Knowledge tracing (KT) is the problem of modeling each student's mastery of knowledge concepts (KCs) as (s)he engages with a sequence of learning activities. It is an active research area to help provide learners with personalized feedback and materials. Various deep learning techniques have been proposed for solving KT. Recent release of large-scale student performance dataset \cite{choi2019ednet} motivates the analysis of performance of deep learning approaches that have been proposed to solve KT. Our analysis can help understand which method to adopt when large dataset related to student performance is available. We also show that incorporating contextual information such as relation between exercises and student forget behavior further improves the performance of deep learning models.

This paper describes a system developed to help University students get more from their online lectures, tutorials, laboratory and other live sessions. We do this by logging their attention levels on their laptops during live Zoom sessions and providing them with personalised video summaries of those live sessions. Using facial attention analysis software we create personalised video summaries composed of just the parts where a student's attention was below some threshold. We can also factor in other criteria into video summary generation such as parts where the student was not paying attention while others in the class were, and parts of the video that other students have replayed extensively which a given student has not. Attention and usage based video summaries of live classes are a form of personalised content, they are educational video segments recommended to highlight important parts of live sessions, useful in both topic understanding and in exam preparation. The system also allows a Professor to review the aggregated attention levels of those in a class who attended a live session and logged their attention levels. This allows her to see which parts of the live activity students were paying most, and least, attention to. The Help-Me-Watch system is deployed and in use at our University in a way that protects student's personal data, operating in a GDPR-compliant way.

Gaussian processes (GPs) provide a framework for Bayesian inference that can offer principled uncertainty estimates for a large range of problems. For example, if we consider regression problems with Gaussian likelihoods, a GP model enjoys a posterior in closed form. However, identifying the posterior GP scales cubically with the number of training examples and requires to store all examples in memory. In order to overcome these obstacles, sparse GPs have been proposed that approximate the true posterior GP with pseudo-training examples. Importantly, the number of pseudo-training examples is user-defined and enables control over computational and memory complexity. In the general case, sparse GPs do not enjoy closed-form solutions and one has to resort to approximate inference. In this context, a convenient choice for approximate inference is variational inference (VI), where the problem of Bayesian inference is cast as an optimization problem -- namely, to maximize a lower bound of the log marginal likelihood. This paves the way for a powerful and versatile framework, where pseudo-training examples are treated as optimization arguments of the approximate posterior that are jointly identified together with hyperparameters of the generative model (i.e. prior and likelihood). The framework can naturally handle a wide scope of supervised learning problems, ranging from regression with heteroscedastic and non-Gaussian likelihoods to classification problems with discrete labels, but also multilabel problems. The purpose of this tutorial is to provide access to the basic matter for readers without prior knowledge in both GPs and VI. A proper exposition to the subject enables also access to more recent advances (like importance-weighted VI as well as inderdomain, multioutput and deep GPs) that can serve as an inspiration for new research ideas.

Gradient descent is an optimization algorithm that follows the negative gradient of an objective function in order to locate the minimum of the function. A limitation of gradient descent is that a single step size (learning rate) is used for all input variables. Extensions to gradient descent like AdaGrad and RMSProp update the algorithm to use a separate step size for each input variable but may result in a step size that rapidly decreases to very small values. The Adaptive Movement Estimation algorithm, or Adam for short, is an extension to gradient descent and a natural successor to techniques like AdaGrad and RMSProp that automatically adapts a learning rate for each input variable for the objective function and further smooths the search process by using an exponentially decreasing moving average of the gradient to make updates to variables. In this tutorial, you will discover how to develop gradient descent with Adam optimization algorithm from scratch.

Personalized gamification explores knowledge about the users to tailor gamification designs to improve one-size-fits-all gamification. The tailoring process should simultaneously consider user and contextual characteristics (e.g., activity to be done and geographic location), which leads to several occasions to tailor. Consequently, tools for automating gamification personalization are needed. The problems that emerge are that which of those characteristics are relevant and how to do such tailoring are open questions, and that the required automating tools are lacking. We tackled these problems in two steps. First, we conducted an exploratory study, collecting participants' opinions on the game elements they consider the most useful for different learning activity types (LAT) via survey. Then, we modeled opinions through conditional decision trees to address the aforementioned tailoring process. Second, as a product from the first step, we implemented a recommender system that suggests personalized gamification designs (which game elements to use), addressing the problem of automating gamification personalization. Our findings i) present empirical evidence that LAT, geographic locations, and other user characteristics affect users' preferences, ii) enable defining gamification designs tailored to user and contextual features simultaneously, and iii) provide technological aid for those interested in designing personalized gamification. The main implications are that demographics, game-related characteristics, geographic location, and LAT to be done, as well as the interaction between different kinds of information (user and contextual characteristics), should be considered in defining gamification designs and that personalizing gamification designs can be improved with aid from our recommender system.

Apple has shed more light on its $100 million pledge to improve racial equity. Today, the company announced that it will be making a $25 million contribution to the Propel Center, a learning hub designed for members of the HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). It will include a physical campus at the Atlanta University Center, a virtual platform for remote learning and events at partner institutions' campuses. In a press release, Apple said the Propel Center will teach a variety of subjects including AI and machine learning, app development, augmented reality, creative arts and entrepreneurship. Apple employees will help design the curricula and offer mentorship opportunities, including internships.

Since its introduction in 2011, there have been over 4000 MOOCs on various subjects on the Web, serving over 35 million learners. MOOCs have shown the ability to democratize knowledge dissemination and bring the best education in the world to every learner. However, the disparate distances between participants, the size of the learner population, and the heterogeneity of the learners' backgrounds make it extremely difficult for instructors to interact with the learners in a timely manner, which adversely affects learning experience. To address the challenges, in this thesis, we propose a framework: educational content linking. By linking and organizing pieces of learning content scattered in various course materials into an easily accessible structure, we hypothesize that this framework can provide learners guidance and improve content navigation. Since most instruction and knowledge acquisition in MOOCs takes place when learners are surveying course materials, better content navigation may help learners find supporting information to resolve their confusion and thus improve learning outcome and experience. To support our conjecture, we present end-to-end studies to investigate our framework around two research questions: 1) can manually generated linking improve learning? 2) can learning content be generated with machine learning methods? For studying the first question, we built an interface that present learning materials and visualize the linking among them simultaneously. We found the interface enables users to search for desired course materials more efficiently, and retain more concepts more readily. For the second question, we propose an automatic content linking algorithm based on conditional random fields. We demonstrate that automatically generated linking can still lead to better learning, although the magnitude of the improvement over the unlinked interface is smaller.

Among the things I have not missed since entering middle age is the sensation of being an absolute beginner. It has been decades since I've sat in a classroom in a gathering cloud of incomprehension (Algebra 2, tenth grade) or sincerely tried, lesson after lesson, to acquire a skill that was clearly not destined to play a large role in my life (modern dance, twelfth grade). Learning to ride a bicycle in my early thirties was an exception--a little mortifying when my husband had to run alongside the bike, as you would with a child--but ultimately rewarding. Less so was the time when a group of Japanese schoolchildren tried to teach me origami at a public event where I was the guest of honor--I'll never forget their sombre puzzlement as my clumsy fingers mutilated yet another paper crane. Like Tom Vanderbilt, a journalist and the author of "Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning" (Knopf), I learn new facts all the time but new skills seldom.

We introduce the "Incremental Implicitly-Refined Classi-fication (IIRC)" setup, an extension to the class incremental learning setup where the incoming batches of classes have two granularity levels. i.e., each sample could have a high-level (coarse) label like "bear" and a low-level (fine) label like "polar bear". Only one label is provided at a time, and the model has to figure out the other label if it has already learnfed it. This setup is more aligned with real-life scenarios, where a learner usually interacts with the same family of entities multiple times, discovers more granularity about them, while still trying not to forget previous knowledge. Moreover, this setup enables evaluating models for some important lifelong learning challenges that cannot be easily addressed under the existing setups. These challenges can be motivated by the example "if a model was trained on the class bear in one task and on polar bear in another task, will it forget the concept of bear, will it rightfully infer that a polar bear is still a bear? and will it wrongfully associate the label of polar bear to other breeds of bear?". We develop a standardized benchmark that enables evaluating models on the IIRC setup. We evaluate several state-of-the-art lifelong learning algorithms and highlight their strengths and limitations. For example, distillation-based methods perform relatively well but are prone to incorrectly predicting too many labels per image. We hope that the proposed setup, along with the benchmark, would provide a meaningful problem setting to the practitioners

You will then learn how to implement these in pythonic and concise PyTorch code, that can be extended to include any future deep Q learning algorithms. These algorithms will be used to solve a variety of environments from the Open AI gym's Atari library, including Pong, Breakout, and Bankheist. You will learn the key to making these Deep Q Learning algorithms work, which is how to modify the Open AI Gym's Atari library to meet the specifications of the original Deep Q Learning papers. Also included is a mini course in deep learning using the PyTorch framework. This is geared for students who are familiar with the basic concepts of deep learning, but not the specifics, or those who are comfortable with deep learning in another framework, such as Tensorflow or Keras.