Intelligent Tutoring System Authoring Tools for Non-Programmers

An intelligent tutoring system (ITS) is a software application that tries to replicate the performance of a human tutor by supporting the theory of learning by doing . ITSs have been shown to improve the performance of a student in wide range of domains. Despite their benefits, ITSs have not seen widespread use due to the complexity involved in their development. Developing an ITS from scratch requires expertise in several fields including computer science, cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. In order to decrease the skill threshold required to build ITSs, several authoring tools have been developed. In this thesis, I document several contributions to the field of intelligent tutoring in the form of extensions to an existing ITS authoring tool, research studies on authoring tool paradigms and the design of authoring tools for non-programmers in two complex domains - natural language processing and 3D game environments. The Extensible Problem Specific Tutor (xPST) is an authoring tool that helps rapidly develop model-tracing like tutors on existing interfaces such as webpages. xPST\u27s language was made more expressive with the introduction of new checktypes required for answer checking in problems belonging to domains such as geometry and statistics. A web-based authoring (WAT) tool was developed for the purpose of tutor management and deployment and to promote non-programmer authoring of ITSs. The WAT was used in a comparison study between two authoring tool paradigms - GUI based and text based, in two different problem domains - statistics and geometry. User-programming of natural language processing (NLP) in ITSs is not common with authoring toolkits. Existing NLP techniques do not offer sufficient power to non-programmers and the NLP is left to expert developers or machine learning algorithms. We attempted to address this challenge by developing a domain-independent authoring tool, ConceptGrid that is intended to help non-programmers develop ITSs that perform natural language processing. ConceptGrid has been integrated into xPST. When templates created using ConceptGrid were tested, they approached the accuracy of human instructors in scoring student responses. 3D game environments belong to another domain for which authoring tools are uncommon. Authoring game-based tutors is challenging due to the inherent domain complexity and dynamic nature of the environment. We attempt to address this challenge through the design of authoring tool that is intended to help non-programmers develop game-based ITSs

Easy Authoring of Intelligent Tutoring Systems for Synthetic Environments

ABSTRACT: We describe how the Extensible Problem Specifi

Expansion of the xPST Framework to Enable Non-programmers to Create Intelligent Tutoring Systems in 3D Game Environments

Our previous work has demonstrated that the Extensible Problem Specific Tutor (xPST) framework lowers the bar for non-programmers to author model tracing intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) on top of existing software and websites. In this work we extend xPST to enable authoring of tutors in 3D games. This process differs substantially from authoring tutors for traditional GUI software in terms of the inherent domain complexity involved, different types of feedback required and interactions generated by various entities apart from the student. A tutor for a village evacuation task has been constructed in order to demonstrate the capabilities of using the extended xPST system to create a game-based tutor.This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of a proceeding published as Kodavali, S.K., Gilbert, S., Blessing, S.B. (2010). Expansion of the xPST Framework to Enable Non-programmers to Create Intelligent Tutoring Systems in 3D Game Environments. In: Aleven, V., Kay, J., Mostow, J. (eds) Intelligent Tutoring Systems. ITS 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6095. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. The final authenticated version is available online at DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-13437-1_72. Copyright 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. Posted with permission

Socio-Cognitive and Affective Computing

Social cognition focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactions. On the other hand, the term cognitive computing is generally used to refer to new hardware and/or software that mimics the functioning of the human brain and helps to improve human decision-making. In this sense, it is a type of computing with the goal of discovering more accurate models of how the human brain/mind senses, reasons, and responds to stimuli. Socio-Cognitive Computing should be understood as a set of theoretical interdisciplinary frameworks, methodologies, methods and hardware/software tools to model how the human brain mediates social interactions. In addition, Affective Computing is the study and development of systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human affects, a fundamental aspect of socio-cognitive neuroscience. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning computer science, electrical engineering, psychology, and cognitive science. Physiological Computing is a category of technology in which electrophysiological data recorded directly from human activity are used to interface with a computing device. This technology becomes even more relevant when computing can be integrated pervasively in everyday life environments. Thus, Socio-Cognitive and Affective Computing systems should be able to adapt their behavior according to the Physiological Computing paradigm. This book integrates proposals from researchers who use signals from the brain and/or body to infer people's intentions and psychological state in smart computing systems. The design of this kind of systems combines knowledge and methods of ubiquitous and pervasive computing, as well as physiological data measurement and processing, with those of socio-cognitive and affective computing

Simulador Web de Resonancia Magnética como Herramienta Educativa: Diseño, Desarrollo y Evaluación

La imagen por resonancia magnética (MRI) es una modalidad médica con una gran popularidad. Esto se debe a varias causas, tales como la consecución de imágenes de gran contraste en tejidos blandos, el hecho de que utiliza radiación no ionizante y su alta versatilidad, ya que puede dar lugar a muy diversos contrastes mediante el ajuste adecuado de parámetros. Esto hace que la resonancia magnética sea una modalidad compleja y, en consecuencia, el proceso de aprendizaje de los técnicos de imagen para el radiodiagnóstico también lo es. En respuesta a tal complejidad, esta tesis se centra en el diseño, desarrollo y evaluación de un simulador web de resonancia magnética que sirve tanto para el aprendizaje de conceptos teóricos sobre resonancia magnética como para la capacitación en la adquisición de esta modalidad. Para su desarrollo se hace uso de ingeniería del software, donde se establecen los pasos que deben llevarse a cabo en una implementación de este carácter. Específicamente, se reúne a un grupo de expertos para recopilar el conjunto de requisitos que debe cumplir esta herramienta y que serán claves para su desempeño. Además, se ha incorporado un sistema de tutoría inteligente (ITS) a esta herramienta. Hasta donde conocemos, ésta es la primera vez que se integra un ITS en un simulador de resonancia magnética. El simulador ha sido evaluado a través de tres experiencias educativas, donde se ha medido tanto la experiencia del usuario como el valor educativo real de la herramienta. Esta última medición se llevó a cabo durante la realización de un experiencia real en una clase y que tuvo una duración de un día. En términos de la experiencia del usuario, nuestros resultados evolucionaron positivamente durante las evaluaciones del simulador. En particular, esta característica mejoró notablemente con la incorporación de un ITS. Los comentarios de los usuarios respaldaron las mediciones cuantitativas obtenidas. Los resultados de la experiencia en el aula mostraron diferencias estadísticas significativas a favor de los participantes que usaron el simulador, tanto en el tamaño del efecto como en las pruebas inferenciales. No somos conscientes de publicación científica alguna en la que se haya descrito la medición del valor educativo real de un simulador de resonancia magnética.Departamento de Teoría de la Señal y Comunicaciones e Ingeniería TelemáticaDoctorado en Tecnologías de la Información y las Telecomunicacione

Generische ITS-Softwarearchitektur und ITS-Prozess

Anhand einer ausgiebigen Analyse vorhandener Softwarearchitekturen von intelligenten Lehr-/Lernsystemen (ITS) werden wiederkehrende Probleme dieser aufgezeigt. Es wird eine Erweiterung der klassischen Architektur entwickelt und in UML spezifiziert. Auf die konzeptionelle Vorarbeit aufbauend, wird sowohl ein ITS-Lehrprozess als auch eine allgemeingültige ITS-Softwarearchitektur in UML definiert. Passend dazu verwirklicht ein Softwareframework die Implementierung, während ein Prototyp die Praktikabilität des ITS-Lehrprozesses, der ITS-Architektur und des Softwareframeworks überprüft.On the basis of the extensive analysis of existing software architectures of intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) the recurring problems are pointed out. An extension of the classical architecture is developed and specified in UML. Based on the conceptual preliminary work, both an ITS teaching process and a generally valid ITS software architecture are defined in UML. Appropriately, a software framework realizes the implementation, while a prototype checks the practicability of the ITS teaching process, ITS architecture and the framework