Abstract
Extreme weather events, such as windstorms, hurricanes, and heat waves, exert a significant impact on global natural catastrophes and pose substantial challenges for weather forecasting systems. To enhance the accuracy and preparedness for extreme weather events, this study explores the potential of using expert crowdsourcing in storm forecasting research through the application of stigmergic collaboration. We present the development and implementation of an expert Crowdsourcing for Semantic Annotation of Atmospheric Phenomena (eCSAAP) system, designed to leverage the collective knowledge and experience of meteorological experts. Through a participatory co-creation process, we iteratively developed a web-based annotation tool capable of capturing multi-faceted insights from weather data and generating visualizations for expert crowdsourcing campaigns. In this context, this article investigates the intrinsic coordination among experts engaged in crowdsourcing tasks focused on the semantic annotation of extreme weather events. The study brings insights about the behavior of expert crowds by considering the cognitive biases and highlighting the impact of existing annotations on the quality of data gathered from the crowd and the collective knowledge generated. The insights regarding the crowdsourcing dynamics, particularly stigmergy, offer a promising starting point for utilizing stigmergic collaboration as an effective coordination mechanism for weather experts in crowdsourcing platforms but also in other domains requiring expertise-driven collective intelligence.

Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the inadequate readiness of numerous nations to address diseases that could potentially evolve into epidemics or pandemics, posing risks to health systems and supply chains. Statistical analysis and predictive models were developed to manage COVID-19 and other diseases that harm public health. However, few public-policy decision-support tools are documented in the literature, although several governments have created them. In line with the previous developments, this tool uses socioeconomic features to model the COVID-19 province's mortality rates. This paper presents a tool to predict the mortality rate of a province using supervised learning techniques, named CuraZone. This tool was validated using 196 provinces in Peru for training and considering 31 characteristics. The tool displays the dataset's most essential characteristics, shows the country's mean square error (MSE), and predicts a province's mortality rate. In addition, the tool contributes to the field of Explainable AI (XAI), as it shows the importance of each feature. Highlighted contributions of this work include the support for the decision-making of governments or stakeholders in epidemics, providing the source code in an open and reproducible way, and the estimated mortality rate for specific populations of a neighborhood, city, or country.

Abstract
Visualizing and examining the intellectual landscape and evolution of scientific communities to support collaboration is crucial for multiple research purposes. In some cases, measuring similarities and matching patterns between research publication document sets can help to identify people with similar interests for building research collaboration networks and university-industry linkages. The premise of this work is assessing feasibility for resolving ambiguous cases in similarity detection to determine authorship with natural language processing (NLP) techniques so that crowdsourcing is applied only in instances that require human judgment. Using an NLP-crowdsourcing convergence strategy, we can reduce the costs of microtask crowdsourcing while saving time and maintaining disambiguation accuracy over large datasets. This article contributes a next-gen crowd-artificial intelligence framework that used an ensemble of term frequency-inverse document frequency and bidirectional encoder representation from transformers to obtain similarity rankings for pairs of scientific documents. A sequence of content-based similarity tasks was created using a crowd-powered interface for solving disambiguation problems. Our experimental results suggest that an adaptive NLP-crowdsourcing hybrid framework has advantages for inter-researcher similarity detection tasks where fully automatic algorithms provide unsatisfactory results, with the goal of helping researchers discover potential collaborators using data-driven approaches.

Abstract
The VR2Care project aims to create age-friendly virtual environments fostering interactive technologies for promoting physical activity, rehabilitation, and social interaction. Smart living environments have intelligent interfaces in a single or multi-user context. The VR2Care ecosystem combines virtual reality technologies for supervised exercise with natural interaction techniques, enhancing social virtualization with gamification aspects in the practice of physical activity in a metaverse context. This paper presents the infrastructure and the high-level functional architecture of the VR2Care ecosystem which provides the necessary tools to construct the communication bridges to bring together people sharing common interests, objectives, or ambitions.

Abstract
The use of 3D animations in medical education is becoming increasingly popular. Indeed, animations are an efficient way to present complex information, reducing time spent reading textbooks. Thus, in the educational contexts, animations can help students learn more efficiently, retain and better understand information. In addition to improving the learning experience, medical education is a highly important and necessary endeavor, as it can directly affect the lives of patients. These videos can be useful in emergency care instructions and provide information about how to administer CPR to a patient or help in forensic reconstructions; a doctor might explain a medical term to a patient in a friendly way, and they can also help patients understand complex procedures. We find it important to understand if students and schools, when challenged, take a role in their community preparedness for major health problems. Projects led by schools are addressed within educational scenarios focused on STEM education and developed under a relevant public health issue through their continuous engagement in open schooling approach. By implementing an educational scenario with a focus on 3D animation, and thus potentiate the use of this technology, we intend to help raise awareness on the public health theme. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Abstract
The human population with disability is rapidly expanding, more than 15% of people worldwide suffer from a disability and, despite the availability of accessibility guidelines, the websites are still inaccessible. Moreover, professionals with knowledge of accessibility and design abilities are hard to come by. Therefore, the current paper addresses the introduction of accessibility to the Software Engineering students through AccessCademy, a gamification-based tool, in a fun way. The activity is delivered via a Web-based learning environment, that presents bad accessibility scenarios or failures based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and then encourages the students to solve them. Furthermore, a case study will be presented that evaluated the learning effectiveness of the tool in the context of a university course. The results demonstrated the potential of AccessCademy which offers students a fun and engaging way to learn about accessibility, to understand the importance of accessible design with WCAG and gain accessible design skills as well. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024.