1,027 research outputs found
Designing and Implementing Embodied Agents: Learning from Experience
In this paper, we provide an overview of part of our experience in designing and implementing some of the embodied agents and talking faces that we have used for our research into human computer interaction. We focus on the techniques that were used and evaluate this with respect to the purpose that the agents and faces were to serve and the costs involved in producing and maintaining the software. We discuss the function of this research and development in relation to the educational programme of our graduate students
Towards Effective Tutorial Feedback for Explanation Questions: A Dataset and Baselines
This paper proposes a new shared task on grading student answers with the goal of enabling well-targeted and flexible feedback in a tutorial dialogue setting
AI in Education as a methodology for enabling educational evidence-based practice
Evidence based practice (EBP) is of critical importance in Education where, increasingly, emphasis is placed on the need to equip teachers with an ability to independently generate evidence of their best practices in situ. Such contextualised evidence is seen as the key to in- forming educational practices more generally. One of the key challenges related to EBP lies in the paucity of methods that would allow educa- tional practitioners to generate evidence of their practices at a low-level of detail in a way that is inspectable and reproducible by others. This position paper focuses on the utility and relevance of AI methods of knowledge elicitation and knowledge representation as a means for sup- porting educational evidence-based practices through action research. AI offers methods whose service extends beyond building of ILEs and into real-world teaching practices, whereby teachers can acquire and apply computational design thinking needed to generate the evidence of in- terest. This opens a new dimension for AIEd as a field, i.e. one that demonstrates explicitly the continuing pertinence and a maturing reci- procity of the relationship between AI and Education
Inattention-Management Middleware for Human-in-the-Loop Multi-Display Applications
Operator inattention is an important and unsolved
problem in mission critical multi-display systems where a single
or a group of operators continuously monitor information flows
on distributed displays. In this paper we present a novel system
solution to this problem and a middleware for supporting flexible
attention-aware applications for a variety of domains. Some of
the most significant functionality includes direct querying of
the applicationâs attention state, custom callback definitions to
be executed on specific attention events or application updates,
inter-application message routing, and pushing custom notification
with relative location information to any other registered
application. We evaluate our middleware by developing three
applications that both demonstrate the efficacy and versatility of
the system and provide performance estimates in terms of latency
as a function of payload size
Computational Approaches to Measuring the Similarity of Short Contexts : A Review of Applications and Methods
Measuring the similarity of short written contexts is a fundamental problem
in Natural Language Processing. This article provides a unifying framework by
which short context problems can be categorized both by their intended
application and proposed solution. The goal is to show that various problems
and methodologies that appear quite different on the surface are in fact very
closely related. The axes by which these categorizations are made include the
format of the contexts (headed versus headless), the way in which the contexts
are to be measured (first-order versus second-order similarity), and the
information used to represent the features in the contexts (micro versus macro
views). The unifying thread that binds together many short context applications
and methods is the fact that similarity decisions must be made between contexts
that share few (if any) words in common.Comment: 23 page
Supporting Peer Help and Collaboration in Distributed Workplace Environments
Special Issue on Computer Supported Collaborative LearningIncreasingly, organizations are geographically distributed with activities coordinated and integrated through the use of information technology. Such organizations face constant change and the corresponding need for continual learning and renewal of their workers. In this paper we describe a prototype system called PHelpS (Peer Help System) that facilitates workers in carrying out such "life long learning". PHelpS supports workers as they perform their tasks, offers assistance in finding peer helpers when required, and mediates communication on task-related topics. When a worker runs into difficulty in carrying out a task, PHelpS provides a list of other workers who are ready, willing and able to help him or her. The worker then selects a particular helper with PHelpS supporting the subsequent help interaction. The PHelpS system acts as a facilitator to stimulate learning and collaboration, rather than as a directive agent imposing its perspectives on the workers. In this way PHelpS facilitates the creation of extensive informal peer help networks, where workers help one another with tasks and opens up new research avenues for further exploration of AI-based computer-supported collaborative learning. (http://aied.inf.ed.ac.uk/members98/archive/vol_9/greer/full.html
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Proceedings of QG2010: The Third Workshop on Question Generation
These are the peer-reviewed proceedings of "QG2010, The Third Workshop on Question Generation". The workshop included a special track for "QGSTEC2010: The First Question Generation Shared Task and Evaluation Challenge".
QG2010 was held as part of The Tenth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS2010)
Instruction based on computer simulations
Excerpts available at Google Books. For integral text, see publisher's website : http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415804615/"Introduction : In the scientific debate on what is the best approach to teaching and learning, a recurring question concerns who should lead the learning process, the teacher or the learner (see e.g., Tobias & Duffy, 2009) ? Poistions takens vary from a preference for direct, expository, teacher-led instruction (Kirschner, Sweller, & Clark, 2006) to fully open student-centered approaches that can be called pure discovery methods (e.g., Papert, 1980), with intermediate positions represented by more or less guided discovery methods (e.g., Mayer, 2004). This discussion also is a recurring theme in this chapter." (http://books.google.fr/books?id=cCD_thHjuxEC&pg=PA446&lpg=PA446&dq=Instruction+based+on+computer+simulations+de+jong&source=bl&ots=tOJ7FdkZow&sig=s8W6OnyU3H7iRLm7wqISfu6CAYE&hl=fr&ei=AZGATviHDMuV0QXewI3KCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=Instruction%20based%20on%20computer%20simulations%20de%20jong&f=false
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Facilitating teacher participation in intelligent computer tutor design : tools and design methods.
This work addresses the widening gap between research in intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) and practical use of this technology by the educational community. In order to ensure that ITSs are effective, teachers must be involved in their design and evaluation. We have followed a user participatory design process to build a set of ITS knowledge acquisition tools that facilitate rapid prototyping and testing of curriculum, and are tailored for usability by teachers. The system (called KAFITS) also serves as a test-bed for experimentation with multiple tutoring strategies. The design includes novel methodologies for tutoring strategy representation (Parameterized Action Networks) and overlay student modeling (a layered student model), and incorporates considerations from instructional design theory. It also allows for considerable student control over the content and style of the information presented. Highly interactive graphics-based tools were built to facilitate design, inspection, and modification of curriculum and tutoring strategies, and to monitor the progress of the tutoring session. Evaluation of the system includes a sixteen-month case study of three educators (one being the domain expert) using the system to build a tutor for statics (forty topics representing about four hours of on-line instruction), testing the tutor on a dozen students, and using test results to iteratively improve the tutor. Detailed throughput analysis indicates that the amount of effort to build the statics tutor was, surprisingly, comparable to similar figures for building (non-intelligent) conventional computer aided instructional systems. Few ITS projects focus on educator participation and this work is the first to empirically study knowledge acquisition for ITSs. Results of the study also include: a recommended design process for building ITSs with educator participation; guidelines for training educators; recommendations for conducting knowledge acquisition sessions; and design tradeoffs for knowledge representation architectures and knowledge acquisition interfaces
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