Part Two of the special issue of AI Magazine presents articles on some of the most interesting projects at the intersection of AI and Education. Included are articles on integrated systems such as virtual humans, an intellgent textbook a game-based learning environment as well as technology focused components such as student models and data mining. The issue concludes with an article summarizing the contemporary and emerging challenges at the intersection of AI and education.

The Twenty-Sixth Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-14) will focus on successful applications of AI technology.

IUI-14 held in cooperation with AAAI. AAAI Spring Symposium Series will be AI Research Society Conference. Third International Conference on held March 24-26, 2014 at Stanford FLAIRS-14 will be held May 21-23, Pattern Recognition Applications University in Palo Alto, California USA 2014 in Pensacola Beach, Florida, USA and Methods. ICAPS-14 will be held Sixteenth International Conference 2014 will be held June 1-4, 2014 at the June 21-26, 2014 in Portsmouth, New on Enterprise Information Systems. IAAI-14 will be held July SOCS 2014 will be held August 15-17, 5th International Joint Conference 27-31, 2014, in Quebec City, Quebec, 2014 in Prague, Czech Republic on Computational Creativity.

This article focuses on contributions that AI can make to address long-term educational goals. It describes five challenges that would support: (1) mentors for every learner; (2) learning twenty-first century skills; (3) interaction data to support learning; (4) universal access to global classrooms; and (5) lifelong and life-wide learning. A vision and brief research agenda are described for each challenge along with goals that lead to access to global educational resources and the reuse and sharing of digital educational resources. Instructional systems with AI technology are described that currently support richer experiences for learners and supply researchers with new opportunities to analyze vast data sets of instructional behavior from big databases, containing elements of learning, affect, motivation, and social interaction. Personalized learning is described using computational tools that enhance student and group experience, reflection, and analysis, and supply data for development of novel theory development.

The emergence of massive open online courses has initiated a broad national-wide discussion on higher education practices, models, and pedagogy.  Artificial intelligence and machine learning courses were at the forefront of this trend and are also being used to serve personalized, managed content in the back-end systems. Massive open online courses are just one example of the sorts of pedagogical innovations being developed to better teach AI. This column will discuss and share innovative educational approaches that teach or leverage AI and its many subfields, including robotics, machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and others at all levels of education (K-12, undergraduate, and graduate levels).  In particular, this column will serve the community as a venue to learn about the Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence (EAAI) (colocated with AAAI for the past four years); introductions to innovative pedagogy and best practices for AI and across the computer science curricula; resources for teaching AI, including model AI assignments, software packages, online videos and lectures that can be used in your classroom; topic tutorials introducing a subject to students and researchers with links to articles, presentations, and online materials; and discussion of the use of AI methods in education shaping personalized tutorials, learning analytics, and data mining

Virtual humans are computer-generated characters designed to look and behave like real people. Studies have shown that virtual humans can mimic many of the social effects that one finds in human-human interactions such as creating rapport, and people respond to virtual humans in ways that are similar to how they respond to real people. We believe that virtual humans represent a new metaphor for interacting with computers, one in which working with a computer becomes much like interacting with a person and this can bring social elements to the interaction that are not easily supported with conventional interfaces. We present two systems that embody these ideas. The first, the Twins are virtual docents in the Museum of Science, Boston, designed to engage visitors and raise their awareness and knowledge of science. The second SimCoach, uses an empathetic virtual human to provide veterans and their families with information about PTSD and depression.

I'm delighted to announce that this issue his spring, AI Magazine launched its digital edition, which inaugurates another major delivery advance, the launch of the AI Magazine app. The app delivers access to the magazine in a device-tailored form for the iPhone, iPad, Android smartphone, Android table, or Amazon Kindle Fire. In addition to providing easy interaction with the magazine's content, the app contains a library of issues (including all of 2013), which will enable reading the magazine anywhere, even offline in airplane mode. It supports searching within and across issues, saving content, and sharing by email or social media. Push notifications will inform users of new issues, and an RSS feed (coming soon) will inform readers of AAAI announcements.

Intelligent game-based learning environments integrate commercial game technologies with AI methods from intelligent tutoring systems and intelligent narrative technologies. This article introduces the CRYSTAL ISLAND intelligent game-based learning environment, which has been under development in the authors’ laboratory for the past seven years. After presenting CRYSTAL ISLAND, the principal technical problems of intelligent game-based learning environments are discussed: narrative-centered tutorial planning, student affect recognition, student knowledge modeling, and student goal recognition. Solutions to these problems are illustrated with research conducted with the CRYSTAL ISLAND learning environment.

Motivated by the original idea of artificial intelligence in the 1950s and 1960s, there has been a revival of research in general intelligence during the last years. The annual AGI conference series, which is the major event in this area, has been held in cooperation with AAAI since 2008. The sixth conference on AGI was held at Peking University, Beijing, from July 31 to August 3, 2013. AGI-13 was collocated with the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2013), the major international AI conference. This was the first time an AGI conference took place in Asia.

Articulating thought in computer-based media is a powerful means for humans to develop their understanding of phenomena. We have created DynaLearn, an Intelligent Learning Environment that allows learners to acquire conceptual knowledge by constructing and simulating qualitative models of how systems behave. DynaLearn uses diagrammatic representations for learners to express their ideas. The environment is equipped with semantic technology components capable of generating knowledge-based feedback, and virtual characters enhancing the interaction with learners. Teachers have created course material, and successful evaluation studies have been performed. This article presents an overview of the DynaLearn system.