Edita Djambazova

Fault-tolerant distributed systems are implemented in safety-critical applications where a system failure could cause severe damage and threaten human lives. To guarantee their flawless operation, their dependability attributes must be embedded early and continuously throughout system design, rather than treating them as an afterthought. This paper presents a conceptual framework for integrating the approach of adjustable reliability into the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC). The approach of adjustable reliability provides a way to distribute structural hardware redundancy and achieve the system reliability required by the application. The proposed framework shifts reliability from a design add-on to a core architectural decision variable in the design of dependable distributed systems. Opportunities and challenges involved are discussed, and some future research directions are outlined.

Contemporary education is being reshaped thanks to the transformative impact of various emerging intelligent educational technologies (IETs). This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of trends in the last five years in the application of IETs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. The review highlights the intelligent technologies used to enhance the teaching process and foster skill development and learner engagement. According to the bibliometric analysis, the IETs most applied in the STEM context are virtual and augmented reality, with more than 30% of publications, followed by artificial intelligence and machine learning. Additionally, the study makes a comprehensive overview of both the opportunities and challenges associated with the integration of IETs in STEM education. It provides a complete view of diverse intelligent technologies, and its findings suggest that applying IETs in STEM education offers opportunities for personalized teaching and learning. Combining various smart technologies can lead to more individualized task assignments, personal assessment, and individual learning paths. IETs introduce possibilities for collaboration, thus making the learning experience more engaging and efficient. They can be very beneficial in assisting the multidisciplinary STEM education by providing different and comprehensive viewpoints on a problem. Applying several IETs together can leverage the successful comprehension of complex STEM concepts.

In the last decade, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education has rapidly evolved and increasingly makes use of innovative technologies. This paper aims to explore and analyze the research on integrating the Internet of Things (IoT) within STEM education and outline key aspects and emerging trends. A complete picture of the recent ten years is gained by gathering bibliometric data from the Scopus and Web of Science scientific databases. Two search queries combining IoT, STEM education, and security were submitted to extract relevant publications and obtain insight into the explored area. The manual content analysis of the study results and publications outlines several key roles of IoT in implementing STEM educational practices, which are conceptualized to reflect user viewpoints. Widespread IoT applications in STEM at different educational levels are discussed and summarized. The special focus on security aspects showed that they are underrepresented, evidenced by the small number of publications related to IoT in STEM education. The importance of including topics aimed at designing and implementing secure IoT applications in STEM-oriented curricula and courses is also discussed.

This paper aims to summarize recent trends in the field of intelligent education and build on the research findings to propose a conceptual model of an intelligent educational environment (IEE) along with possible applications. A bibliometric analysis explores the recent trends to obtain insights into the current research directions. The concept of an IEE is introduced and correlated to other popular concepts in the educational field. Relevant user requirements for the IEE are defined and discussed. They serve as the basis for creating the conceptual model as a UML class diagram. The proposed model gives an overall picture of the relationships among the essential elements of the IEE and provides insights into its future development. Two possible applications are outlined: personalized teaching and learning and the assessment process. Any particular application of the model to build an IEE must consider all specific user requirements and add relevant details. The proposed conceptual model can be used to enhance the teaching–learning process and improve learners’ performance.