Keynote Speakers
Speech Title
Transforming Learning and Education in the Era of AI
Prof. BREAZEAL, Cynthia
Professor of Media Arts and Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The United States
Speaker Bio
Cynthia Breazeal is a professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, where she founded and directs the Personal Robots group at the Media Lab. She is the MIT dean for digital learning, and in this role, she leverages her experience in emerging digital technologies and business, research, and strategic initiatives to lead Open Learning’s business and research & engagement units. She is also the Director of the MIT-wide Initiative on Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education (raise.mit.edu). MIT RAISE is a research and outreach effort that advances access and inclusivity in AI education to people of all ages and backgrounds with a focus on K12 and the workforce. She co-founded the consumer social robotics company, Jibo, Inc., where she served as Chief Scientist and Chief Experience Officer.
Breazeal is a pioneer of social robotics and human-robot interaction. Her work balances technical innovation in AI, UX design, and understanding the psychology of engagement to design personified AI technologies that promote human flourishing and personal growth. Her recent work focuses on the theme of "living with AI" and understanding the long-term impact of social robots that can build relationships and provide personalized support as helpful companions in daily life. Her research group actively investigates social robots applied to education, pediatrics, health and wellness, and aging. As part of this mission, her group also develops design justice frameworks for human-robot interaction and inclusive AI literacy education for under-served K12 students.
Speech Summary
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming the world, and it is essential for educators, researchers, and innovators to prepare students to thrive in an increasingly AI-powered workforce. The MIT RAISE Initiative is at the forefront of the growing K12 AI Literacy/Fluency movement. Our efforts advance research, innovation, and impact goals at the intersection of AI and learning for K12 students on a global scale. Building on MIT's tradition of constructionist pedagogy and groundbreaking science and innovation, MIT RAISE develops transformative educational technologies, innovative curriculum, teacher development materials, and innovative K12 outreach programs such as the Day of AI and MIT Future Makers. This includes exploring how AI-powered educational interventions can support student learning outcomes and prepare them to work creatively and responsibly with increasingly intelligent tools and technologies. Today, even young learners can now use these powerful AI and computing tools to become positive change makers at the personal, community, and national levels. Much of what we develop and share with the educational community is free and open source. This talk will introduce these resources, their impact, and how to access them. Our hope is K12 teachers can use these resources to build their own AI literacy skills, learn how to responsibly and effectively use AI in teaching practice, and bring AI literacy and AI fluency to their classroom. By doing so, we hope to contribute to a future where everyone can participate in, benefit from, and responsibly shape our future with artificial intelligence.
Speech Title
The effectiveness of AI-based support for engagement during video-based learning
Prof. MITROVIC, Tanja
Professor of Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering
University of Canterbury, New Zealand
Speaker Bio
Dr Antonija (Tanja) Mitrovic is a full professor at the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. She is the leader of ICTG (Intelligent Computer Tutoring Group). Dr Mitrovic received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Nis, Yugoslavia, in 1994. She is an associate editor of the following journals: Practice in Technology Enhanced Learning (RPTEL), International Journal on Artificial Intelligence in Education (IJAIED) and Journal of Universal Computer Science (JUCS). She is a Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education (APSCE), Distinguished member of ACM, and senior member of AAAI and IEEE. She was awarded the Distinguished Researcher Award in 2011 by APSCE.
Dr Mitrovic’s primary research interests are in AI in education and student modeling. ICTG has developed a number of constraint-based intelligent tutoring systems in a variety of domains, which have been thoroughly evaluated in real classrooms, and proven to be highly effective. These systems provide adaptive support for acquiring both problem-solving skills and meta-cognitive skills. ICTG has also developed ASPIRE, a full authoring and deployment environment for constraint-based tutors. Her recent research focuses on AI-based support for active learning from videos.
Speech Summary
Video-based learning is very popular both in formal and informal educational settings. Videos do not only allow information transfer, but also offer opportunities to show how to perform tasks so that the learner can grasp them better. However, watching videos can be a passive activity and result in shallow learning. We have developed AVW-Space, a video watching platform, which allows the teacher to select publicly available videos from YouTube and define a space for their students. Learning happens in two phases in the platform. In the first phase, students watch videos and write comments on them. The teacher can specify aspects for students to use when writing comments, which focus students’ attention to important concepts in videos or to encourage students to self-reflect. In the second phase, the teacher can select some comments to open anonymously to the whole class, to review and rate. The teacher can specify rating categories to reinforce important activities, such as self-reflection. AVW-Space is a general-purpose and can be used to provide instruction in any domain. In our research, we focus on teaching soft skills, e.g. giving presentations or communications in software-development teams, as such skills are difficult to teach in the classroom and require the learner to reflect on their experience and observe the skills performed in various situations. In addition to writing/rating comments, AVW-Space uses AI-based support in order to track the learner’s behaviour and provide personalized nudges in order to improve engagement. In this talk, I will present the evolution of AVW-Space and various types of AI-based support we have added to it over the years. In early studies, when there was no support, half of the participants watched videos passively. To improve engagement via comment writing, extended the platform by adding a set of reminder nudges, which are given to students who are passively watching videos or not commenting on a variety of topics. Those nudges resulted in a significantly higher percentage of students writing comments. We then developed machine learning models which classify students’ comments immediately after they are written into low, medium or high-quality comments. Based on these classification, AVW-Space provides additional nudges to students based on the quality of comments they write. We also added visualizations of students’ activities, the comment quality and nudges, so that students can easily review their progress. The most recent studies show the effectiveness of the AI-based support: the vast majority of students are now active and writing high-quality comments, which also results in higher learning outcomes.
Prof. Gautam Biswas
Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Engineering
Professor of Computer Science
Professor of Computer Engineering
Professor of Engineering Management
Senior Research Scientist, Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS)
Vanderbilt University, United States
Speaker Bio
Prof. Biswas conducts research in Intelligent Systems with primary interests in monitoring, control, and fault adaptivity of complex cyber-physical systems. In particular, his research focuses on Deep Reinforcement Learning, Unsupervised and Semi-supervised Anomaly Detection methods, and Online Risk and Safety analysis applied to Air and Marine vehicles as well as Smart Buildings. His work, in conjunction with Honeywell Technical Center and NASA Ames, led to the NASA 2011 Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate Technology and Innovation Group Award for Vehicle Level Reasoning System and Data Mining methods to improve aircraft diagnostic and prognostic systems.
A second research area involves developing intelligent open-ended learning environments focused on learning and instruction in STEM + CS domains. He has developed innovative learning analytics and data mining techniques for studying students’ learning behaviors and linking them to their metacognitive and self-regulated learning strategies. More recently, he has been analyzing multi-modal data from augmented reality training environments to study individual and team performance.
Prof. Biswas’ research has been supported by funding from the Army, Navy, NASA, NSF, DARPA, and the US Department of Education. He has published extensively and currently has over 600 refereed publications.
