The 8th International Symposium on Emerging Technologies for Education (SETE) was held at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Function Centre from 26th to 28th November 2023.
The Symposium was conceived as a melting pot of researchers, educators and practitioners relating to several fields, such as Artificial Intelligence in Education, Big Data Driven Education, Informal Learning in the Workplace, Data Driven Decision Making in Education, User/Student/Teacher Modelling, Learning Analytics, Assessment in Technology Enhanced Learning, and Inclusive Education. Also, representations coming from different countries, such as Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, China, Singapore, and Mexico, enhanced this sense of international intersection point.
Keynote presentations were conducted by Professor Jing Yang, teaching Psycholinguistics at Zhejiang University, on Brain Imaging when learning a second language, differentiating contexts among bilingualism, second language learners and online language learners. Another keynote presentation was given by Professor Judy Kay, head of the Human Centred Technology Research Cluster at the University of Sydney. She talked about empowering learners in the age of AI with Scrutability and Open Learner Models and gave out examples that the Research Cluster is conducting. A final keynote was held by Professor Dragan Gašević, teaching Learning Analytics at Monash University, Melbourne. He specifically addressed the promises, concerns and research needs of Generative AI in Education.
All the attendees presentations at SETE were of high impact in the multi-disciplinary field of Technologies in Education, and mainly touched the technological fields of: augmented reality, deep learning, generative AI models, and dataset construction and benchmarking. While they dealt with the following application cases: digital humanities, biology, translation, diversity, cultures.
This PhD was represented by the fellow PhD student, Giada Pantana, XXXIX cycle, who presented a peer-reviewed full paper in SETE Main Track written along with Professor Ilaria Torre, entitled Investigating the Adoption of Machine Translation in Foreign Language Learning: The Instructors’ Perspective.
The paper investigates Machine Translation (MT) quality with an experimental comparison, and investigates the perception of MT quality and its uses with language teachers and assistants in primary and secondary schools in Australia teaching Italian as LOTE (Languages Other than English).
The results of the paper report that, generally speaking, the MT quality assessment and the MT quality perceived by the instructors do not overlap, and the paper reports some considerations on why is that according to the teachers’ perspective investigated with a survey. Though, there is agreement on the best-performing tool (DeepL), and on the quality performances of MT in three specific translation parameters (Accuracy, Fluency, Terminology).
During the final day of conference, awards were assigned.
The paper presented by PhD student Giada Pantana and professor Ilaria Torre won the Best Paper Award for SETE 2023.

The proceedings of the conference are available at: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-97-4243-1