The 2018 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the 2018 Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, and the 2018 Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence were held February 2–7, 2018 at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA.  This report, based on the prefaces contained in the AAAI-18 proceedings and program, summarizes the events of the conference.

Artificial Intelligence Education: Editorial Introduction

In this article, ten questions about MOOCs (crowdsourced from the recipients of the AAAI and SIGCSE mailing lists) were posed by editors Michael Wollowski, Todd Neller, James Boerkoel to Douglas H. Fisher, Charles Isbell Jr., and Michael Littman — educators with unique, relevant experiences to lend their perspective on those issues.

Additional landmark events in the past 20 or so years that looked at the challenges of AI education have included the AI Education Workshop held at the 2008 AAAI conference and the Improving Instruction of Introductory Artificial Intelligence symposium held at the 1994 AAAI Fall Symposium. To quote Marti Hearst, the organizer of the 1994 symposium (Hearst 1994): "This symposium was motivated by the desire to address an oft-voiced complaint that introductory artificial intelligence is a notoriously difficult course to teach well." With the regular progression of the field and recent successes such as autonomous cars, deep learning, and IBM's Watson system, this situation has not become easier. At the same time, recent innovations in pedagogical technologies, such as massive open online courses (MOOCs), smartphones, and smart classrooms, have revolutionized how we view the art of teaching. We believe that now is a good time to take stock of state-of-the-art practices in the teaching of AI, as well as propose a vision for AI education in the future. This issue of AI Magazine includes five articles at the cutting edge of AI education. Each covers a subject of current concern to the AI education community. We note that the subject area expertise of the authors covers a wide range including robotics, knowledge-based systems, ethics, machine learning, and game theory. The article Ask Me Anything About MOOCs by Douglas Fisher, Charles Isbell, and Michael Littman was a unique project.

The field of AI has changed significantly in the past couple of years and will likely continue to do so. Driven by a desire to expose our students to relevant and modern materials, we conducted two surveys, one of AI instructors and one of AI practitioners. The surveys were aimed at gathering infor-mation about the current state of the art of introducing AI as well as gathering input from practitioners in the field on techniques used in practice. In this paper, we present and briefly discuss the responses to those two surveys.

We developed a course in which students train an instance of Watson and develop an application that interacts with the trained instance. Additionally, students learn technical in-formation about the Jeopardy! version of Watson and they discuss a future infused with cognitive assistants. In this poster, we justify this course, characterize major assessment items and provide advice on choosing a domain.

In this paper, we describe how we integrated the materials from the 2013 IBM The Great Minds Challenge (TGMC) - Watson Technical Edition into our Introductory Artificial Intelligence course. We describe the variety of materials made available by IBM, as well as the nature of the competition and the datasets that are at the heart of it. We detail how, where and in what form we integrated the materials into our course. We describe assignments that are based on the materials from the competition as well as additional materials we incorporated into our course. We finish by evaluating our experience in teaching with the materials as well as summarize relevant student feedback. We make recommendations for those who wish to adopt the materials.

Past educational robotics research has indicated that the use of simulators can increase students’ performance in introductory robotics programming courses. In this paper, we introduce a simulator for the iRobot Create that works on Windows PCs. It was developed to work with a Python robotics library and includes an Eclipse plugin, but can simulate any library that uses the serial Open Interface on the Create. The platform, library, and simulator are all easy to use and have been well-received initially by students.