Education
JELAI: Integrating AI and Learning Analytics in Jupyter Notebooks
Torre, Manuel Valle, van der Velden, Thom, Specht, Marcus, Oertel, Catharine
Generative AI offers potential for educational support, but often lacks pedagogical grounding and awareness of the student's learning context. Furthermore, researching student interactions with these tools within authentic learning environments remains challenging. To address this, we present JELAI, an open-source platform architecture designed to integrate fine-grained Learning Analytics (LA) with Large Language Model (LLM)-based tutoring directly within a Jupyter Notebook environment. JELAI employs a modular, containerized design featuring JupyterLab extensions for telemetry and chat, alongside a central mid-dleware handling LA processing and context-aware LLM prompt enrichment. This architecture enables the capture of integrated code interaction and chat data, facilitating real-time, context-sensitive AI scaffolding and research into student behaviour. We describe the system's design, implementation, and demonstrate its feasibility through system performance benchmarks and two proof-of-concept use cases illustrating its capabilities for logging multi-modal data, analysing help-seeking patterns, and supporting A/B testing of AI configurations. JELAI's primary contribution is its technical framework, providing a flexible tool for researchers and educators to develop, deploy, and study LA-informed AI tutoring within the widely used Jupyter ecosystem.
EmbodiedAgent: A Scalable Hierarchical Approach to Overcome Practical Challenge in Multi-Robot Control
Wan, Hanwen, Chen, Yifei, Deng, Yixuan, Wei, Zeyu, Li, Dongrui, Lin, Zexin, Wu, Donghao, Cheng, Jiu, Ji, Xiaoqiang
In response to these limitations, this work introduces a hierarchical Embodied system with an Agent-based planner, named EmbodiedAgent. EmbodiedAgent leverages a next-action prediction paradigm to establish a heterogeneous multi-robot control system. The core agent generates a single action and its corresponding arguments per inference, terminating upon receiving an end-of-planning signal, thus ensuring a controlled and concise execution process. To address the aforementioned challenges, we enhance the planner's robustness and generalizability through supervised fine-tuning. Extended from previous work MultiPlan [4], we present MultiPlan+, a large-scale dataset comprising 100 scenarios with over 18,000 tasks, enriched with a subset of impractical cases to mitigate hallucinations. Additionally, we develop an agent based on a fine-tuned language model equipped with function calling capabilities and structured memory. Specifically, robot skills, termination signals, and error signals related to impractical cases are encapsulated as tools, while planning history is organized within the structured memory. For low-level execution, we employ specialized policies trained on individual basic tasks to ensure reliable and robust performance. Furthermore, we propose a comprehensive R obot Planning A ssessment S chema ( RPAS), which moves beyond error-type diagnostics to emphasize stratified success rates assessed through both human evaluation and automated grading.
Fair Sortition Made Transparent
Sortition is an age-old democratic paradigm, widely manifested today through the random selection of citizens' assemblies. Recently-deployed algorithms select assemblies maximally fairly, meaning that subject to demographic quotas, they give all potential participants as equal a chance as possible of being chosen. While these fairness gains can bolster the legitimacy of citizens' assemblies and facilitate their uptake, existing algorithms remain limited by their lack of transparency. To overcome this hurdle, in this work we focus on panel selection by uniform lottery, which is easy to realize in an observable way. By this approach, the final assembly is selected by uniformly sampling some pre-selected set of m possible assemblies. We provide theoretical guarantees on the fairness attainable via this type of uniform lottery, as compared to the existing maximally fair but opaque algorithms, for two different fairness objectives. We complement these results with experiments on real-world instances that demonstrate the viability of the uniform lottery approach as a method of selecting assemblies both fairly and transparently.