Machine learning predicts how long museum visitors will engage with exhibits

In a proof-of-concept study, education and artificial intelligence researchers have demonstrated the use of a machine-learning model to predict how long individual museum visitors will engage with a given exhibit. The finding opens the door to a host of new work on improving user engagement with informal learning tools. "Education is an important part of the mission statement for most museums," says Jonathan Rowe, co-author of the study and a research scientist in North Carolina State University's Center for Educational Informatics (CEI). "The amount of time people spend engaging with an exhibit is used as a proxy for engagement and helps us assess the quality of learning experiences in a museum setting. It's not like school--you can't make visitors take a test."