Visual Feedback for Gaming Prevention in Intelligent Tutoring Systems

A major issue in Intelligent Tutoring Systems is off-task student behavior, especially performance-based gaming, where students systematically exploit tutor behavior in order to advance through a curriculum quickly and easily, with as little active thought directed at the educational content as possible. The goal of this research was to explore the phenomena of off-task gaming behavior within the Assistments system, as well as to develop a passive visual indicator to deter and prevent off-task gaming behavior without active intervention via graphical feedback to the student and teachers. Traditional active intervention approaches were also constructed for comparison purposes, and machine-learned gaming-detection models were developed as a potential invocation and evaluation mechanism. Passive graphical interventions have been well received by teachers, and results are suggestive that they are effective at reducing off-task gaming behavior

Modeling Health Policy with Digital Humans

The healthcare system is the foremost human system responsible for preventing human casualty. Most of the health research and development is focused on basic science, drug development, optimizing patient experience, and electronic healthcare systems. There is less research focused on the systemic interaction of multiple entities involved in patient care. In this early research paper, we model the relationships between Payers, Providers and Patient entities and examine the effects of policy changes on these entities and their relationships

The evolution of digital organisms

The goal of this project was to design, develop and implement an artificial life simulation based on research and examination of existing systems. Utilizing object-oriented paradigms and multiple threads, evolving organisms transfer through states based on inherited traits. Hypotheses regarding evolution towards particular traits were fashioned, and some of these were successfully validated experimentally. This report covers background material, system requirements and design, implementation methodology and details, system tests and evaluation, as well as conclusions and proposed ideas for future work

Fuel cell exhibit for the National Museum of Science and Industry.

The goal of this project was to deliver a prototype exhibit on fuel cells for the Science Museum in London. Our preliminary research included an overview of fuel cell technology, museum exhibit design, and surveying. In the design of the prototype, the museum public was surveyed on their interests in the applications of energy and for feedback on the exhibit. Additionally, the project team provided recommendations to the Science Museum for both virtual and physical exhibits on fuel cells

The eXtensible tutor architecture: a new foundation for ITS

Abstract. The eXtensible Tutor Architecture (XTA) was designed as a platform for creating and deploying many types of Intelligent Tutoring Systems across many different platforms. The XTA presently has support for state graph pseudo-tutors and JESS model-tracing cognitive tutors, in both a client and server context. The XTA was designed with future development in mind, allowing easy specification of new tutor types, tutoring strategies, and interface layers. It has been used as the foundation of the Assistments Project, a wide scale web based ITS deployment. The Assistments Project is on track to provide ITS content to 100,000 students in the state of Massachusetts. 1