The COVID‐19 pandemic forced universities around the world to shut down their campuses indefinitely and move their educational activities onto online platforms. The universities were not prepared for such a transition and their online teaching‐learning process evolved gradually. We conducted a survey in which we asked undergraduate students in an Indian university about their opinion on different aspects of online education during the ongoing pandemic. We received responses from 358 students. The students felt that they learn better in physical classrooms (65.9%) and by attending MOOCs (39.9%) than through online education. The students, however, felt that the professors have improved their online teaching skills since the beginning of the pandemic (68.1%) and online education is useful right now (77.9%). The students appreciated the software and online study materials being used to support online education. However, the students felt that online education is stressful and affecting their health and social life. This pandemic has led to a widespread adoption of online education and the lessons we learn now will be helpful in the future.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns to contain it are affecting the daily life of people around the world. People are now using digital technologies, including social media, more than ever before. The objectives of this study were to analyze the social media usage pattern of people during the COVID-19 imposed lockdown and to understand the effects of emotion on the same. We scraped messages posted on Twitter by users from India expressing their emotion or view on the pandemic during the first 40 days of the lockdown. We identified the users who posted frequently and analyzed their usage pattern and their overall emotion during the study period based on their tweets. It was observed that 222 users tweeted frequently during the study period. Out of them, 13.5% were found to be addicted to Twitter and posted 13.67 tweets daily on an average (SD: 4.89), while 3.2% were found to be highly addicted and posted 40.71 tweets daily on an average (SD: 9.90) during the study period. The overall emotion of 40.1% of the users was happiness throughout the study period. However, it was also observed that users who tweeted more frequently were typically angry, disgusted, or sad about the prevailing situation. We concluded that people with a negative sentiment are more susceptible to addictive use of social media.

Anxiety Social mediaMachine learning A B S T R A C T Mental well-being and social media have been closely related domains of study. In this research a novel model, AD prediction model, for anxious depression prediction in real-time tweets is proposed. This mixed anxiety-depressive disorder is a predominantly associated with erratic thought process, restlessness and sleeplessness. Based on the linguistic cues and user posting patterns, the feature set is defined using a 5-tuple vector . An anxiety-related lexicon is built to detect the presence of anxiety indicators. Time and frequency of tweet is analyzed for irregularities and opinion polarity analytics is done to find inconsistencies in posting behaviour. The model is trained using three classifiers (multinomial naïve bayes, gradient boosting, and random forest) and majority voting using an ensemble voting classifier is done. Preliminary results are evaluated for tweets of sampled 100 users and the proposed model achieves a classification accuracy of 85.09%. . * https://twitter.com/msindiastudent

A large community of research has been developed in recent years to analyze social media and social networks, with the aim of understanding, discovering insights, and exploiting the available information. The focus has shifted from conventional polarity classification to contemporary applicationoriented fine-grained aspects such as, emotions, sarcasm, stance, rumor, and hate speech detection in the user-generated content. Detecting a sarcastic tone in natural language hinders the performance of sentiment analysis tasks. The majority of the studies on automatic sarcasm detection emphasize on the use of lexical, syntactic, or pragmatic features that are often unequivocally expressed through figurative literary devices such as words, emoticons, and exclamation marks. In this paper, we propose a deep learning model called sAtt-BLSTM convNet that is based on the hybrid of soft attention-based bidirectional long shortterm memory (sAtt-BLSTM) and convolution neural network (convNet) applying global vectors for word representation (GLoVe) for building semantic word embeddings. In addition to the feature maps generated by the sAtt-BLSTM, punctuation-based auxiliary features are also merged into the convNet. The robustness of the proposed model is investigated using balanced (tweets from benchmark SemEval 2015 Task 11) and unbalanced (approximately 40000 random tweets using the Sarcasm Detector tool with 15000 sarcastic and 25000 non-sarcastic messages) datasets. An experimental study using the training-and test-set accuracy metrics is performed to compare the proposed deep neural model with convNet, LSTM, and bidirectional LSTM with/without attention and it is observed that the novel sAtt-BLSTM convNet model outperforms others with a superior sarcasm-classification accuracy of 97.87% for the Twitter dataset and 93.71% for the random-tweet dataset. INDEX TERMS Sarcasm, deep learning, attention, social data.

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Context:Pain is the most common symptom in admitted cancer patients. The association between the severity of cancer pain and distress symptoms such as depression and anxiety is a subject of research.Aims:The aim is to study the prevalence of pain, anxiety, and depression in admitted cancer patients and determine the association between pain and anxiety and depression at a tertiary cancer care institute.Settings and Design:This was prospective observational study.Subjects and Methods:We enrolled 393 cancer inpatients prospectively after written informed consent. Their disease details, presence, severity, and character of pain were recorded. Numerical Pain Scale was used for pain scores, self-reporting Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale for anxiety and depression.Statistical Analysis Used:Normal data were analyzed with parametric, nonnormal with nonparametric methods, and categorical with the Chi-square test.Results:The prevalence of moderate-to-severe pain was 41.5%, anxiety 20.3%, and depression 24.8%. Proportion of patients with anxiety and depression was 9.2% and 17.7% in patients with no pain; about 32.8% and 36.7% with severe pain, respectively (P < 0.000). In patients with no depression 6% had anxiety; with depression 44.9% had anxiety (P < 0.000). Odd's ratio to have anxiety and depression was 4.44 (95% confidence interval [CI] 2.0318–9.7024) and 2.92 (95% CI 1.5739–5.4186), respectively, in patients with pain as compared to no pain (P < 0.00). There was a positive correlation between pain, anxiety, and depression scores.Conclusions:There is strong association between the presence and severity of pain and distress symptoms such as anxiety and depression in admitted cancer patients.

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Wearable devices such as smartwatches, wristbands, GPS shoes are increasingly used for fitness and wellness as they allow users to monitor their daily health. These devices have sensors for accumulating user activity data. Clinical actigraph devices fall in the category of wearable devices worn on the wrist determined to estimate sleep parameters by recording movements during sleep. This study aims to predict sleep quality from wearable sensors using deep learning techniques. Three sleep indicators are proposed which are calculated using the data collected automatically from wearable devices. These sleep indicators are Daily Sleep Quality, Weekly Sleep Quality, and Sleep Consistency. Two deep learning models namely Convolution Neural Network (CNN) and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) have been implemented to predict sleep quality on the basis of the proposed indicators. Two datasets have been used to validate the work proposed in this study which include a dataset comprising sleep parameters using commercial wearable devices and another dataset consisting of sleep data using clinical actigraph device. Systematic Minority Oversampling Technique has been applied for data augmentation with the intent to increase data instances and to alleviate class imbalance. CNN is observed to outperform MLP in predicting sleep quality with the highest accuracy of 97.30%. This study also evaluates the worth of each sleep attribute using Information Gain algorithm in order to identify the most important attributes which contribute to the sleep quality. It has been concluded that in bed awake percentage contributes maximum to the Daily Sleep Quality, average sleep efficiency contributes maximum to the Weekly Sleep Quality and standard deviation of midpoint of in bed and out of bed times contributes maximum to the Sleep Consistency.