strategies to solve a problem, the under -standing of a student's thinking process, among many other findings.(c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )

2022

A WebApp for Reliability Detection in Social Media

Authors
David, F; Guimarães, N; Figueira, A;

Publication
CENTERIS 2022 - International Conference on ENTERprise Information Systems / ProjMAN - International Conference on Project MANagement / HCist - International Conference on Health and Social Care Information Systems and Technologies 2022, Hybrid Event / Lisbon, Portugal, November 9-11, 2022.

Abstract

2023

Bibliometric Analysis of Automated Assessment in Programming Education: A Deeper Insight into Feedback

Authors
Paiva, JC; Figueira, A; Leal, JP;

Publication
ELECTRONICS

Abstract
Learning to program requires diligent practice and creates room for discovery, trial and error, debugging, and concept mapping. Learners must walk this long road themselves, supported by appropriate and timely feedback. Providing such feedback in programming exercises is not a humanly feasible task. Therefore, the early and steadily growing interest of computer science educators in the automated assessment of programming exercises is not surprising. The automated assessment of programming assignments has been an active area of research for over a century, and interest in it continues to grow as it adapts to new developments in computer science and the resulting changes in educational requirements. It is therefore of paramount importance to understand the work that has been performed, who has performed it, its evolution over time, the relationships between publications, its hot topics, and open problems, among others. This paper presents a bibliometric study of the field, with a particular focus on the issue of automatic feedback generation, using literature data from the Web of Science Core Collection. It includes a descriptive analysis using various bibliometric measures and data visualizations on authors, affiliations, citations, and topics. In addition, we performed a complementary analysis focusing only on the subset of publications on the specific topic of automatic feedback generation. The results are highlighted and discussed.

2022

An NLP Approach to Understand the Top Ranked Higher Education Institutions' Social Media Communication Strategy

Authors
Figueira, A; Nascimento, LV;

Publication
Web Information Systems and Technologies - 18th International Conference, WEBIST 2022, Valletta, Malta, October 25-27, 2022, Revised Selected Papers

Abstract
In this paper we examine the use of social media as a marketing channel by Higher Education Institutions (HEI) and its impact on the institution's brand, attracting top professionals and students. HEIs are annually evaluated globally based on various success parameters to be published in rankings. Specifically, we analyze the Twitter publishing strategies of the selected HEIs, and we compare the results with their overall ranking positions. Our study shows that there are no significant differences between the well-known university rankings based on Kendall t and RBO metrics. However, our data retrieval indicates a tendency for the top-ranked universities to adopt specific strategies, which are further emphasized when analyzing emotions and topics. Conversely, some universities have less prominent strategies that do not align with their ranking positions. This study provides insights into the role of social media in the marketing strategies of HEIs and its impact on their global rankings. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

2023

On the Quality of Synthetic Generated Tabular Data

Authors
Espinosa, E; Figueira, A;

Publication
MATHEMATICS

Abstract
Class imbalance is a common issue while developing classification models. In order to tackle this problem, synthetic data have recently been developed to enhance the minority class. These artificially generated samples aim to bolster the representation of the minority class. However, evaluating the suitability of such generated data is crucial to ensure their alignment with the original data distribution. Utility measures come into play here to quantify how similar the distribution of the generated data is to the original one. For tabular data, there are various evaluation methods that assess different characteristics of the generated data. In this study, we collected utility measures and categorized them based on the type of analysis they performed. We then applied these measures to synthetic data generated from two well-known datasets, Adults Income, and Liar+. We also used five well-known generative models, Borderline SMOTE, DataSynthesizer, CTGAN, CopulaGAN, and REaLTabFormer, to generate the synthetic data and evaluated its quality using the utility measures. The measurements have proven to be informative, indicating that if one synthetic dataset is superior to another in terms of utility measures, it will be more effective as an augmentation for the minority class when performing classification tasks.

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