Total: 16
Like good human tutors, intelligent tutoring systems should detect and respond to students' affective states. However, accuracy in detecting affective states automatically has been limited by the time and expense of manually labeling training data for supervised learning. To combat this limitation, we use semi-supervised learning to train an affective state detector on a sparsely labeled, culturally novel, authentic data set in the form of screen capture videos from a Swahili literacy and numeracy tablet tutor in Tanzania that shows the face of the child using it. We achieved 88% leave-1-child-out cross-validated accuracy in distinguishing pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral affective states, compared to only 61% for the best supervised learning method we tested. This work contributes toward using automated affect detection both off-line to improve the design of intelligent tutors, and at runtime to respond to student affect based on input from a user-facing tablet camera or webcam.
Public school boundaries are redrawn from time to time to ensure effective functioning of school systems. This process, also called school redistricting, is non-trivial due to (1) the presence of multiple design criteria such as capacity utilization, proximity and travel time which are hard for planners to consider simultaneously, (2) the fixed locations of schools with widely differing capacities that need to be balanced, (3) the spatial nature of the data and the need to preserve contiguity in school zones, and (4) the difficulty in quantifying local factors that may arise. Motivated by these challenges and the intricacy of the process, we propose a geospatial clustering algorithm called GeoKmeans for assisting planners in designing school boundaries such that students are assigned to proximal schools while ensuring effective utilization of school capacities. The algorithm operates on polygonal geometries and connects them into geographically contiguous school boundaries while balancing problem-specific constraints. We evaluate our approach on real-world data of two rapidly growing school districts in the US. Results indicate the efficacy of our approach in designing boundaries. Additionally, a case study is included to demonstrate the potential of GeoKmeans to assist planners in drawing boundaries.
The paper presents the pedagogical innovations and experience of the co-development of three MOOCs on the subject of “Modeling and Solving Discrete Optimization Problems” by two universities. In a nutshell, the MOOCs feature the Fable-Based Learning approach, which is a form of problem-based learning encapsulated in a coherent story plot. Each lecture video begins with an animation that tells a story following a novel. The protagonists of the story encounter a problem requiring technical assistance from the two professors from modern time via a magical tablet granted to them by a fairy god. The new pedagogy aims at increasing learners' motivation and interests as well as situating the learners in a coherent learning context. In addition to scriptwriting, animation production and situating the teaching materials in the story plot, another challenge of the project is the remote distance between the two institutions as well as the need to produce all teaching materials in both (Mandarin) Chinese and English to cater for different geographic learning needs. The MOOCs have been running recurrently on Coursera since 2017. We present learner statistics and feedback, and discuss our experience with and preliminary observations of adopting the online materials in a Flipped Classroom setting.
We report on an experiment that we performed when we taught the undergraduate artificial intelligence class at the University of Southern California. We taught it – under very similar conditions – once with and once without an attendance requirement. The attendance requirement substantially increased the attendance of the students. It did not substantially affect their performance but decreased their course ratings across all categories in the official course evaluation, whose results happened to be biased toward the opinions of the students attending the lectures. For example, the overall rating of the instructor was 0.89 lower (on a 1-5 scale) with the attendance requirement and the overall rating of the class was 0.85 lower. Thus, the attendance requirement, combined with the policy for administering the course evaluation, had a large impact on the course ratings, which is a problem if the course ratings influence decisions on promotions, tenure, and salary increments for the instructors but also demonstrates the potential for the manipulation of course ratings.
Understanding how machines learn is critical for children to develop useful mental models for exploring artificial intelligence (AI) and smart devices that they now frequently interact with. Although children are very familiar with having conversations with conversational agents like Siri and Alexa, children often have limited knowledge about AI and machine learning. We leverage their existing familiarity and present Zhorai, a conversational platform and curriculum designed to help young children understand how machines learn. Children ages eight to eleven train an agent through conversation and understand how the knowledge is represented using visualizations. This paper describes how we designed the curriculum and evaluated its effectiveness with 14 children in small groups. We found that the conversational aspect of the platform increased engagement during learning and the novel visualizations helped make machine knowledge understandable. As a result, we make recommendations for future iterations of Zhorai and approaches for teaching AI to children.
Automatic short answer scoring (ASAS) is a research subject of intelligent education, which is a hot field of natural language understanding. Many experiments have confirmed that the ASAS system is not good enough, because its performance is limited by the training data. Focusing on the problem, we propose MDA-ASAS, multiple data augmentation strategies for improving performance on automatic short answer scoring. MDA-ASAS is designed to learn language representation enhanced by data augmentation strategies, which includes back-translation, correct answer as reference answer, and swap content. We argue that external knowledge has a profound impact on the ASAS process. Meanwhile, the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model has been shown to be effective for improving many natural language processing tasks, which acquires more semantic, grammatical and other features in large amounts of unsupervised data, and actually adds external knowledge. Combining with the latest BERT model, our experimental results on the ASAS dataset show that MDA-ASAS brings a significant gain over state-of-art. We also perform extensive ablation studies and suggest parameters for practical use.
This paper describes an experience in teaching Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to a group of high school students over an intense one-month period. In this work, we provide an outline of an AI course curriculum we designed for high school students and then evaluate its effectiveness by analyzing student's feedback and student outcomes. After closely observing students, evaluating their responses to our surveys, and analyzing their contribution to the course project, we identified some possible impediments in teaching AI to high school students and propose some measures to avoid them. These measures include employing a combination of objectivist and constructivist pedagogies, reviewing/introducing basic programming concepts at the beginning of the course, and addressing gender discrepancies throughout the course.
We need to teach AI to students in and outside of traditional computer science degree programs, including those designer-engineer hybrid students who will design and implement games or engage in technical games research later. The need to rethink AI curriculum is pressing in a design education context because AI powers many emerging practical techniques such as drama management, procedural content generation, player modeling, and machine playtesting. In this paper, we describe a 5-year experimental effort to teach a Game AI course structured around a broad and expanding set of roles AI can play in game design (e.g., Adversary and Actor, as well as Design Assistant and Storyteller). This course sets up computer science and computer game design students to transform practices in the game industry as well as create new forms of media that were previously unreachable. Our students gained mastery over the relevant techniques and further demonstrated (via novel prototype systems) many new roles for AI along the way.
Robots are a popular platform for introducing computing and artificial intelligence to novice programmers. However, programming state-of-the-art robots is very challenging, and requires knowledge of concurrency, operation safety, and software engineering skills, which can take years to teach. In this paper, we present an approach to introducing computing that allows students to safely and easily program high-performance robots. We develop a platform for students to program RoboCup Small Size League robots using JavaScript. The platform 1) ensures physical safety at several levels of abstraction, 2) allows students to program robots using JavaScript in the browser, without the need to install software, and 3) presents a simplified JavaScript semantics that shields students from confusing language features. We discuss our experience running a week-long workshop using this platform, and analyze over 3,000 student-written program revisions to provide empirical evidence that our approach does help students.
We present a serious game designed to help players/learners develop socio-moral reasoning (SMR) maturity. It is based on an existing computerized task that was converted into a game to improve the motivation of learners. The learner model is computed using a hybrid deep learning architecture, and adaptation rules are provided by both human experts and machine learning techniques. We conducted some experiments with two versions of the game (the initial version and the adaptive version with AI-Based learner modeling). The results show that the adaptive version provides significant better results in terms of learning gain.
We propose an experimental ethics-based curricular module for an undergraduate course on Robot Ethics. The proposed module aims to teach students how human subjects research methods can be used to investigate potential ethical concerns arising in human-robot interaction, by engaging those students in real experimental ethics research. In this paper we describe the proposed curricular module, describe our implementation of that module within a Robot Ethics course offered at a medium-sized engineering university, and statistically evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed curricular module in achieving desired learning objectives. While our results do not provide clear evidence of a quantifiable benefit to undergraduate achievement of the described learning objectives, we note that the module did provide additional learning opportunities for graduate students in the course, as they helped to supervise, analyze, and write up the results of this undergraduate-performed research experiment.
AIspace is a set of tools used to learn and teach fundamental AI algorithms. The original version of AIspace was written in Java. There was not a clean separation of the algorithms and visualization; it was too complicated for students to modify the underlying algorithms. Its next generation, AIspace2, is built on AIPython, open source Python code that is designed to be as close as possible to pseudocode. AISpace2, visualized in JupyterLab, keeps the simple Python code, and uses hooks in AIPython to allow visualization of the algorithms. This allows students to see and modify the high-level algorithms in Python, and to visualize the output in a graphical form, aiming to better help them to build confidence and comfort in AI concepts and algorithms. So far we have tools for search, constraint satisfaction problems (CSP), planning and Bayesian network. In this paper we outline the tools and give some evaluations based on user feedback.
As more open source educational software applications become available, higher educational institutions have the opportunity to utilize these cost efficient tools to deliver the instruction traditionally taught off line with heavy associated costs. Here we introduce a machine learning course that uses a simple, cloud computing approach to creating course materials. We see this type of serverless, cloud-based, literate programming to be the future of computer science education in non-traditional higher educational institutions in particular serving students who will need the basic literacy for computing and computation but will not pursue the traditional computer scientist path.
Undergraduate courses that focus on open-ended, project-based learning teach students how to define concrete goals, transfer conceptual understanding of algorithms to code, and evaluate/analyze/present their solution. However, AI, along with machine learning, is getting increasingly varied in terms of both the approaches and applications, making it challenging to design project courses that span a sufficiently wide spectrum of AI. For these reasons, existing AI project courses are restricted to a narrow set of approaches (e.g. only reinforcement learning) or applications (e.g. only computer vision). In this paper, we propose to use Minecraft as the platform for teaching AI via project-based learning. Minecraft is an open-world sandbox game with elements of exploration, resource gathering, crafting, construction, and combat, and is supported by the Malmo library that provides a programmatic interface to the player observations and actions at various levels of granularity. In Minecraft, students can design projects to use approaches like search-based AI, reinforcement learning, supervised learning, and constraint satisfaction, on data types like text, audio, images, and tabular data. We describe our experience with an open-ended, undergraduate AI projects course using Minecraft that includes 82 different projects, covering themes that ranged from navigation, instruction following, object detection, combat, and music/image generation.
An initiative recently established at our institution is creating new opportunities for students to deepen their understanding of code and computational thinking, and to embrace questions of access, equity and social justice. In this short paper we report on two contextualized computing courses in this initiative that introduce coding and computational thinking through contextualizing two subfields of AI: Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. The goal was two-fold: to help students gain foundational computational skills to further their own creative and critical practices; and more broadly, to help them develop better-informed critiques of the use of algorithmic systems, especially AI technology.
The Model AI Assignments session seeks to gather and disseminate the best assignment designs of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Education community. Recognizing that assignments form the core of student learning experience, we here present abstracts of nine AI assignments from the 2020 session that are easily adoptable, playfully engaging, and flexible for a variety of instructor needs. Assignment specifications and supporting resources may be found at http://modelai.gettysburg.edu.