Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Homework faces an existential crisis. Has AI made it pointless? Students wait for a celebration of high test scores to begin at La Tijera Academy of Excellence in Inglewood on Wednesday. This is read by an automated voice.

Feature generation (FG) aims to enhance the prediction potential of original data by constructing high-order feature combinations and removing redundant features. It is a key preprocessing step for tabular scientific data to improve downstream machine-learning model performance. Traditional methods face the following two challenges when dealing with the feature generation of scientific data: First, the effective construction of high-order feature combinations in scientific data necessitates profound and extensive domain-specific expertise. Secondly, as the order of feature combinations increases, the search space expands exponentially, imposing prohibitive human labor consumption. Advancements in the Data-Centric Artificial Intelligence (DCAI) paradigm have opened novel avenues for automating feature generation processes. Inspired by that, this paper revisits the conventional feature generation workflow and proposes the Multi-agent Feature Generation (MAFG) framework. Specifically, in the iterative exploration stage, multi-agents will construct mathematical transformation equations collaboratively, synthesize and identify feature combinations ex-hibiting high information content, and leverage a reinforcement learning mechanism to evolve their strategies. Upon completing the exploration phase, MAFG integrates the large language models (LLMs) to interpreta-tively evaluate the generated features of each significant model performance breakthrough. Experimental results and case studies consistently demonstrate that the MAFG framework effectively automates the feature generation process and significantly enhances various downstream scientific data mining tasks.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, such as ChatGPT, are reshaping how English as a foreign language (EFL) students write since students can compose texts by integrating their own words with AI-generated text. This study investigated how 59 Hong Kong secondary school students with varying levels of academic achievement interacted with AI-generated text to compose a feature article, exploring whether any interaction patterns benefited the overall quality of the article. Through content analysis, multiple linear regression and cluster analysis, we found the overall number of words -- whether AI- or human-generated -- is the main predictor of writing quality. However, the impact varies by students' competence to write independently, for instance, by using their own words accurately and coherently to compose a text, and to follow specific interaction patterns with AI-generated text. Therefore, although composing texts with human words and AI-generated text may become prevalent in EFL writing classrooms, without educators' careful attention to EFL writing pedagogy and AI literacy, high-achieving students stand to benefit more from using AI-generated text than low-achieving students.

Tokyo police have arrested three teenage boys on suspicion of fraudulently subscribing to Rakuten Mobile's phone service via a self-made program using artificial intelligence. The Metropolitan Police Department's cybercrime unit believes that the boys obtained at least about 2,500 mobile phone subscriptions in about six months from December 2023 and sold them for a total of about 7.5 million in crypto assets. The arrests were made for allegedly obtaining 105 mobile phone subscriptions between May and August last year by logging into the Rakuten Mobile system with other people's IDs and passwords. The boys -- a 14-year-old third-year junior high school student in Tokyo, a 16-year-old first-year high school student in Gifu Prefecture and a 15-year-old third-year junior high school student in Shiga Prefecture -- have admitted to the allegations, according to police sources. One of the three was quoted as saying that he wanted to attract attention on social media by devising and carrying out a sophisticated criminal scheme.

The impressive essay writing and problem-solving capabilities of large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's ChatGPT have opened up new avenues in education. Our goal is to gain insights into the widespread use of LLMs among secondary students to inform their future development. Despite school restrictions, our survey of over 300 middle and high school students revealed that a remarkable 70% of students have utilized LLMs, higher than the usage percentage among young adults, and this percentage remains consistent across 7th to 12th grade. Students also reported using LLMs for multiple subjects, including language arts, history, and math assignments, but expressed mixed thoughts on their effectiveness due to occasional hallucinations in historical contexts and incorrect answers for lack of rigorous reasoning. The survey feedback called for LLMs better adapted for students, and also raised questions to developers and educators on how to help students from underserved communities leverage LLMs' capabilities for equal access to advanced education resources. We propose a few ideas to address such issues, including subject-specific models, personalized learning, and AI classrooms.

Ongoing advancements in Generative AI (GenAI) have boosted the potential of applying long-standing "learning-by-teaching" practices in the form of a teachable agent (TA). Despite the recognized roles and opportunities of TAs, less is known about how GenAI could create synergy or introduce challenges in TAs and how students perceived the application of GenAI in TAs. This study explored middle school students' perceived roles, benefits, and challenges of GenAI-powered TAs in an authentic mathematics classroom. Through classroom observation, focus-group interviews, and open-ended surveys of 108 sixth-grade students, we found that students expected the GenAI-powered TA to serve as a learning companion, facilitator, and collaborative problem-solver. Students also expressed the benefits and challenges of GenAI-powered TAs. This study provides implications for the design of educational AI and AI-assisted instruction.

The increasing demand for programming language education and growing class sizes require immediate and personalized feedback. However, traditional code review methods have limitations in providing this level of feedback. As the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT for generating accurate solutions and timely code reviews are verified, this research proposes a system that employs GPT-4 to offer learner-friendly code reviews and minimize the risk of AI-assist cheating. To provide learner-friendly code reviews, a dataset was collected from an online judge system, and this dataset was utilized to develop and enhance the system's prompts. In addition, to minimize AI-assist cheating, the system flow was designed to provide code reviews only for code submitted by a learner, and a feature that highlights code lines to fix was added. After the initial system was deployed on the web, software education experts conducted usability test. Based on the results, improvement strategies were developed to improve code review and code correctness check module, thereby enhancing the system. The improved system underwent evaluation by software education experts based on four criteria: strict code correctness checks, response time, lower API call costs, and the quality of code reviews. The results demonstrated a performance to accurately identify error types, shorten response times, lower API call costs, and maintain high-quality code reviews without major issues. Feedback from participants affirmed the tool's suitability for teaching programming to primary and secondary school students. Given these benefits, the system is anticipated to be a efficient learning tool in programming language learning for educational settings.

Using large language models (LLMs) for educational applications like dialogue-based teaching is a hot topic. Effective teaching, however, requires teachers to adapt the difficulty of content and explanations to the education level of their students. Even the best LLMs today struggle to do this well. If we want to improve LLMs on this adaptation task, we need to be able to measure adaptation success reliably. However, current Static metrics for text difficulty, like the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease score, are known to be crude and brittle. We, therefore, introduce and evaluate a new set of Prompt-based metrics for text difficulty. Based on a user study, we create Prompt-based metrics as inputs for LLMs. They leverage LLM's general language understanding capabilities to capture more abstract and complex features than Static metrics. Regression experiments show that adding our Prompt-based metrics significantly improves text difficulty classification over Static metrics alone. Our results demonstrate the promise of using LLMs to evaluate text adaptation to different education levels.

Automated methods are becoming increasingly integrated into studies of formative feedback on students' science explanation writing. Most of this work, however, addresses students' responses to short answer questions. We investigate automated feedback on students' science explanation essays, where students must articulate multiple ideas. Feedback is based on a rubric that identifies the main ideas students are prompted to include in explanatory essays about the physics of energy and mass, given their experiments with a simulated roller coaster. We have found that students generally improve on revised versions of their essays. Here, however, we focus on two factors that affect the accuracy of the automated feedback. First, we find that the main ideas in the rubric differ with respect to how much freedom they afford in explanations of the idea, thus explanation of a natural law is relatively constrained. Students have more freedom in how they explain complex relations they observe in their roller coasters, such as transfer of different forms of energy. Second, by tracing the automated decision process, we can diagnose when a student's statement lacks sufficient clarity for the automated tool to associate it more strongly with one of the main ideas above all others. This in turn provides an opportunity for teachers and peers to help students reflect on how to state their ideas more clearly.

The Beverly Hills Unified School District says the laws are still catching up with the technology. Multiple Los Angeles-area school districts have investigated instances of "inappropriate," artificial intelligence-generated images of students circulating online and in text messages in recent months. Most recently, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) announced that it is investigating "allegations of inappropriate photos being created and disseminated within the Fairfax High School community," the school district told Fox News Digital in a statement. "These allegations are taken seriously, do not reflect the values of the Los Angeles Unified community and will result in appropriate disciplinary action if warranted." A preliminary investigation revealed that the images were allegedly "created and shared on a third-party messaging app unaffiliated with" LAUSD.