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EduAgent: Generative Student Agents in Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Student simulation in online education is important to address dynamic learning behaviors of students with diverse backgrounds. Existing simulation models based on deep learning usually need massive training data, lacking prior knowledge in educational contexts. Large language models (LLMs) may contain such prior knowledge since they are pre-trained from a large corpus. However, because student behaviors are dynamic and multifaceted with individual differences, directly prompting LLMs is not robust nor accurate enough to capture fine-grained interactions among diverse student personas, learning behaviors, and learning outcomes. This work tackles this problem by presenting a newly annotated fine-grained large-scale dataset and proposing EduAgent, a novel generative agent framework incorporating cognitive prior knowledge (i.e., theoretical findings revealed in cognitive science) to guide LLMs to first reason correlations among various behaviors and then make simulations. Our two experiments show that EduAgent could not only mimic and predict learning behaviors of real students but also generate realistic learning behaviors of virtual students without real data.


(Un)making AI Magic: a Design Taxonomy

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper examines the role that enchantment plays in the design of AI things by constructing a taxonomy of design approaches that increase or decrease the perception of magic and enchantment. We start from the design discourse surrounding recent developments in AI technologies, highlighting specific interaction qualities such as algorithmic uncertainties and errors and articulating relations to the rhetoric of magic and supernatural thinking. Through analyzing and reflecting upon 52 students' design projects from two editions of a Master course in design and AI, we identify seven design principles and unpack the effects of each in terms of enchantment and disenchantment. We conclude by articulating ways in which this taxonomy can be approached and appropriated by design/HCI practitioners, especially to support exploration and reflexivity.


Introduction to Human-Robot Interaction: A Multi-Perspective Introductory Course

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this paper I describe the design of an introductory course in These course goals are critically conditioned on the expected background Human-Robot Interaction. This project-driven course is designed to of the enrolled students. The course is offered at a small introduce undergraduate and graduate engineering students, especially engineering-only university with a strong focus on Robotics related those enrolled in Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, fields (50% of all undergraduate students are enrolled in Mechanical and Robotics degree programs, to key theories and methods used Engineering or Computer Science degree programs, and degree programs in the field of Human-Robot Interaction that they would otherwise offered in Robotics at both the undergraduate and graduate be unlikely to see in those degree programs. To achieve this aim, level), but with no degree programs offered in social sciences or humanities the course takes students all the way from stakeholder analysis (e.g., Psychology) and few, if any, elective courses available to empirical evaluation, covering and integrating key Qualitative, in those fields. The university size and focus means that the course Design, Computational, and Quantitative methods along the way. I is offered at a mixed undergraduate/graduate level, and is primarily detail the goals, audience, and format of the course, and provide a offered to students from Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, detailed walkthrough of the course syllabus.


Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Document-Level Event Causality Identification with Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Transfer Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Event Causality Identification (ECI) refers to the detection of causal relations between events in texts. However, most existing studies focus on sentence-level ECI with high-resource languages, leaving more challenging document-level ECI (DECI) with low-resource languages under-explored. In this paper, we propose a Heterogeneous Graph Interaction Model with Multi-granularity Contrastive Transfer Learning (GIMC) for zero-shot cross-lingual document-level ECI. Specifically, we introduce a heterogeneous graph interaction network to model the long-distance dependencies between events that are scattered over a document. Then, to improve cross-lingual transferability of causal knowledge learned from the source language, we propose a multi-granularity contrastive transfer learning module to align the causal representations across languages. Extensive experiments show our framework outperforms the previous state-of-the-art model by 9.4% and 8.2% of average F1 score on monolingual and multilingual scenarios respectively. Notably, in the multilingual scenario, our zero-shot framework even exceeds GPT-3.5 with few-shot learning by 24.3% in overall performance.


Multi-Level Feedback Generation with Large Language Models for Empowering Novice Peer Counselors

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Realistic practice and tailored feedback are key processes for training peer counselors with clinical skills. However, existing mechanisms of providing feedback largely rely on human supervision. Peer counselors often lack mechanisms to receive detailed feedback from experienced mentors, making it difficult for them to support the large number of people with mental health issues who use peer counseling. Our work aims to leverage large language models to provide contextualized and multi-level feedback to empower peer counselors, especially novices, at scale. To achieve this, we co-design with a group of senior psychotherapy supervisors to develop a multi-level feedback taxonomy, and then construct a publicly available dataset with comprehensive feedback annotations of 400 emotional support conversations. We further design a self-improvement method on top of large language models to enhance the automatic generation of feedback. Via qualitative and quantitative evaluation with domain experts, we demonstrate that our method minimizes the risk of potentially harmful and low-quality feedback generation which is desirable in such high-stakes scenarios.


Advancing IIoT with Over-the-Air Federated Learning: The Role of Iterative Magnitude Pruning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) under Industry 4.0 heralds an era of interconnected smart devices where data-driven insights and machine learning (ML) fuse to revolutionize manufacturing. A noteworthy development in IIoT is the integration of federated learning (FL), which addresses data privacy and security among devices. FL enables edge sensors, also known as peripheral intelligence units (PIUs) to learn and adapt using their data locally, without explicit sharing of confidential data, to facilitate a collaborative yet confidential learning process. However, the lower memory footprint and computational power of PIUs inherently require deep neural network (DNN) models that have a very compact size. Model compression techniques such as pruning can be used to reduce the size of DNN models by removing unnecessary connections that have little impact on the model's performance, thus making the models more suitable for the limited resources of PIUs. Targeting the notion of compact yet robust DNN models, we propose the integration of iterative magnitude pruning (IMP) of the DNN model being trained in an over-the-air FL (OTA-FL) environment for IIoT. We provide a tutorial overview and also present a case study of the effectiveness of IMP in OTA-FL for an IIoT environment. Finally, we present future directions for enhancing and optimizing these deep compression techniques further, aiming to push the boundaries of IIoT capabilities in acquiring compact yet robust and high-performing DNN models.


Hey, Teacher, (Don't) Leave Those Kids Alone: Standardizing HRI Education

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Many researchers offer graduate-level versions of the course, which may focus more on the specific researcher's focus area of HRI or be a seminar-style class with reading weekly scientific articles but often feature little to no lecturing on fundamental topics. At the end of an introductory human-robot interaction course, I believe every student should have the tools to: Read, understand, and discuss recent literature Have a comprehensive overview of the entire field of HRI (not just a subset) Design a user study with human participants Develop a hands-on interaction with a real robot Analyze and evaluate experimental data Communicate their findings This manuscript describes the importance of an introductory course containing theoretical and experimental components in Section 2, while Section 3 advocates for adopting or creating a universal robotic platform that all introductory students will gain experience with through a semester-long project, regardless of university funding or size. I also see significant value in some teaching technical papers at the undergraduate level, and I recommend a comprehensive way to do this in Section 4. Section 5 more explicitly outlines the proposed course content for such an introductory course based on my experience designing and teaching such a course in Fall 2023.


Enhancing Law Enforcement Training: A Gamified Approach to Detecting Terrorism Financing

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Tools for fighting cyber-criminal activities using new technologies are promoted and deployed every day. However, too often, they are unnecessarily complex and hard to use, requiring deep domain and technical knowledge. These characteristics often limit the engagement of law enforcement and end-users in these technologies that, despite their potential, remain misunderstood. For this reason, in this study, we describe our experience in combining learning and training methods and the potential benefits of gamification to enhance technology transfer and increase adult learning. In fact, in this case, participants are experienced practitioners in professions/industries that are exposed to terrorism financing (such as Law Enforcement Officers, Financial Investigation Officers, private investigators, etc.) We define training activities on different levels for increasing the exchange of information about new trends and criminal modus operandi among and within law enforcement agencies, intensifying cross-border cooperation and supporting efforts to combat and prevent terrorism funding activities. On the other hand, a game (hackathon) is designed to address realistic challenges related to the dark net, crypto assets, new payment systems and dark web marketplaces that could be used for terrorist activities. The entire methodology was evaluated using quizzes, contest results, and engagement metrics. In particular, training events show about 60% of participants complete the 11-week training course, while the Hackathon results, gathered in two pilot studies (Madrid and The Hague), show increasing expertise among the participants (progression in the achieved points on average). At the same time, more than 70% of participants positively evaluate the use of the gamification approach, and more than 85% of them consider the implemented Use Cases suitable for their investigations.


Causal knowledge engineering: A case study from COVID-19

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

COVID-19 appeared abruptly in early 2020, requiring a rapid response amid a context of great uncertainty. Good quality data and knowledge was initially lacking, and many early models had to be developed with causal assumptions and estimations built in to supplement limited data, often with no reliable approach for identifying, validating and documenting these causal assumptions. Our team embarked on a knowledge engineering process to develop a causal knowledge base consisting of several causal BNs for diverse aspects of COVID-19. The unique challenges of the setting lead to experiments with the elicitation approach, and what emerged was a knowledge engineering method we call Causal Knowledge Engineering (CKE). The CKE provides a structured approach for building a causal knowledge base that can support the development of a variety of application-specific models. Here we describe the CKE method, and use our COVID-19 work as a case study to provide a detailed discussion and analysis of the method.


HRI Curriculum for a Liberal Arts Education

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this course, we will learn how a human-robot interaction course at an undergraduate liberal robots use computational models to have natural and intuitive social arts college. We provide a sample syllabus adapted from a previous interactions with humans.