Student attrition among undergraduate students is among the most concerned issues in higher educational institutions in Malaysia and abroad. This problem arises when these students unable to complete their studies within the stipulated period when there are majoring in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. Research findings highlight numerous factors contribute to the student attrition. These findings also suggest that the factors differ from one case to another case. Effects of student attrition not only for the student itself but also to the institutions and community. It is challenging to classify the factors based on general assumptions. Moreover, increasing students’ information makes the problem more complicated. This student information can provide a useful database for analytical analysis. Methods such as big data analytics and data mining techniques can be deployed to gain insights and pattern that related to student attrition problem. The objective of this paper (i) review the student attrition in higher education (HE) and the contributing factors; and (ii) review the existing computational model to analyze and predict student attrition in HE.

Secondary schools as part of the foundational level of education cannot afford to lag behind in using multimedia to improve the intellectual and creative capabilities among the teachers and students. This study investigated multimedia technologies as modern pedagogical tools for strategic improvement on the teaching and learning process. The study adopted a descriptive survey design. The population was the senior secondary school students and teachers in Kuje Area Council of Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Nigeria. A simple random sampling technique was used to select 250 students and 100 teachers. Cronbach's alpha statistical tool was used to obtain a reliability coefficient of 0.83 on validated questionnaires which were distributed to collect data from the respondents. Statistically, mean, standard deviation, percentage and partial correlation were used to answer the research questions while t-test and Chi-Square were used to test the postulated hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The findings showed that television sets, projectors and computers were the major multimedia facilities used for teaching and learning in the council, multimedia facilities had a high influence on teaching and learning. It was gathered that multimedia enriched teaching cognitive skills and psychomotor skills and developed concretization of abstraction on any subject matter. Some recommendations were made which included the provision of financial support to procure multimedia facilities to schools towards the attainment of educational objectives, provision of subsiding policies by the government on the importation of multimedia facilities, employment of competent and experienced technical staff should be employed to solve a series of technical problems in using multimedia facilities. Experimental research design on the effectiveness of multimedia facilities as modern pedagogical tools for strategic improvement on teaching and learning was proposed for future work.

In Software Defined Networks (SDN) the control plane is removed to a separate device called the controller. The controller is the most important and main part in SDN architecture and large SDN networks may consist of multiple controllers or controller domains that distribute the network management between them. Because of the controller importance, it has been given a proper attention and many studies have been made to compare, test, and evaluate the performance of the controllers. This paper aims to evaluate and compare the performance of different SDN controllers which are Open Network Operating System (ONOS), OpenDaylight, POX and Ryu, using Two performance tests; the first test includes connecting two controllers of each of the four controllers to linear topology with different number of switches; and the other test includes connecting different number of controllers of each of the four controllers to linear topology with fixed number of switches. Then for these tests, the performance in terms of some Quality of Service (QoS) parameters such as average Round-Trip Time (RTT), throughput, and jitter are measured between the two end hosts in each network. After the evaluation of the performance has been completed, it had been seen that the controllers showed different behaviors, and that POX controller showed more stable and good performance results than other controllers.

In many classes of applications, mainly in signal and image processing applications, decreasing the static power of computational circuits is a challenge. Multipliers are typically located on the critical path of such systems. A promising approach for energy-efficient design of digital systems is approximate or inexact computing. On the other hand, leakage power and limited scalability become serious obstacles that prevent the continuous miniaturization of the conventional CMOS-based logic circuits. Spin-based devices are considered as promising alternatives for CMOS technology due to their proper characteristics such as near-zero current leakage, sustainability, integrity, low standby power. In this paper a new low power approximate 4-2 compressor is presented which is implemented using spintronic devices. The proposed design is utilized in a multiplier tree for image processing applications. We have simulated and compared the proposed design with state-of-the-art designs in both quantitative and qualitative metrics. The simulation results show that the proposed design has 92% and 188% lower power consumption and PDP, respectively compared to the best state-of-the-art design.

This paper focuses on the personality traits of students and stress scale they had to face in undergraduate level. With the advancement of computer science and machine learning based applications, we have tried to inter-correlate the terms. In the area of computational psychology, it is important to understand participants’ psychological behavior using personality traits and predict how he/she is going to react on a certain level of the stressed situation. For the experiment, we have collected data of around 150 participants. The personality traits data are collected using the standard survey named The Big Five Personality Test created by IPIP organization and stress scale measurements are collected using scale devised by Sheldon Cohen named as Perceived Stress Scale hosted by Mind garden. The data are taken from Bangladeshi computer science undergraduate students and kept anonymous. In this paper, we have applied nine different machine learning based classification models are built for mapping the traits with stress scales. For performance evaluation, we have utilized precision, recall, f1-score, and accuracy. From the experimental findings, we found that Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO) and k-NN classifier gives the highest prediction accuracy which is approximately 70%.

The study aimed to assess whether the students from mathematical science-based undergraduate degree programmes in Kaduna State University perform academically better when either the Computer-Based Test (CBT) or the Paper-Pencil Test (PPT) is used to write the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), which is conducted annually by the Joint Admissions Matriculation Board (JAMB). The study adopted a quantitative approach to research. A purposive sample of one thousand and twenty-three (1023) first-year students constituted the population for the study. This population was drawn from Computer Science, Mathematics and Physics undergraduate degree programmes in the Kaduna State University who were admitted from the 2010/2011 to 2012/2013 and 2015/2016 to 2016/2017 academic sessions respectively. The instruments used for data collection were the UTME scores and the academic standing of first-year Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA) results, which were coded and analysed with the aid of Computational Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 23. Descriptive statistics and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) were the statistical tools used to answer the four (4) research questions raised. The results revealed a majority of the students who performed academically better were those who used the PPT as their test medium in writing the UTME. It concluded that the majority of the students who wrote the UTME using PPT performed better in their academics. The study thereby recommended that there is a need for the Joint Admissions Matriculation Board (JAMB) to review its examination policies in mathematics-based subjects to enable students to pass such subjects with flying colours, thereby encouraging them to perform better academically in the undergraduate studies.