Computer-aided design — The common ground

Until recently, control systems have seldom been designed as integral parts of the plants they are to control but have been added as an afterthought, an acceptable performance being obtained by a process of trial and error. Even when the plant and its control system are designed together it is usually too complex for precise analysis and compromises must be made. Judgment is therefore essential and computers cannot replace the designer, who must simulate a number of different designs under changing conditions, which a computer can now do more quickly than he can sketch them. The computations, whether they be for components or systems, either static or dynamic, are similar for almost all design procedures and the common problem is to optimize some notional cost function. Because human jusgment is involved, good man/computer communication, e.g. interactive graphics, is always essential.     

Intelligent tutoring systems

Abstract  This is a non-specialist introduction to intelligent tutoring systems, one way in which artificial intelligence is being applied to education. It presumes little knowledge of AI. The aim is to explain what an ITS consists of, in general terms, and to give some feel for the current products of this kind of research.     

Building common ground in global teamwork through re-representation

We explore in this paper the relation between activities, communication channels and media, and common ground building in global teams. We define re-representation as a sequence of representations of the same concept using different communication channels and media. We identified the re-representation technique to build common ground that is used by team members during multimodal and multimedia communicative events in cross-disciplinary, geographically distributed settings. Our hypotheses are as follows: (1) Significant sources of information behind decisions and request for actions are embedded within the fabric of communicative events in which participants use both informal and formal media to express their ideas. Capturing these information sources can facilitate common ground building and accelerate the execution of action requests. (2) Re-representations of concepts, i.e., sequences of representations using diverse media and communication channels, mediate and accelerate common ground building. (3) The use of intra- or interdisciplinary re-representations correlates with high team performance, i.e., effective team process and high product quality. We used AEC Global Teamwork course offered in 2008–2009 as the testbed for our study to validate our hypothesis.     

Intelligent tutoring systems survey

Simple computer assisted instruction (CAI) systems suffer from the fact that in general they do not know the subject matter they are teaching. Intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) use artificial intelligence (AI) formalisms to represent knowledge in order to improve on CAI systems. We survey a number of systems developed, and the emerging architecture for ITS development.     

Seeking common ground while reserving differences in gesture elicitation studies

Gesture elicitation studies have been frequently conducted in recent years for gesture design. However, most elicitation studies adopted the frequency ratio approach to assign top gestures derived from end-users to the corresponding target tasks, which may cause the results get caught in local minima, i.e., the gestures discovered in an elicitation study are not the best ones. In this paper, we propose a novel approach of seeking common ground while reserving differences in gesture elicitation research. To verify this point, we conducted a four-stage case study on the derivation of a user-defined mouse gesture vocabulary for web navigation and then provide new empirical evidences on our proposed method, including 1) gesture disagreement is a serious problem in elicitation studies, e.g., the chance for participants to produce the same mouse gesture for a given target task without any restriction is very low, below 0.26 on average; 2) offering a set of gesture candidates can improve consistency; and 3) benefited from the hindsight effect, some unique but highly teachable gestures produced in the elicitation study may also have a chance to be chosen as the top gestures. Finally, we discuss how these findings can be applied to inform all gesture-based interaction design.

     

A systematic review of shared visualisation to achieve common ground

This paper reports a systematic review of shared visualisation based on fifteen papers from 2000 to 2013. The findings identified five shared visualisation strategies that represent the ways implemented to process data sharing and knowledge to arrive at the desired level of understanding. Four visualisation techniques were also identified to show how shared cognition is made possible in designing tools for mediating data or knowledge among the users involved. These findings provide research opportunities in integrating rich interactive data visualisation for mobile-based technologies as an effective mean in supporting collaborative work. Finally, social, task and cognitive elements which can be significantly supported by shared visualisation and a guideline for future researchers seeking to design shared visualisation-based systems are presented.     

Boosting learning-by-teaching in virtual tutoring

Research has shown that students tend to engage in quality learning when they are asked to teach (i.e., learning-by-teaching). In this study, a web-based tutoring environment has been developed to enhance the learning of college students by their teaching others: the Virtual Tutee System (VTS). In the VTS, students take the role of tutor and teach a virtual character about what they learn from readings. The design of the VTS has been refined through several iterations of formative evaluation. The current study explored whether the recent improvements made in the VTS augmented the learning-by-teaching effects. The VTS was evaluated with regard to its' effects on students' reading engagement and reading performance. Results indicated that students were behaviorally and cognitively engaged in reading with use of the VTS. Also, the study found a significant improvement in students' emotional engagement in reading after using the VTS. Limited support was found for enhancement of reading performance with repeated use of the VTS. Implications of the study findings are discussed, and suggestions for future research are provided.     

Reciprocal tutoring using cognitive tools

Abstract Reciprocal tutoring, where peers take turns to tutor each other, is an interesting style of social learning. In the Reciprocal Tutoring System (RTS), three computational cognitive tools were designed to facilitate reciprocal tutoring of Lisp programming on the network. The first is a Petal-style of code–chunk interface, with which a tutee can enter Lisp code without making syntactic errors. The second tool is Diagnosis-Hint Tree, with which a tutor can diagnose and comment on the errors in the tutee's program. The third one is a list of dialogue templates, with which the tutee and the tutor can communicate during the tutoring process. A three-phase experiment was conducted, with each phase using different cognitive tools. In addition, with the help of the cognitive tools, RTS provides a virtual learning companion that can play tutor or tutee. Evaluation results reveal both the strengths and weaknesses of peer-based learning and intelligent tutoring, with supports of different cognitive tools. Peer-based learning supported by cognitive tools is a practical and attractive alternative to intelligent tutoring systems. Exactly which type of tutor is preferred depends on the tutee's cognitive, communication, and emotional needs in the tutorial context.     

Inductive families

A general formulation of inductive and recursive definitions in Martin-Löf's type theory is presented. It extends Backhouse's Do-It-Yourself Type Theory to include inductive definitions of families of sets and definitions of functions by recursion on the way elements of such sets are generated. The formulation is in natural deduction and is intended to be a natural generalisation to type theory of Martin-Löf's theory of iterated inductive definitions in predicate logic.Formal criteria are given for correct formation and introduction rules of a new set former capturing definition by strictly positive, iterated, generalised induction. Moreover, there is an inversion principle for deriving elimination and equality rules from the formation and introduction rules. Finally, there is an alternative schematic presentation of definition by recursion.The resulting theory is a flexible and powerful language for programming and constructive mathematics. We hint at the wealth of possible applications by showing several basic examples: predicate logic, generalised induction, and a formalisation of the untyped lambda calculus.A shorter preliminary version of this paper appeared under the title An inversion principle for Martin-Löf's type theory in the Proceedings of the Workshop on Programming Logic in Båstad, May 1989, Programming Methodology Group Report 54, Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Göteborg, pages 177–190.     

基于宠物游戏的智能教学系统

通过利用游戏宠物扮演各种教育角色,扩展智能教学系统(intelligent tutoring system,ITS)中的学生模型,从而完成宠物游戏与ITS的有机结合.设计了一个基于宠物游戏的游戏化智能教学系统架构,架构中的宠物模块能记录学习者的学习活动、分析学习者的学习进程.基于该软件架构,实现了一款游戏化智能教学系统--宠物星际旅行,将宠物游戏的游戏化特性引入到了小学分数知识的学习过程中.测试结果表明,学生对该游戏越专注,就能越快地理解和运用所学知识.     

A cognitive load application in tutoring

Research on intelligent tutoring systems has mainly concentrated on how to reduce a cognitive load which a student will bear in learning a domain. This load reduction approach contributes to facilitating his/her learning. However the approach often fails to reinforce the student's comprehension and retention. Another approach to tutoring is to apply a load to him/her purposefully. In this paper, we present a framework for cognitive load application and describe a demonstration system. The framework imposes a load on a student who tries to understand an explanation. The important point toward the load application is to provide the student with an optimal load that does not go beyond his/her capacity for understanding. This requires controlling the student's load by means of explanations. In order to implement such load control, it is necessary to estimate how much load the explanation imposes on his/her understanding process. The load estimate depends on his/her understanding capability since the same explanation imposes a different load according to the capability. Therefore a student model representing his/her capability is required. This paper shows how our system accomplishes a proper load application by generating explanations with the load estimate.     

Intelligent tutoring systems: an overview

This is a non-expert overview of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs), a way in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques are being applied to education. It introduces ITSs and the motivation for them. It looks at its history: its evolution from Computer-Assisted Instruction (CAI). After looking at the structure of a typical ITS, the paper further examines and discusses some other architectures. Several classic ITSs are reviewed, mainly due to their historical significance or because they best demonstrate some of the principles of intelligent tutoring. A reasonably representative list of ITSs is also provided in order to provide a better appreciation of this vibrant field as well as reveal the scope of existing tutors. The paper concludes, perhaps more appropriately, with some of the author's viewpoints on a couple of controversial issues in the intelligent tutoring domain.     

Student modelling in intelligent tutoring systems

Student modelling is a special type of user modelling which is relevant to the adaptability of intelligent tutoring systems. This paper reviews the basic techniques which have been used in student modelling and discusses issues and approaches of current interest. The role of a student model in a tutoring system and methods for representing information about students are discussed. The paper concludes with an overview of some unresolved issues and problems in student modelling.Electric Brain Company     

Inductive attribute grammars

Attribute grammars are traditionally constrained to be noncircular. In using attribute grammars to specify the semantics of programming languages, this noncircularity limitation has restricted attribute grammars to compile-time or static semantics. Inductive attribute grammars add a general form of circularity to this standard approach. Inductive attribute grammars have the expressiveness required to describe the full semantics of programming languages, while at the same time maintaining the declarative character of standard attribute grammars. This expanded view of attribute grammars proves to be useful in interactive language-based programming environments, as inductive attribute grammars allow the environment to provide an interpreter for incremental re-evaluation of programs after small changes to the code. The addition of run-time semantics via circular attribute grammars permits automatically generated environments to be complete, in that incremental static semantic checking and fast incremental execution are now available within a single framework.The authors' present affiliations are the United States Geological Survey and the Northrop Corporation respectively.     

Inductive pattern learning

A general (nonheuristic) computational analytical model to tackle the difficult unsupervised inductive learning problem is proposed by making some additions and modifications to an existing metric model so that the model is more elegant and able to handle the unsupervised case. It turns out that it is instructive to treat, in essence, the supervised problem with noise as an unsupervised problem. We demonstrate the success of the new model on the benchmark XOR (exclusive-or) and parity problems by showing how the inductive agent successfully learns the weights in a dynamic manner that would allow it to distinguish between bit-strings of any length and unknown labels