Lei Shi

• PhD in Computer Science
• Senior Lecturer at Newcastle University

The integration of AI in education offers significant potential to enhance learning efficiency. Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Llama, allow students to query a wide range of topics, providing unprecedented flexibility. However, LLMs face challenges, such as handling varying content relevance and lack of personalization....

Gamification is commonly employed to support the formation of positive psychological states and learning outcomes, with one of the primary psychological factors chiefly relevant to learning being the flow state. However, the effects of gamification on students’ flow experience are still little known. Filling this gap, we conducted a between-subject...

Leveraging user behavior has become an increasingly valuable resource for modeling and personalizing systems based on the unique characteristics of each user. While recent studies have recently been conducted along these lines, there is still a lack of understanding of the relationship between students’ Myers-Briggs Type Indicators and their behavi...

Despite recent progress, hand gesture recognition, a highly regarded method of human computer interaction, still faces considerable challenges. In this paper, we address the problem of individual user style variation, which can significantly affect system performance. While previous work only supports the manual inclusion of customized hand gesture...

Sign language has been extensively studied as a means of facilitating effective communication between hearing individuals and the deaf community. With the continuous advancements in virtual reality (VR) and gamification technologies, an increasing number of studies have begun to explore the application of these emerging technologies in sign languag...

In the rapidly evolving landscape of text-based communication, the importance of the initial interaction phase remains paramount. This study investigates the potential benefits that a proposed AI chat assistant equipped with text recommendation and polishing functionalities can bring during initial textual interactions. The system allows the users...

The field of Knowledge Tracing aims to understand how students learn and master knowledge over time by analyzing their historical behaviour data. To achieve this goal, many researchers have proposed Knowledge Tracing models that use data from Intelligent Tutoring Systems to predict students' subsequent actions. However, with the development of Inte...

The field of Knowledge Tracing (KT) aims to understand how students learn and master knowledge over time by analyzing their historical behaviour data. To achieve this goal, many researchers have proposed KT models that use data from Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) to predict students' subsequent actions. However, with the development of ITS, lar...

Layout guides the position and scale of design elements for desirable aesthetics and effective demonstration. Recently, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have proved their capability in generating effective layouts. However, current GANs ignore the situation where the amounts and types of the input design elements are given and determined. In...

The escalating volume of textual data necessitates adept and scalable Information Extraction (IE) systems in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyse massive text collections in a detailed manner. While most deep learning systems are designed to handle textual information as it is, the gap in the existence of the interface between...

In text-based communication, the enhancement of user experiences during the earliest stages of contact, particularly while establishing rapport, is of utmost importance. This research investigates differences between males and females in the utilisation of an AI conversation assistant at the beginning of a conversation. The system has text "Recomme...

Figure 1: The implemented gamified virtual environments for ASL learning: 3D (left) and 2D (right). ABSTRACT With ongoing advancements in virtual reality and gamification, researchers have started exploring their application in sign language learning, aiming at enhancing communication between hearing individuals and the deaf community. This study c...

In this research, we investigate the influence of utilising AI-generated photographs on malicious bots that engage in disinformation, fraud, reputation manipulation, and other types of malicious activity on social networks. Our research aims to compare the performance metrics of social bots that employ AI photos with those that use other types of p...

Accurate clinical coding using the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) standard is essential for healthcare analytics. ICD-11 introduces new coding guidelines and cluster structures, posing challenges for existing coding tools. This research presents an automated approach to generate valid ICD-11 cluster codes from medical text. Natural...

In this research, we investigate the influence of utilizing artificial intelligence (AI)-generated photographs on malicious bots that engage in disinformation, fraud, reputation manipulation, and other types of malicious activity on social networks. Our research aims to compare the performance metrics of social bots that employ AI photos with those...

Knowledge graph visualization in ultrasound reports is essential for enhancing medical decision making and the efficiency and accuracy of computer-aided analysis tools. This study aims to propose an intelligent method for analyzing ultrasound reports through knowledge graph visualization. Firstly, we provide a novel method for extracting key term n...

The continuous application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in online education has led to significant progress, especially in the field of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), online courses and learning management systems (LMS). An important research direction of the field is to provide students with customised learning trajectories vi...

Knowledge tracing aims to estimate students’ knowledge state or skill mastering level over time, which is evolving into an essential task in educational technology. Traditional knowledge tracing algorithms generally use one or a few features to predict students’ behaviour and do not consider the latent relations between these features, which could...

Sign languages enable effective communication between deaf and hearing people. Despite years of extensive pedagogical research, learning sign language online comes with a number of difficulties that might be frustrating for some students. Indeed, most of the existing approaches rely heavily on learning resources uploaded on websites, assuming that...

Users' viewing behavior could affect their perception and evaluation of design works. Taking into account users' visual attention as a subjective cognition cue, we used eye-tracking evidence to identify users' focus areas for further analysis. We conducted experiments to extract the image features of design images and the reviewers' eye-tracking da...

The use of sign language is a highly effective way of communicating with individuals who experience hearing loss. Despite extensive research, many learners find traditional methods of learning sign language, such as web-based question-answer methods, to be unengaging. This has led to the development of new techniques, such as the use of virtual rea...

Virtual reality (VR) technology capably complements exhibitions. Despite the considerable attention to the development of VR exhibitions, corresponding 3D user interface (UIs) design is in strong need. In this paper, we focus on the design of 3D UIs for VR exhibitions based on head-mounted displays (HMDs). The paper presents two workshops: one expl...

Background: Technological advances in the smart home have created new opportunities for supporting digital citizens’ well-being and facilitating their empowerment but have enabled new types of complex online harms to develop. Recent statistics have indicated that ‘smart’ technology ownership increases yearly, driven by lower costs and increased acc...

The use of sign language is a highly effective way of communicating with individuals who experience hearing loss. Despite extensive research, many learners find traditional methods of learning sign language, such as web-based question-answer methods, to be unengaging. This has led to the development of new techniques, such as the use of virtual rea...

Environmental stressors combined with a predisposition to experience mental health problems increase the risk for SI (Suicidal Ideation) among college/university students. However, university health and wellbeing services know little about machine learning methods and techniques to identify as early as possible students with higher risk. We develop...

With the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), an increasing number of Machine Learning (ML) technologies have been widely applied in many aspects of life. In the field of education, Intelligence Tutoring Systems (ITS) have also made significant advancements using these technologies. Developing different teaching strategies automatical...

Sign language can make possible effective communication between hearing and deaf-mute people. Despite years of extensive pedagogical research, learning sign language remains a formidable task, with the majority of the current systems relying extensively on online learning resources, presuming that users would regularly access them; yet, this approa...

Much research has been done on the relationship between emotions and colors, and many color scheme recommendation tools have been developed. These tools can often help recommend a suitable color scheme to express a certain emotion, but it is still difficult to design satisfying schemes based on such recommendations. In this study, based on the Colo...

With the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), an increasing number of Machine Learning (ML) technologies have been widely applied in many aspects of life. In the field of education, Intelligence Tutoring Systems (ITS) have also made significant advancements using these technologies. Developing different teaching strategies automatical...

Sign language can make possible effective communication between hearing and deaf-mute people. Despite years of extensive pedagogical research, learning sign language remains a formidable task, with the majority of the current systems relying extensively on online learning resources, presuming that users would regularly access them; yet, this approa...

Environmental stressors combined with a predisposition to experience mental health problems increase the risk for SI (Suicidal Ideation) among college/university students. However, university health and wellbeing services know little about machine learning methods and techniques to identify as early as possible students with higher risk. We develop...

This paper explores deep latent variable models for semi-supervised paraphrase generation, where the missing target pair is modelled as a latent paraphrase sequence. We present a novel unsupervised model named variational sequence auto-encoding reconstruction (VSAR), which performs latent sequence inference given an observed text. To leverage infor...

In March 29, 2023, the UK Government released a white paper outlining its plans to implement a pro-innovation approach to Artificial Intelligence (AI) regulation and strengthen the UK's position as a global leader in AI. As part of the white paper, the government has developed five key principles to guide regulators. These principles encompass saf...

XAI with natural language processing aims to produce human-readable explanations as evidence for AI decision-making, which addresses explainability and transparency. However, from an HCI perspective, the current approaches only focus on delivering a single explanation, which fails to account for the diversity of human thoughts and experiences in la...

Online course reviews have been an essential way in which course providers could get insights into students’ perceptions about the course quality, especially in the context of massive open online courses (MOOCs), where it is hard for both parties to get further interaction. Analyzing online course reviews is thus an inevitable part for course provi...

Lacking behavioural data between students and an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) has been an obstacle for improving its personalisation capability. One feasible solution is to train “sim students”, who simulate real students’ behaviour in the ITS. We can then use their generated behavioural data to train the ITS to offer real students personalise...

XAI with natural language processing aims to produce human-readable explanations as evidence for AI decision-making, which addresses explainability and transparency. However , from an HCI perspective, the current approaches only focus on delivering a single explanation, which fails to account for the diversity of human thoughts and experiences in l...

Despite rapid advances of modern artificial intelligence (AI), there is a growing concern regarding its capacity to be explainable, transparent, and accountable. One crucial step towards such AI systems involves reliable and efficient uncertainty quantification methods. Existing approaches to uncertainty quantification in natural language processin...

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have attracted extensive interest in text classification tasks due to their expected superior performance in representation learning. However, most existing studies adopted the same semi-supervised learning setting as the vanilla Graph Convolution Network (GCN), which requires a large amount of labelled data during trai...

Gamification has been widely used to design better educational systems aiming to increase students’ concentration, motivation, engagement, flow experience, and others positive experiences. With advances in research on gamification in education, over the past few years, many studies have highlighted the need to tailor the gamification design propert...

Decision Forests have attracted the academic community’s interest mainly due to their simplicity and transparency. This paper proposes two novel decision forest building techniques, called Maximal Information Coefficient Forest (MICF) and Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient Forest (PCCF). The proposed new algorithms use Pearson’s Correlation Coeffici...

Leveraging the power of computational methods, AI can perform effective strategies in intelligent design. Researchers are pushing the boundaries of AI, developing computational systems to solve complex questions. The authors investigate the association of user preference for UI and deep image features, aiming to predict user preference level using...

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the whole world in various ways. One type of impact is that communication, work, interaction, a great part of our lives has moved online on various platforms, with some of the most popular being the social media ones. Another, arguably less visible impact, is the emotional impact. Detecting and understanding emoti...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become a popular choice for e-learning thanks to their great flexibility. However, due to large numbers of learners and their diverse backgrounds, it is taxing to offer real-time support. Learners may post their feelings of confusion and struggle in the respective MOOC forums, but with the large volume of po...

As the largest distance learning university in the UK, the Open University has more than 250,000 students enrolled, making it also the largest academic institute in the UK. However, many students end up failing or withdrawing from online courses, which makes it extremely crucial to identify those “at risk” students and inject necessary intervention...

Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) systems have become prevalent in recent years and draw more attention, a.o., due to the coronavirus pandemic’s impact. However, there is a well-known higher chance of dropout from MOOCs than from conventional off-line courses. Researchers have implemented extensive methods to explore the reasons behind learner attr...

The analysis of literature within a research domain can provide significant value during preliminary research. While literature reviews may provide an in-depth understanding of current studies within an area, they are limited by the number of studies which they take into account. Importantly, whilst publications in hot areas abound, it is not feasi...

The classroom environment is a major contributor to the learning process in schools. Young students are affected by different details in their academic progress, be it their own characteristics, their teacher’s or their peers’. The combination of these factors is known to have an impact on the attainment of young students. However, what is less kno...

Schoolchildren’s academic progress is known to be affected by the classroom environment. It is important for teachers and administrators to understand their pupils’ status and how various factors in the classroom may affect them, as it can help them adjust pedagogical interventions and management styles. In this study, we expand a novel agent-based...

This study aims to explore and improve ways of handling a continuous variable dataset, in order to predict student dropout in MOOCs, by implementing various models, including the ones most successful across various domains, such as recurrent neural network (RNN), and tree-based algorithms. Unlike existing studies, we arguably fairly compare each al...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become a popular choice for e-learning thanks to their great flexibility. However, due to large numbers of learners and their diverse backgrounds, it is taxing to offer real-time support. Learners may post their feelings of confusion and struggle in the respective MOOC forums, but with the large volume of po...

Visual aesthetics is vital in determining the usability of the graphical user interface (GUI). It can strengthen the competitiveness of interactive online applications. Human aesthetic preferences for GUI are implicit and linked to various aspects of perception. In this study, an aesthetic GUI image database was constructed with 38,423 design works...

One of the main challenges in the field of learning technologies is the automatic students' flow experience identification in educational systems. This challenge occurs because the flow experience identification is usually conducted by using invasive techniques (e.g., eye trackers or electroencephalograms) or approaches that are not able to handle...

Millions of people have enrolled and enrol (especially in the Covid-19 pandemic world) in MOOCs. However, the retention rate of learners is notoriously low. The majority of the research work on this issue focuses on predicting the dropout rate, but very few use explainable learning patterns as part of this analysis. However, visual representation o...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) exhibit a remarkable heterogeneity of students. The advent of complex "big data" from MOOC platforms is a challenging yet rewarding opportunity to deeply understand how students are engaged in MOOCs. Past research, looking mainly into overall behavior, may have missed patterns related to student diversity. Using...

While Massive Open Online Course (MOOCs) platforms provide knowledge in a new and unique way, the very high number of dropouts is a significant drawback. Several features are considered to contribute towards learner attrition or lack of interest, which may lead to disengagement or total dropout. The jury is still out on which factors are the most a...

Gamification design has benefited from data-driven approaches to creating strategies based on students characteristics. However, these strategies need further validation to verify their effectiveness in e-learning environments. The exploratory study presented in this paper thus aims at verifying how data-driven gamified strategies are perceived by...

Gamification has been widely employed in the educational domain over the past eight years when the term became a trend. However, the literature states that gamification still lacks formal definitions to support the design and analysis of gamified strategies. This paper analysed the game elements employed in gamified learning environments through a...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) continue to see increasing enrolment, but only a small percent of enrolees completes the MOOCs. Whilst a lot of research has focused on predicting completion, there is little research analysing the ostensible contradiction between the MOOC's popularity and the apparent disengagement of learners. Specifically, it...

An exploratory study on social interactions of MOOC students in FutureLearn was conducted, to answer "how can we cluster students based on their social interactions?" Comments were categorized based on how students interacted with them, e.g., how a student's comment received replies from peers. Statistical modelling and machine learning were used t...

This paper presents for the first time a detailed analysis of fine-grained navigation style identification in MOOCs backed by a large number of active learners. The result shows 1) whilst the sequential style is clearly in evidence, the global style is less prominent; 2) the majority of the learners do not belong to either category; 3) navigation s...

An exploratory study on social interactions of MOOC students in FutureLearn was conducted, to answer "how can we cluster students based on their social interactions?" Comments were categorized based on how students interacted with them, e.g., how a student's comment received replies from peers. Statistical modelling and machine learning were used t...

This chapter demonstrates a temporal analysis in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), towards identifying at-risk students through analyzing their demographical changes. At-risk students are those who tend to drop out from the MOOCs. Previous studies have shown that how students interact in MOOCs could be used to identify at-risk students. Some stu...

This paper presents for the first time a detailed analysis of fine-grained navigation style identification in MOOCs backed by a large number of active learners. The result shows 1) whilst the sequential style is clearly in evidence, the global style is less prominent; 2) the majority of the learners do not belong to either category; 3) navigation s...

Millions of people have enrolled and enrol (especially in the Covid-19 pandemic world) in MOOCs. However, the retention rate of learners is notoriously low. The majority of the research work on this issue focuses on predicting the dropout rate, but very few use explainable learning patterns as part of this analysis. However, visual representation o...

Recent research has shown that using gamification can prone to impact negatively on the motivation of students in educational systems. One of the reasons is that people are motivated or demotivated by different gamification elements according to their "gamer type". Thus, one of the main challenges in this field is to tailor gamified educational sys...

Abstract Gamification has been widely employed in the educational domain over the past eight years when the term became a trend. However, the literature states that gamification still lacks formal definitions to support the design and analysis of gamified strategies. This paper analysed the game elements employed in gamified learning environments t...

Gamification design has benefited from data-driven approaches to creating strategies based on students' characteristics. However, these strategies need further validation to verify their effectiveness in e-learning environments. The exploratory study presented in this paper thus aims at verifying how data-driven gamified strategies are perceived by...

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) continue to see increasing enrolment, but only a small percent of enrolees completes the MOOCs. Whilst a lot of research has focused on predicting completion, there is little research analysing the ostensible contradiction between the MOOC’s popularity and the apparent disengagement of learners. Specifically, it...

Flow is a state of deep engagement that is highly related to the learning experiences. One of the biggest challenges in this field is to provide automatic and implicit students' flow experience identification in educational systems, contributing to the educational systems design and evaluation improvement. In this paper, we propose a theory-driven...

Gamification has been widely employed in the educational domain over the past eight years when the term became a trend. However, the literature states that gamification still lacks formal definitions to support the design of gamified strategies. This paper aims to create a taxonomy for the game elements, based on gamification experts' opinions. Aft...

Gamification frameworks can aid in gamification planning for education. Most frameworks, however, do not provide ways to select, relate or recommend how to use game elements , to gamify a certain educational task. Instead, most provide a "one-size-fits-all" approach covering all learners, without considering different user characteristics, such as...

Gamification frameworks can aid in gamification planning for education. Most frameworks, however, do not provide ways to select, relate or recommend how to use game elements, to gamify a certain educational task. Instead, most provide a "one-size-fits-all" approach covering all learners, without considering different user characteristics, such as g...

While Massive Open Online Course (MOOCs) platforms provide knowledge in a new and unique way, the very high number of dropouts is a significant drawback. Several features are considered to contribute towards learner attrition or lack of interest, which may lead to disengagement or total dropout. The jury is still out on which factors are the most a...

With the advent of 'big data', various new methods have been proposed , to explore data in several domains. In the domain of learning (and e-learning, in particular), the outcomes lag somewhat behind. This is not unexpected , as e-learning has the additional dimensions of learning and engagement, as well as other psychological aspects, to name but...

With the advent of ‘big data’, various new methods have been proposed, to explore data in several domains. In the domain of learning (and e-learning, in particular), the outcomes lag somewhat behind. This is not unexpected, as e-learning has the additional dimensions of learning and engagement, as well as other psychological aspects, to name but a...

Stereotyping is the first type of adaptation in education ever proposed. However, the early systems have never dealt with the numbers of learners that current MOOCs provide. Thus, the umbrella question that this work tackles is if learner characteristics can predict their overall, but also fine-grain behaviour. Earlier results point at differences...

Big data and analytics for educational information systems, despite having gained researchers' attention, are still in their infancy and will take years to mature. Massive open online courses (MOOCs), which record learner-computer interactions, bring unprecedented opportunities to analyse learner activities at a very fine granularity, using very la...

Data-intensive analysis of massive open online courses (MOOCs) is popular. Researchers have been proposing various parameters conducive to analysis and prediction of student behaviour and outcomes in MOOCs, as well as different methods to analyse and use these parameters, ranging from statistics, to NLP, to ML, and even graph analysis. In this pape...

Whilst a high dropout rate is a well-known problem in MOOCs, few studies take a data-driven approach to understand the reasons of such a phenomenon, and to thus be in the position to recommend and design possible adaptive solutions to alleviate it. In this study, we are particularly interested in finding a novel early detection mechanism of potenti...