Education is increasingly mediated by technology, and is used by a wide array of learners from different age groups, socio-economic backgrounds and cultures. The proliferation of educational software provides new opportunities for using computational methods to support students in their learning process and teachers and researchers in their understanding of how students learn. This talk will identify several computational challenges within this context and present some initial solutions that synthesise approaches from artificial intelligence, HCI and data mining. Specifically, I will present plan recognition algorithms for making sense of students’ activities using open-ended and exploratory educational software; methods for visualising these activities to teachers as well as other students; and tools for personalising educational content to students by combining collaborative filtering with social choice.
Ya'akov (Kobi) Gal is a faculty member of the Department of Information Systems Engineering at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and an associate at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. His work investigates representations and algorithms for making decisions in heterogeneous groups comprising both people and computational agents. He has published over 40 papers in highly refereed venues on topics ranging from artificial intelligence to the learning and cognitive sciences. He is a recipient of the Wolf foundation's 2013 Krill prize for young Israeli scientists, a Marie Curie International fellowship for 2010, a two-time recipient of Harvard University’s Derek Bok award for excellence in teaching, as well as the School of Engineering and Applied Science's outstanding teacher award.
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~gal/