Education
Introducing Uninformed Search with Tangible Board Games
Martin, Fred G. (University of Massachusetts Lowell)
Researchers have established the value of hands-on learning with tangible artifacts in mathematics and related fields. Inspired by this work, an assignment was developed for an undergraduate/graduate Artificial Intelligence course to introduce students to the formal representation of search. Students analyzed a familiar board game โ e.g., Rush Hour or peg solitaire โ using the standard approach to modeling an uninformed search process. The assignment was well-received by students, and analysis of their work yielded unexpected insights into the challenges students face in understanding how the formal problem model interacts with search algorithms. This paper introduces the theoretical motivations for the work, analyzes student work products, and makes recommendations for future extensions.
Teaching Reinforcement Learning with Mario: An Argument and Case Study
Taylor, Matthew Edmund (Lafayette College)
Integrating games into the computer science curriculum has been gaining acceptance in recent years, particularly when used to improve student engagement in introductory courses. This paper argues that games can also be useful in upper level courses, such as general artificial intelligence and machine learning. We provide a case study of using a Mario game in a machine learning class to provide one successful data point where both content-specific and general learning outcomes were successfully achieved.
Model AI Assignments 2011
Neller, Todd William (Gettysburg College) | desJardins, Marie (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) | Oates, Tim (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) | Taylor, Matthew E. (Lafayette College)
Cluedo) serves as a fun when it comes to designing an optimal (or even practicable) focus problem for this introduction to propositional knowledge solution. The potential solutions also touch on many representation and reasoning. After covering fundamentals areas of AI, so the students can be creative in applying and of propositional logic, students first solve basic synthesizing what they've learned to a new problem. The logic problems with and without the aid of a satisfiability three challenges give the students the opportunity to choose solver (e.g.
Science Fiction as an Introduction to AI Research
Goldsmith, Judy (University of Kentucky) | Mattei, Nicholas (University of Kentucky)
The undergraduate computer science curriculum is generally focused on skills and tools;ย most students are not exposed to muchย research in the field, and do not learn how to navigate the research literature.ย We describe how science fiction reviews were used as a gateway to research reviews.ย Students learn a little about current or recent research on a topic that stirs their imagination, and learn how to search for, read critically, and compare technical papers on a topic related their chosen science fiction book, movie, or TV show.
Teaching Introductory Artificial Intelligence through Java-Based Games
McGovern, Amy (University of Oklahoma) | Tidwell, Zachery (University of Oklahoma) | Rushing, Derek (University of Oklahoma)
We introduce a Java graphical gaming framework that enables students in an introductory artificial intelligence (AI) course to immediately apply and visualize the topics from class. We have used this framework in teaching a mixed undergraduate/graduate AI course for six years. We believe that the use of games motivates students. The graphical nature of each game enables students to quickly see how well their algorithm works. Because the topics in an introductory AI course vary widely, students apply their algorithms to multiple game environments. A final challenging environment enables them to tie together the concepts for the entire semester.
Sketch Recognition Algorithms for Comparing Complex and Unpredictable Shapes
Field, Martin (Texas A&M University) | Valentine, Stephanie (Saint Mary's University of Minnesota) | Linsey, Julie (Texas A&M University) | Hammond, Tracy (Texas A&M University)
In an introductory engineering course with an annual enrollment of over 1000 students, a professor has little option but to rely on multiple choice exams for midterms and finals. Furthermore, the teaching assistants are too overloaded to give detailed feedback on submitted homework assignments. We introduce Mechanix, a computer-assisted tutoring system for engineering students. Mechanix uses recognition of freehand sketches to provide instant, detailed, and formative feedback as the student progresses through each homework assignment, quiz, or exam. Free sketch recognition techniques allow students to solve free-body diagram and static truss problems as if they were using a pen and paper. The same recognition algorithms enable professors to add new unique problems simply by sketching out the correct answer. Mechanix is able to ease the burden of grading so that instructors can assign more free response questions, which provide a better measure of student progress than multiple choice questions do.
From decision to action : intentionality, a guide for the specification of intelligent agents' behaviour
De Loor, Pierre, Pierre-Alexandre, Favier
This article introduces a reflexion about behavioural specification for interactive and participative agent-based simulation in virtual reality. Within this context, it is neces sary to reach a high level of expressivness in order to enforce interactions between the designer and the behavioural model during the in-line prototyping. This requires to consider the need of semantic very early in the design process. The Intentional agent model is here exposed as a possible answer. It relies on a mixed imperative and declarative approach which focuses on the link between decision and action. The design of a tool able to simulate virtual environment implying agents based on this model is discuss
Dimensions of Self-Expression in Facebook Status Updates
Kramer, Adam D. I. (Facebook, Inc.) | Chung, Cindy K. (The University of Texas at Austin)
We describe the dimensions along which Facebook users tend to express themselves via status updates using the semi-automated text analysis approach, the Meaning Extraction Method (MEM). First, we examined dimensions of self-expression in all status updates from a sample of four million Facebook users from four English-speaking countries (the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia) in order to examine how these countries vary in their self-expressions. All four countries showed a basic three-component structure, indicating that the medium is a stronger influence than country characteristics or demographics on how people use Facebook status updates. In each country, people vary in terms of the extent to which they use Informal Speech, share Positive Events, and discuss School in their Facebook status updates. Together, these factors tell us how users differ in their self-expression, and thus illustrate meaningful use cases for the product: Talking about whatโs going on tends to be positive, and people vary in terms of the extent to which their status updates are short, slangy emotional expressions and topics regarding school. The specific words that define these factors showed subtle differences across countries: The use of profanity indicates fewer school words (but only in Australia), whereas the UK shows greater use of slang terms (rather than profanity) when speaking informally. The MEM also identified English-language dialects as a meaningful dimension along which the countries varied. In sum, beyond simply indicating topicality of posts, this study provides insight into how status updates are used for self-expression. We discuss several theoretical frameworks that could produce these results, and more broadly discuss the generation of theoretical frameworks from wholly empirical data (such as naturalistic Internet speech) using the MEM.
Modeling the Detection of Textual Cyberbullying
Dinakar, Karthik (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) | Reichart, Roi (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) | Lieberman, Henry (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
The scourge of cyberbullying has assumed alarming proportions with an ever-increasing number of adolescents admitting to having dealt with it either as a victim or as a bystander. Anonymity and the lack of meaningful supervision in the electronic medium are two factors that have exacerbated this social menace. Comments or posts involving sensitive topics that are personal to an individual are more likely to be internalized by a victim, often resulting in tragic outcomes. We decompose the overall detection problem into detection of sensitive topics, lending itself into text classification sub-problems. We experiment with a corpus of 4500 YouTube comments, applying a range of binary and multiclass classifiers. We find that binary classifiers for individual labels outperform multiclass classifiers. Our findings show that the detection of textual cyberbullying can be tackled by building individual topic-sensitive classifiers.
NPCEditor: Creating Virtual Human Dialogue Using Information Retrieval Techniques
Leuski, Anton (Institute for Creative Technologies) | Traum, David (Institute for Creative Technologies)
See Leuski et al. (2006) and to the same question -- for example, "What Leuski and Traum (2008) for more details. is your name?" -- depending on who the interactor The final parameter is the classification threshold is looking at. NPCEditor's user interface allows the on the KL-divergence value: only answers that designer to define arbitrary annotation classes or score above the threshold value are returned from categories and specify which of these annotation the classifier. The threshold is determined by tuning categories should be used in classification.