Learners may develop expertise by experiencing numerous different but relevant situations. Computer games and virtual simulations can facilitate these training opportunities, however, because of the relative difficulty in authoring new scenarios, the increasing need for new and different scenarios becomes a bottleneck in the learning process. Furthermore, a one-size-fits-all scenario may not address all of the abilities, needs, or goals of a particular learner. To address these issues we present a novel technique, Automated Scenario Adaptation, to automatically “rewrite” narrative scenario content to suit individual learners’ needs and abilities and to incorporate recent changes from real world learning needs. Scenario adaptation acts as problem generation for intelligent tutoring systems, producing greater learning opportunities that facilitate engagement and continued learner involvement.

The Snackbot, is a robot designed in collaboration between the Robotics Institute, and the Human Computer Interaction Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. The Snackbot was created to traverse the halls of Carnegie Mellon University, and deliver food items ordered by occupants of the offices. The goal of this development project for the Snackbot, was to refine the audio/video synchronization, and to also create a simple way to log, and stream that data over a network. Such a task requires that one not only carefully consider different pieces of software to use, but also that they can apply it across the necessary platform. For the Snackbot, the sight, and sound are important qualities, especially when testing out in the field using an operator. That ability is crucial when preparing an interactive robot to autonomously carry out its task efficiently.

This paper tackles the problem of building situated prompting and assistance systems for guiding a human with a cognitive disability through a large domain containing multiple tasks. This problem is challenging because the target population has difficulty maintaining goals, recalling necessary steps and recognizing objects and potential actions (affordances), and therefore may not appear to be acting rationally. Prompts or cues from an automated system can be very helpful in this regard, but the domain is inherently partially observable due to sensor noise and uncertain human behaviours, making the task of selecting an appropriate prompt very challenging. Prior work has shown how such automated assistance for a single task can be modeled as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). In this paper, we generalise this to multiple tasks, and show how to build a scalable, distributed and hierarchical controller. We demonstrate the algorithm in a set of simulated domains and show it can perform as well as the full model in many cases, and can give solutions to large problems (over 10 15 states and 10 9 observations) for which the full model fails to find a policy.

The New York Public Library is participating in the Chronicling America initiative to develop an online searchable database of historically significant newspaper articles. Microfilm copies of the papers are scanned and high resolution OCR software is run on them. The text from the OCR provides a wealth of data and opinion for researchers and historians. However, the categorization of articles provided by the OCR engine is rudimentary and a large number of the articles are labeled ``editorial" without further categorization. To provide a more refined grouping of articles, unsupervised machine learning algorithms (such as K-Means) are being investigated. The K-Means algorithm requires tuning of parameters such as the number of clusters and mechanism of seeding to ensure that the search is not prone to being caught in a local minima. We designed a pilot study to observe whether humans are adept at finding sub-categories. The subjective labels provided by humans are used as a guide to compare performance of the automated clustering techniques. In addition, seeds provided by annotators are carefully incorporated into a semi-supervised K-Means algorithm (Seeded K-Means); empirical results indicate that this helps to improve performance and provides an intuitive sub-categorization of the articles labeled ``editorial" by the OCR engine.

We present an efficient random decision tree algorithm for case-based reasoning systems. We combine this algorithm with a simple similarity measure based on domain knowledge to create a stronger hybrid algorithm. This combination is based on our general approach for combining lazy and eager learning methods. We evaluate the resulting algorithms on a case base of patient records in a palliative care domain. Our hybrid algorithm consistently produces a lower average error than the base algorithms.

State-of-the-art abstraction heuristics are those constructed by the merge-and-shrink approach in which an abstraction consists of a labeled transition system, and the composition of abstractions correspond to the synchronized product of transition systems. Merge-and-shrink heuristics build a composite abstraction from atomic abstractions that are directly associated with the variables of the planning problem. In this paper, we show that the framework of labeled transition systems is more general, and propose a new type of abstraction called the counting abstraction. Counting abstractions can be transparently combined with other type of abstractions to get more informative heuristics. We show how to effectively construct the counting abstractions and presents preliminary experiments over benchmark problems.

Historically, causal markers, syntactic structures and connectives have been the sole identifying features for automatically extracting causal relations in natural language discourse. However various connectives such as “and,” prepositions such as “as” and other syntactic structures are highly ambiguous in nature, and it is clear that one cannot solely rely on lexico-syntactic markers for detection of causal phenomenon in discourse. This paper introduces the theory of granularity and describes different approaches to identify granularity in natural language. As causality is often granular in nature, we use granularity relations to discover and infer the presence of causal relations in text. We compare this with causal relations identified using just causal markers. We achieve a precision of 0.91 and a recall of 0.79 using granularity for causal relation detection, as compared to a precision of 0.79 and a recall of 0.44 using pure causal markers for causality detection.

It is widely acknowledged that one-on-one human tutoring is one of the most effective ways to provide learning, however, the source of its effectiveness is still unclear. Tutor-centered, student-centered, and interaction hypotheses have been proposed as possible explanations of the effectiveness of human tutoring. Most research has addressed this question by analyzing tutorial sessions at the dialogue move or speech act level. The present paper adopts a different approach by focusing on word usage patterns in 50 naturalistic tutorial sessions between human students and expert tutors. Specifically, each unique word in the session was designated as a student initiative word, a tutor initiative word, or a shared-initiative word. Comparisons of the frequencies as well as the weights of the words assigned to each of these categories indicated that the student and tutor share initiative even though the tutor’s are considerably more verbose. The implications of the results for the development of an ITS that aspires to model expert tutors are discussed.

The call for papers were Yutao Wang and Neil Heffernan for "The attracted 179 submissions, across 13 different'Assistance' Model: Leveraging How Many tracks. Special tracks are a vital part of the Hints and Attempts a Student Needs," a submission FLAIRS conferences, with 12 held at FLAIRSto the Special Track on Intelligent Tutoring 24. Over 90 percent of the papers were reviewed Systems; Simon Delamarre for "The Utility of by four or more reviewers, and all papers were Combinatory Categorical Grammar in Designing reviewed by at least three. These reviews were a Pedagogical Tool for Teaching Languages," coordinated by the program committees of the a submission to the Special Track on Computation general conference and the special tracks. The Linguistics; and Rachel M. Rufenacht, accepted submissions include 94 papers and 37 Philip M. McCarthy, and Travis A. Lamkin for poster papers that appear in these proceedings.

Rook Jumping Maze design provides a number of good opportunities for experiential learning of AI concepts, including uninformed search, stochastic local search, machine learning, and objective/utility function design. In this paper we will define the maze and present a collection of exercises that allow exploration of several AI topics in the context of an engaging, fun, and unifying task.