CIRCLE seminar schedule

[Peter Brusilovsky]

Here is the CIRCLE seminar schedule for the end of 1997:

Monday, December 8, 1997
Steven Ritter and Olga Medvedeva
Department of Psychology
Carnegie Mellon University
"Reading the tutor's mind: Content authoring for an intelligent tutoring system"
12pm, LRDC 2nd floor auditorium (3939 O'Hara Street).

Wednesday (!), December 17, 1997
Haruki Ueno
Tokyo Denki University, Japan
Knowledge-Based Program Understander: ALPUS - Concepts, Methodology and
Applications.
12pm, Wean Hall 4625 (Carnegie Mellon Campus)

(!) Regular seminar's day is Monday. This is a special arrangement.


The next CIRCLE seminar speaker is Steven Ritter from the Department of
Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, who will discuss some issues of
content authoring for intelligent tutoring systems and present pSAT, a
WWW/Java-based content authoring tool (see announcement below).

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--------------------------------------------------

Reading the tutor's mind: Content authoring for an intelligent tutoring system

Steven Ritter and Olga Medvedeva
Department of Psychology
Carnegie Mellon University

December 8, 1997, 12 noon, LRDC 2nd floor auditorium.

Abstract

Intelligent tutoring systems are generative. Their instructional
abilities can apply to a whole range of content, beyond that developed
for the initial version of the system. For simple domains, where the
system can completely and reliably solve all problems in the domain,
this allows content to be added easily. But there are substantial
challenges with domains in which the system cannot solve the problem on
its own. The PAT Algebra system operates in such a domain: students are
asked to read and understand word problems, but the system cannot be
expected to possess natural language capabilities sufficient for the
task.

In such cases, the problem representation needs to be coded so that
natural language understanding does not take place at runtime. The
author's task is to enter the problem text along with a
computer-understandable representation of the problem. New questions
arise in the designing an authoring tool in this kind of domain: How can
we ensure that the text and underlying problem representation remain "in
sync"? How can we allow authors to create the underlying representation
without this becoming a programming task? How can we communicate the
meaning and consequences of the underlying representation to the author?
How can the author correct misinterpretations?

In this talk, we describe our approach to answering these questions for
the pSAT (Problem Situation Authoring Tool) system. In addition, we
discuss ideas for how exposing the tutor's representation (opening its
"mind") can help teachers better understand the system, the domain and
their students.

Contact information

Please, contact Steven Ritter directly (268-3498 or sritter+ at andrew.cmu.edu)


Dr. Peter Brusilovsky <plb at cs.cmu.edu>
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA

Phone 412 268 56 84
Fax   412 268 55 76
WWW   http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~plb/home.html