Search

This article focuses on contributions that AI can make to address long-term educational goals. Challenges are described that support: (1) mentors for every learner; (2) learning 21st century skills; (3) interaction data for learning; (4) universal access to global classrooms; and (5) lifelong, and lifewide learning. A vision and brief research agenda are described for each challenge along with goals that lead to development of global educational resources and the reuse and sharing of digital educational resources. Instructional systems with AI technology are described that currently support richer experiences for learners and supply researchers with new opportunities to analyze vast data sets of instructional behavior from big databases that record elements of learning, affect, motivation, and social interaction. Personalized learning is described that facilitates student and group experience, reflection, and assessment., Artificial intelligence affects growth and productivity in many sectors (for example, transportation, communication, commerce, and finance). However, one painful exception is education; specifically, very few AI-based learning systems are consistently [...]

* Inquire Biology is a prototype of a new kind of intelligent textbook--one that answers students' questions, engages their interest, and improves their understanding. Inquire Biology provides unique capabilities through a knowledge representation that captures conceptual knowledge from the textbook and uses inference procedures to answer students' questions. Students ask questions by typing free-form natural language queries or by selecting passages of text. The system then attempts to answer the question and also generates suggested questions related to the query or selection. The questions supported by the system were chosen to be educationally useful, for example: what is the structure of X? compare X and Y? how does X relate to Y? In user studies, students found this question-answering capability to be extremely useful while reading and while doing problem solving. in an initial controlled experiment, community college students using the Inquire Biology prototype outperformed students using either a hard copy or conventional ebook version of the same biology textbook. While additional research is needed to fully develop Inquire Biology, the initial prototype clearly demonstrates the promise of applying knowledge representation and question-answering technology to electronic textbooks., Learning a scientific discipline such as biology is a daunting challenge. In a typical advanced high school or introductory college biology course, a student is expected to learn about 5000 [...]

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University's Department of Computer Science, presented the 2010 Spring Symposium Series Monday through Wednesday, March 2224, 2010, at Stanford University. The titles of the seven symposia were Artificial Intelligence for Development; Cognitive Shape Processing; Educational Robotics and Beyond: Design and Evaluation; Embedded Reasoning: Intelligence in Embedded Systems; Intelligent Information Privacy Management; It's All in the Timing: Representing and Reasoning about Time in Interactive Behavior; and Linked Data Meets Artificial Intelligence., Artificial Intelligence for Development The Symposium on Artificial Intelligence for Development was organized to explore opportunities for using machine learning, inference, planning, and perception to enhance the quality of lives [...]

In the winter 2004 issue of AI Magazine, we reported Vulcan Inc.'s first step toward creating a question-answering system called Digital Aristotle. The goal of that first step was to assess the state of the art in applied knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR) by asking AI experts to represent 70 pages from the advanced placement (AP) chemistry syllabus and to deliver knowledge-based systems capable of answering questions from that syllabus. This article reports the next step toward realizing a Digital Aristotle: we present the design and evaluation results for a system called AURA, which enables domain experts in physics, chemistry, and biology to author a knowledge base and that then allows a different set of users to ask novel questions against that knowledge base. These results represent a substantial advance over what we reported in 2004, both in the breadth of covered subjects and in the provision of sophisticated technologies in knowledge representation and reasoning, natural language processing, and question answering to domain experts and novice users., Project Halo is a long-range research effort sponsored by Vulcan Inc., pursuing the vision of the 'Digital Aristotle'--an application containing large volumes of scientific knowledge and capable of applying sophisticated [...]

Knowledge graphs (KGs) have emerged as a compelling abstraction for organizing the world's structured knowledge and for integrating information extracted from multiple data sources. They are also beginning to play a central role in representing information extracted by AI systems, and for improving the predictions of AI systems by giving them knowledge expressed in KGs as input. The goals of this article are to (a) introduce KGs and discuss important areas of application that have gained recent prominence; (b) situate KGs in the context of the prior work in AI; and (c) present a few contrasting perspectives that help in better understanding KGs in relation to related technologies.

The fall and winter issues of AI Magazine present articles on some of the most interesting projects at the intersection of AI and education. Included are articles on integrated systems such as virtual humans, an intelligent textbook, and a game-based learning environment as well as technology-focused components such as student models and data mining. This issue concludes with an article summarizing the contemporary and emerging challenges at the intersection of Al and education., It is a time of remarkable transformation for education. Everyone recognizes the need to improve teacher effectiveness, to improve student engagement, and to create a twenty-first century education system that [...]

The fall and winter issues oral Magazine present articles on some of the most interesting projects at the intersection of AI and education, included are articles on integrated systems such as virtual humans, an intelligent textbook, and a game-based learning environment as well as technology-focused components such as student models and data mining. The winter issue will conclude with an article summarizing the contemporary and emerging challenges at the intersection of Al and education., It is a time of remarkable transformation for education. Everyone recognizes the need to improve teacher effectiveness, to improve student engagement, and to create a twenty-first century education system that [...]

Cis-regulomes underlying immune-cell-specific genomic states have been extensively analyzed by structure-based chromatin profiling. By coupling such approaches with a high-throughput enhancer screen (self-transcribing active regulatory region sequencing (STARR–seq)), we assembled a functional cis-regulome for lipopolysaccharide-activated B cells. Functional enhancers, in contrast with accessible chromatin regions that lack enhancer activity, were enriched for enhancer RNAs (eRNAs) and preferentially interacted in vivo with B cell lineage-determining transcription factors. Interestingly, preferential combinatorial binding by these transcription factors was not associated with differential enrichment of their sites. Instead, active enhancers were resolved by principal component analysis (PCA) from all accessible regions by co-varying transcription factor motif scores involving a distinct set of signaling-induced transcription factors. High-resolution chromosome conformation capture (Hi-C) analysis revealed multiplex, activated enhancer–promoter configurations encompassing numerous multi-enhancer genes and multi-genic enhancers engaged in the control of divergent molecular pathways. Motif analysis of pathway-specific enhancers provides a catalog of diverse transcription factor codes for biological processes encompassing B cell activation, cycling and differentiation.

This special issue issue of AI Magazine presents six articles on some of the most interesting question-answering systems in development today. Included are articles on Vulcan's Project Halo, Cyc's Semantic Research Assistant, IBM's Watson, True Knowledge, and the University of Washington's TextRunner., Starting from the Turing test, question answering (QA) has often been thought of and used as a direct way of observing and measuring intelligent behavior in machines. Even though AI [...]

Delineating hierarchical cellular states, including rare intermediates and the networks of regulatory genes that orchestrate cell-type specification, are continuing challenges for developmental biology. Single-cell RNA sequencing is greatly accelerating such research, given its power to provide comprehensive descriptions of genomic states and their presumptive regulators. Haematopoietic multipotential progenitor cells, as well as bipotential intermediates, manifest mixed-lineage patterns of gene expression at a single-cell level. Such mixed-lineage states may reflect the molecular priming of different developmental potentials by co-expressed alternative-lineage determinants, namely transcription factors. Although a bistable gene regulatory network has been proposed to regulate the specification of either neutrophils or macrophages, the nature of the transition states manifested in vivo, and the underlying dynamics of the cell-fate determinants, have remained elusive. Here we use single-cell RNA sequencing coupled with a new analytic tool, iterative clustering and guide-gene selection, and clonogenic assays to delineate hierarchical genomic and regulatory states that culminate in neutrophil or macrophage specification in mice. We show that this analysis captured prevalent mixed-lineage intermediates that manifested concurrent expression of haematopoietic stem cell/progenitor and myeloid progenitor cell genes. It also revealed rare metastable intermediates that had collapsed the haematopoietic stem cell/progenitor gene expression programme, instead expressing low levels of the myeloid determinants, Irf8 and Gfi1 (refs 9, 10, 11, 12, 13). Genetic perturbations and chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by sequencing revealed Irf8 and Gfi1 as key components of counteracting myeloid-gene-regulatory networks. Combined loss of these two determinants ‘trapped’ the metastable intermediate. We propose that mixed-lineage states are obligatory during cell-fate specification, manifest differing frequencies because of their dynamic instability and are dictated by counteracting gene-regulatory networks.

Rapid developments in educational technology in higher education are intended to make learning more engaging and effective. At the same time, cognitive load theory stresses limitations of human cognitive architecture and urges educational developers to design learning tools that optimise learners’ mental capacities. In a 2-month study we investigated university students’ learning with an AI-enriched digital biology textbook that integrates a 5000-concept knowledge base and algorithms offering the possibility to ask questions and receive answers. The study aimed to shed more light on differences between three sub-types (intrinsic, germane and extraneous) of cognitive load and their relationship with learning gain, self-regulated learning and usability perception while students interacted with the AI-enriched book during an introductory biology course. We found that students displayed a beneficial learning pattern with germane cognitive load significantly higher than both intrinsic and extraneous loads showing that they were engaged in meaningful learning throughout the study. A significant correlation between germane load and accessing linked suggested questions available in the AI-book indicates that the book may support deep learning. Additionally, results showed that perceived non-optimal design, which deflects cognitive resources away from meaningful processing accompanied lower learning gains. Nevertheless, students reported substantially more favourable than unfavourable opinions of the AI-book. The findings provide new approaches for investigating cognitive load types in relation to learning with emerging digital tools in higher education. The findings also highlight the importance of optimally aligning educational technologies and human cognitive architecture.

Humans are able to apply abstract reasoning patterns to learned knowledge and principles, and infer correct results. Our work is motivated by the vision of automated asking and answering of questions related to a biology textbook—a capability which requires application of abstract reasoning patterns. For example, biological processes such as cellular respiration have an intricate structure that defines the ordering among different steps and the participants in each step. A person who understands the process is expected to be able to reason with how the process is affected if one or more steps are interrupted. In this article we analyze a family of questions about process interruption, and present reasoning patterns that an automated reasoning system can use to answer them. Our reasoning patterns rely on the order of steps of the process and the participants of those steps. We suggest that this approach leads to more intuitive and simpler reasoning than an approach of based on theory of intentions, or an approach that relies on qualitative simulation. Our work is a step toward a system that can discuss answers to questions and assist human learners of biology.

Inquire Biology is a prototype of a new kind of intelligent textbook — one that answers students' questions, engages their interest, and improves their understanding. Inquire Biology provides unique capabilities through a knowledge representation that captures conceptual knowledge from the textbook and uses inference procedures to answer students' questions. Students ask questions by typing free‐form natural language queries or by selecting passages of text. The system then attempts to answer the question and also generates suggested questions related to the query or selection. The questions supported by the system were chosen to be educationally useful, for example: what is the structure of X? compare X and Y? how does X relate to Y? In user studies, students found this question‐answering capability to be extremely useful while reading and while doing problem solving. In an initial controlled experiment, community college students using the Inquire Biology prototype outperformed students using either a hard copy or conventional ebook version of the same biology textbook. While additional research is needed to fully develop Inquire Biology, the initial prototype clearly demonstrates the promise of applying knowledge representation and question‐answering technology to electronic textbooks.

Yannakakis showed that a locking policy is not safe if and only if it allows a canonical nonserializable schedule of transactions in which all transactions except one are executed serially (Yannakakis, 1982). In the present paper, we study the generalization of this result to a dynamic database, that is, a database that may undergo insertions and deletions of entities. We illustrate the utility of this generalization by applying it to obtain correctness proofs of three locking policies that handle dynamic databases.

Description

The fall and winter issues of AI Magazine present articles on some of the most interesting projects at the intersection of AI and education. Included are articles on integrated systems such as virtual humans, an intelligent textbook, and a game‐based learning environment as well as technology‐focused components such as student models and data mining. The winter issue will conclude with an article summarizing the contemporary and emerging challenges at the intersection of AI and education.

In this Letter, the first name of author Virendra K. Chaudhri was incorrectly spelled ‘Viren’; author Meenakshi Venkatasubramanian should also be associated with ‘Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio 45221, USA’; authors Bruce J. Aronow, Nathan Salomonis, Harinder Singh and H. Leighton Grimes should also be associated with ‘Department of Pediatrics, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Cincinnati, Ohio 45229, USA’. The Letter has not been corrected online.

No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.