Issues of inequity in U.S. high schools' course scheduling did not previously exist. However, in recent years, with the increase in student population and course variety, students perceive that the course scheduling method is unfair. Current integer programming (IP) methods to the high school scheduling problem (HSSP) fall short in addressing these fairness concerns. The purpose of this research is to develop a solution methodology that generates feasible and fair course schedules using student preferences. Utilizing principles of fairness, which have been well studied in market design, we define the fair high school scheduling problem (FHSSP), a novel extension to the HSSP, and devise a corresponding algorithm based on integer programming to solve the FHSSP. We test our approach on a real course request dataset from a high school in California, USA. Results show that our algorithm can generate schedules that are both feasible and fair. In this paper, we demonstrate that our IP algorithm not only solves the HSSP and FHSSP in the United States but has the potential to be applied to various real-world scheduling problems. Additionally, we show the feasibility of integrating human emotions into mathematical modeling.

Can AI be used ethically for school work? It depends upon who you ask -- quite literally. That's because less than two years after ChatGPT was originally released in November 2022, the attitudes towards AI in the classroom still vary widely. High schools have viewed AI as a crutch at best, and at worst as a tool for cheating. But several universities leave generative AI use entirely up to the discretion of the person teaching the course.

Deep learning surrogate modeling shows great promise for subsurface flow applications, but the training demands can be substantial. Here we introduce a new surrogate modeling framework to predict CO2 saturation, pressure and surface displacement for use in the history matching of carbon storage operations. Rather than train using a large number of expensive coupled flow-geomechanics simulation runs, training here involves a large number of inexpensive flow-only simulations combined with a much smaller number of coupled runs. The flow-only runs use an effective rock compressibility, which is shown to provide accurate predictions for saturation and pressure for our system. A recurrent residual U-Net architecture is applied for the saturation and pressure surrogate models, while a new residual U-Net model is introduced to predict surface displacement. The surface displacement surrogate accepts, as inputs, geomodel quantities along with saturation and pressure surrogate predictions. Median relative error for a diverse test set is less than 4% for all variables. The surrogate models are incorporated into a hierarchical Markov chain Monte Carlo history matching workflow. Surrogate error is included using a new treatment involving the full model error covariance matrix. A high degree of prior uncertainty, with geomodels characterized by uncertain geological scenario parameters (metaparameters) and associated realizations, is considered. History matching results for a synthetic true model are generated using in-situ monitoring-well data only, surface displacement data only, and both data types. The enhanced uncertainty reduction achieved with both data types is quantified. Posterior saturation and surface displacement fields are shown to correspond well with the true solution.

Teachers are important to imparting knowledge and guiding learners, and the role of large language models (LLMs) as potential educators is emerging as an important area of study. Recognizing LLMs' capability to generate educational content can lead to advances in automated and personalized learning. While LLMs have been tested for their comprehension and problem-solving skills, their capability in teaching remains largely unexplored. In teaching, questioning is a key skill that guides students to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize core concepts and principles. Therefore, our research introduces a benchmark to evaluate the questioning capability in education as a teacher of LLMs through evaluating their generated educational questions, utilizing Anderson and Krathwohl's taxonomy across general, monodisciplinary, and interdisciplinary domains. We shift the focus from LLMs as learners to LLMs as educators, assessing their teaching capability through guiding them to generate questions. We apply four metrics, including relevance, coverage, representativeness, and consistency, to evaluate the educational quality of LLMs' outputs. Our results indicate that GPT-4 demonstrates significant potential in teaching general, humanities, and science courses; Claude2 appears more apt as an interdisciplinary teacher. Furthermore, the automatic scores align with human perspectives.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has experienced significant advancement over the past decade, prompting a growing interest in applications within finance. This survey critically evaluates 167 publications, exploring diverse RL applications and frameworks in finance. Financial markets, marked by their complexity, multi-agent nature, information asymmetry, and inherent randomness, serve as an intriguing test-bed for RL. Traditional finance offers certain solutions, and RL advances these with a more dynamic approach, incorporating machine learning methods, including transfer learning, meta-learning, and multi-agent solutions. This survey dissects key RL components through the lens of Quantitative Finance. We uncover emerging themes, propose areas for future research, and critique the strengths and weaknesses of existing methods.

This paper presents a tutorial of an explainable approach using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) to classify four progressive dementia stages based on open MRI brain images. The detailed implementation steps are demonstrated with an explanation. Whilst the proposed CNN architecture is demonstrated to achieve more than 99% accuracy for the test dataset, the computational procedure of CNN remains a black box. The visualisation based on Grad-CAM is attempted to explain such very high accuracy and may provide useful information for physicians. Future motivation based on this work is discussed.

This paper introduces an intelligent lecturing assistant (ILA) system that utilizes a knowledge graph to represent course content and optimal pedagogical strategies. The system is designed to support instructors in enhancing student learning through real-time analysis of voice, content, and teaching methods. As an initial investigation, we present a case study on lecture voice sentiment analysis, in which we developed a training set comprising over 3,000 one-minute lecture voice clips. Each clip was manually labeled as either engaging or non-engaging. Utilizing this dataset, we constructed and evaluated several classification models based on a variety of features extracted from the voice clips. The results demonstrate promising performance, achieving an F1-score of 90% for boring lectures on an independent set of over 800 test voice clips. This case study lays the groundwork for the development of a more sophisticated model that will integrate content analysis and pedagogical practices. Our ultimate goal is to aid instructors in teaching more engagingly and effectively by leveraging modern artificial intelligence techniques.

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are an unsupervised method for learning a sparse decomposition of a neural network's latent representations into seemingly interpretable features. Despite recent excitement about their potential, research applications outside of industry are limited by the high cost of training a comprehensive suite of SAEs. In this work, we introduce Gemma Scope, an open suite of JumpReLU SAEs trained on all layers and sub-layers of Gemma 2 2B and 9B and select layers of Gemma 2 27B base models. We primarily train SAEs on the Gemma 2 pre-trained models, but additionally release SAEs trained on instruction-tuned Gemma 2 9B for comparison. We evaluate the quality of each SAE on standard metrics and release these results. We hope that by releasing these SAE weights, we can help make more ambitious safety and interpretability research easier for the community. Weights and a tutorial can be found at https://huggingface.co/google/gemma-scope and an interactive demo can be found at https://www.neuronpedia.org/gemma-scope

Assumption-based Argumentation (ABA) is advocated as a unifying formalism for various forms of non-monotonic reasoning, including logic programming. It allows capturing defeasible knowledge, subject to argumentative debate. While, in much existing work, ABA frameworks are given up-front, in this paper we focus on the problem of automating their learning from background knowledge and positive/negative examples. Unlike prior work, we newly frame the problem in terms of brave reasoning under stable extensions for ABA. We present a novel algorithm based on transformation rules (such as Rote Learning, Folding, Assumption Introduction and Fact Subsumption) and an implementation thereof that makes use of Answer Set Programming. Finally, we compare our technique to state-of-the-art ILP systems that learn defeasible knowledge.

Sean Ammirati has been teaching a class on entrepreneurship for more than a decade. A professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Mr. Ammirati has groups of mostly graduate students start businesses from scratch over the course of the spring semester. Some of the start-ups that his 49 students created this year were classic examples of the form: a dating app for couples in long-distance relationships, a personalized fitness app. But Mr. Ammirati also noticed something unusual. "I have a pretty good sense how fast the progress that students should make in a semester should be," he said.