The international higher education sector is characterized by the mobility of international students, who undergo transitions in unfamiliar cultural environments that may negatively affect their academic experiences and overall well-being. Culture shock often arises from insufficient knowledge of, and limited understanding about, the norms of the host culture, as well as cultural gaps between international students and the host country. Drawing on a netnographic study of YouTube vlogs by a purposive sample of international students in the Philippines, this paper examines their experiences of culture shock. The findings indicate that international students act as active agents in adapting to... More >

Previous studies showed estimated prevalence of diet non-adherence among maintenance hemodialysis patients ranged from 10.6 to 60.2\%. Aside from the varying range of diet non-adherence worldwide, there is no gold-standard in defining diet non-adherence which emphasizes the need to look into various parameters of diet non-adherence such as medications, socioeconomic factors, depression, social support, etc. This cross-sectional study aimed to determine the following: 1. Correlation of depression with diet non-adherence of maintenance hemodialysis patients; 2. Correlation of social support with diet non-adherence of maintenance hemodialysis patients of 24 maintenance hemodialysis patients fro... More >

The growth of distributed, institutionally siloed data has created demand for analytics frameworks that ensure privacy, interpretability, and real-time decision support. While federated learning enables decentralized model training without raw data sharing, most existing approaches rely on opaque neural models and lack explicit reasoning capabilities. This paper proposes a Federated Neuro-Symbolic Intelligence (FNSI) framework that integrates federated learning with symbolic reasoning to address these limitations. The architecture combines local neural learning with symbolic constraint enforcement at the client level and a privacy-preserving coordination layer that aggregates encrypted updat... More >

This paper presents the design and development of a Cardiovascular Patients’ Nutrition Assessment Web Application with a Hybrid Recommender System, developed for Malabon Hospital and Medical Clinic. The primary objective of the system is to support both patients and healthcare providers in monitoring nutritional status and improving dietary management for individuals with cardiovascular conditions. The application was implemented using the Laravel framework and features a simple, user-friendly interface that facilitates interaction among patients, clinicians, and nutritionists. The recommender system integrates rule-based logic with intelligent recommendation techniques to generate persona... More >

This study examined the relationships among awe, self-transcendence, and optimism among Filipino college students within the framework of positive psychology and the Sustainable Development Goals. Using a quantitative correlational design, data were gathered from 134 college students enrolled in various higher education institutions in Metro Manila, selected through convenience sampling. Standardized instruments—the Awe Experience Scale, Self-Transcendence Scale, and Life Orientation Test—were administered through an online survey using Google Forms. Descriptive statistics were used to determine levels of awe, self-transcendence, and optimism, while Pearson Correlation assessed relations... More >