Opportunities and challenges in using AI Chatbots in Higher Education

Artificial intelligence (AI) conversational chatbots have gained popularity over time, and have been widely used in the fields of e-commerce, online banking, and digital healthcare and well-being, among others. The technology has the potential to provide personalised service to a range of consumers. However, the use of chatbots within educational settings is still limited. In this paper, we present three chatbot prototypes, the Warwick Manufacturing Group, University of Warwick, are currently developing, and discuss the potential opportunities and technical challenges we face when considering AI chatbots to support our daily activities within the department. Three AI virtual agents are under development: 1) to support the delivery of a taught Master's course simulation game; 2) to support the training and use of a newly introduced educational application; 3) to improve the processing of helpdesk requests within a university department. We hope this paper is informative to those interested in using chatbots in the educational domain. We also aim to improve awareness among those within the chatbot development industry, in particular the chatbot engine providers, about the educational and operational needs within educational institutes, which may differ from those in other domains

SOA services in higher education

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a recent architectural framework for distributed software system development in which software components are packaged as Services. It has become increasingly popular in academia and in industry, but has been principally used in the business domain. However, in higher education, SOA has rarely been applied or investigated. In this paper, we propose the idea of applying SOA technologies in the education domain, to increase both interoperability and flexibility within the e-learning environment. We expect that both students and teachers in higher educational institutions can benefit from this approach. We also describe a number of possible SOA services, along with a high level service roadmap to support a university's learning and teaching activities

Estimation of Covariate-Speci c Time-Dependent ROC Curves in the Presence of Missing Biomarkers

Covariate-specific time-dependent ROC curves are often used to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of a biomarker with time-to-event outcomes, when certain covariates have an impact on the test accuracy. In many medical studies, measurements of biomarkers are subject to missingness due to high cost or limitation of technology. This article considers estimation of covariate-specific time-dependent ROC curves in the presence of missing biomarkers. To incorporate the covariate effect, we assume a proportional hazards model for the failure time given the biomarker and the covariates, and a semiparametric location model for the biomarker given the covariates. In the presence of missing biomarkers, we propose a simple weighted estimator for the ROC curves where the weights are inversely proportional to the selection probability. We also propose an augmented weighted estimator which utilizes information from the subjects with missing biomarkers. The augmented weighted estimator enjoys the double-robustness property in the sense that the estimator remains consistent if either the missing data process or the conditional distribution of the missing data given the observed data is correctly specified. We derive the large sample properties of the proposed estimators and evaluate their finite sample performance using numerical studies. The proposed approaches are illustrated using the US Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset

Effects of Laser Power and Substrate on the Raman Shift of Carbon-Nanotube Papers

The progress in the fabrication of carbon-nanotube-based structures has made it possible to use Raman spectroscopy to measure the deformation states of carbon nanotubes and abutting materials. In this work, we investigate the effects of laser power and surrounding materials on the Raman shift of carbon-nanotube (CNT) papers for the laser intensity in a range of 0.071 to 1.415 kW/mm2 without action of mechanical loading. Two different configurations of the CNT papers are used in the Raman measurement; one uses a suspended CNT paper, and the other places a CNT paper on a glass or aluminum substrate. The experimental results reveal that there exist combinational effects of the laser power and abutting materials on the changes of the wavenumbers of the D, G and G′ bands of the CNT papers. We derive an analytical relation between the strain components, temperature and the change of the wavenumber of the Raman peak, which yields a proportional relationship between the change of the wavenumber of the Raman peak and the laser power. Such a relationship is supported by the experimental results

Comprehensive Evaluation of Environmental Policy for Water Pollutants and Greenhouse Gases Reduction in Jiaxing city, China

Recently, various environmental problems have been generated with the rapid economic development in China. That’s because China currently over-emphasized economic development beyond environmental issues; therefore, now it is important to enforce optimal environmental policies in order to achieve economic development as well as environmental improvement. In this study, we selected Jiaxing city as research area for that the environmental pollution problem has become prominent with economic high growth, and we constructed environmental system model and social economic model to establish the scenarios. Through computer simulation, we can evaluate the efficiency of the comprehensive environmental policies from both environmental preservation and social economic development aspects. While the social-economic model shows the socioeconomic activities which are vital events, fortune and service, such as production, finance and budget; the environmental system model shows the water pollutants and the greenhouse gas movement in the region. The dynamic optimization simulation is accomplished based on this environmental and socio-economic system model. In view of the restriction on water pollutants, greenhouse gas total exhausted amount, and economic activity in the catchment area, the simulation we practiced can provide concrete inner-generating optimal policies which can achieve the best economic and environment improvement with the consideration of policy, regional and timing choice in Jiaxing City, China.