Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Education


A Semantic Metacognitive Learning Environment

AAAI Conferences

In the last years, knowledge technologies have been exploited for self-regulation functionalities inside e-learning systems. The definition of integrated system suitably scaffolding learners to improve their experi- ence is still lacking though. In this work, we propose an innovative Web-based educational environment that sustains metacognitive self-regulated learning processes upon Semantic Web and Social Web methods and technologies.


Modeling and Measuring Self-Regulated Learning in Teachable Agent Environments

AAAI Conferences

Our learning by teaching environment has students take on the role and responsibilities of a teacher to a virtual student named Betty. The environment is structured so that successfully instructing their teachable agent requires the students to learn and understand science topics for themselves. This process is supported by adaptive scaffolding and feedback from the system. This feedback is instantiated through the interactions with the teachable agent and a mentor agent, named Mr. Davis. This paper provides an overview of two studies that were conducted with 5th grade science students and a description of the analysis techniques that we have developed for interpreting students’ activities in this learning environment.


Scaffold Ill-Structured Problem Solving Processes through Fostering Self-Regulation — A Web-Based Cognitive Support System

AAAI Conferences

This paper provides an overview of a web-based, database-driven cognitive support system for scaffolding ill-structured problem solving processes through fostering self-regulation. Self-regulation learning and ill-structured problem-solving theories guided the design framework of this cognitive tool. Of particular interest are the roles of question prompts, expert view, and peer review mechanisms in supporting self-monitoring, self-regulation, and self-reflection in the processes of ill-structured problem solving, which have been tested through empirical studies in various content domains and contexts. Based on findings, suggestions are made to improve the cognitive support system for future research, including mapping self-regulation learning processes more closely with ill-structured problem-solving processes, and focusing on the system’s capability to automatically adapt scaffolding based on individual needs and prior knowledge.


Making the Implicit Explicit: Issues and Approaches for Scaffolding Metacognitive Activity (Invited Talk)

AAAI Conferences

But moreover, the implicit nature Metacognitive activity is a core aspect of many multifaceted of metacognitive activities makes the goal of supporting practices, but supporting such activity in educational contexts metacognition perhaps an even larger challenge. When we is a complex endeavor. One example of such a practice think about the two major learning goals described above includes the substantive inquiry practices that different in the science inquiry example and other learning goals educational policy groups (for example, National Research put forth in many educational policies, we can the central Council 2000) recommend for K-12 student curricula, including challenge that we want to address with metacognitive support: those practices that involve more authentic types of (1) supporting novice learners to mindfully engage in scientific inquiry along with online inquiry activities that incorporate the metacognitive activity necessary to successfully participate a growing number of digital libraries and other in complex, multifaceted practices, and (2) supporting information resources. There are many characterizations novice learners to learn good metacognitive practiceswhat of inquiry, but we can succinctly describe inquiry as a set metacognitive activities are, why they are important, and of activities that involve: (1) asking and developing questions how to engage in them. Supporting metacognition is vital to investigate; (2) searching for and gathering relevant to essentially help make these implicit activities more explicit data and information; (3) reading, evaluating, and analyzing to learners, yet we continue to see how difficult it is to the gathered data and information; and (4) synthesizing provide such support.


Preface: Meta-Cognitive Educational Systems: One Step Forward

AAAI Conferences

The AAAI Fall Symposium on Meta-Cognitive Educational - What are the theoretical foundations and how are they articulated Systems: One Step Forward is the second edition of the successful in CBLEs? MCES implemented as CBLEs are designed to interact with - What are the main aspects of metacognition, selfregulation users, and support their learning and decision-making processes. Can MCES actually foster they need to plan their learning activities, to adapt their learners to be self-regulating agents? How can a MCES learning strategies to meet learning goals, become aware of be autonomous and increase its knowledge to match the changing task conditions, and the dynamic aspects of the learners evolving skills and knowledge? MCES may not be embodied, prior to, during, and after they have been involved in but does it help if they act as intentional agents? the learning environment.


Scalable POMDPs for Diagnosis and Planning in Intelligent Tutoring Systems

AAAI Conferences

A promising application area for proactive assistant agents is automated tutoring and training.  Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) assist tutors and tutees by automating diagnosis and adaptive tutoring. These tasks are well modeled by a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) since it accounts for the uncertainty inherent in diagnosis. However, an important aspect of making POMDP solvers feasible for real-world problems is selecting appropriate representations for states, actions, and observations. This paper studies two scalable POMDP state and observation representations. State queues allow POMDPs to temporarily ignore less-relevant states. Observation chains represent information in independent dimensions using sequences of observations to reduce the size of the observation set. Preliminary experiments with simulated tutees suggest the experimental representations perform as well as lossless POMDPs, and can model much larger problems.


Alignments of Manifold Sections of Different Dimensions in Manifold Learning

AAAI Conferences

We consider an alignment algorithm for reconstructing global coordinates from local coordinates constructed for sections of manifolds. We show that, under certain conditions, the align- ment algorithm can successfully recover global coordinates even when local neighborhoods have different dimensions. Our results generalize an earlier analysis to allow alignment of sections of different dimensions. We also apply our result to a semisupervised learning problem.


Building a Job Lanscape from Directional Transition Data

AAAI Conferences

The analysis of career paths suffers from a lack of exploratory tools and dynamic models, due in part to the inherent high dimensionality of the problem. Paths may be understood as directed traversals through a graph whose nodes consist of "job types," which we define as industry and occupation pairs. We want to develop tools to understand and detect high-level features of  both the labor market and the workers moving through it — career dynamics. To do this, we map the discrete space of jobs into a d-dimensional continuous space; proximity between jobs will mean that they are "close" to each other in a non-negligible subset of career paths. This embedding allows one to visualize the job landscape.  Moreover, we can map individual or groups of career paths to this space, extract features of their collective structure, and construct statistical tests comparing groups by means of this mapping.


Eye Spy: Improving Vision through Dialog

AAAI Conferences

Despite efforts to build robust vision systems, robots in new environments inevitably encounter new objects. Traditional supervised learning requires gathering and annotating sampleimages in the environment, usually in the form of bounding boxes or segmentations. This training interface takes some experience to do correctly and is quite tedious. We report work in progress on a robotic dialog system to learn names and attributes of objects through spoken interaction with a human teacher. The robot and human play a variant of the children’s games “I Spy” and “20 Questions”. In our game, the human places objects of interest in front of the robot, then picks an object in her head. The robot asks a series of natural language questions about the target object, with the goal of pointing at the correct object while asking a minimum number of questions. The questions range from attributes such as color (“Is it red?”) to category questions (“Is it a cup?”). The robot selects questions to ask based on an information gain criteria, seeking to minimize the entropy of the visual model given the answer to the question.


Preparing to Talk: Interaction between a Linguistically Enabled Agent and a Human Teacher

AAAI Conferences

As a precursor to learning to use language an infant has to acquire preliminary linguistic skills, including the ability to recognize and produce word forms without meaning. This develops out of babbling, through vocal interaction with carers. We report on evidence from developmental psychology and from neuroscientific research that supports a dual process approach to language learning. We describe a simulation of the transition from babbling to the recognition of first word forms in a simulated robot interacting with a human teacher. This precedes interactions with the real iCub robot.