(Press-News.org) MADISON, Wis. -- Human learning is a complex, sometimes mysterious process. Most of us have had experiences where we have struggled to learn something new, but also times when we've picked something up nearly effortlessly.
What if a fusion of computer science and psychology could help us understand more about how people learn, making it possible to design ideal lessons?
That long-range goal is moving toward reality thanks to an effort led by professors in the University of Wisconsin-Madison departments of computer sciences, psychology and educational psychology. Their collaborative research aims to break new ground in what computer scientist Jerry Zhu calls "machine teaching"-- a twist on the more familiar concept of machine learning.
"My hope is that machine teaching has an impact on the educational world. It's quite different from how people usually think about education," says Zhu. "It will give us optimal, personalized lessons for real, human students."
Machine learning is a well-established subfield of computer science in which experts develop mathematical tools to help computers learn from data and detect patterns. The machine learner (the computer) is like a student. The goal of machine learning is to develop models that will prove useful in the future when dealing with large, often unwieldly data sets. Practical tasks like speech recognition are aided by machine learning.
Machine teaching turns this concept on its ear. Rather than dealing with pools of data and not knowing at the outset what patterns might be revealed through analysis, the researcher in a machine teaching arrangement already knows what knowledge he or she wants to impress upon the learner.
Machine teaching uses sophisticated mathematics to allow researchers to model actual human students and devise the best possible lessons for teaching them. While the definition of "best" in a particular setting is up to the teacher, one example could be identifying the smallest number of exercises needed for a particular student to grasp a concept. Or, as Zhu puts it, "Can five really good questions teach the material, rather than 20?"
While this work is still in its early stages, it has immense potential to impact education.
Timothy T. Rogers, a professor of cognitive psychology at UW-Madison and one of Zhu's collaborators, explains how computer science and psychology come together.
"In order for the machine teaching approach to work, it needs a good model of how the learner behaves -- that is, how the learner's behavior changes with different kinds of learning or practice experiences," Rogers says. "Also, the model needs to be computational; it has to be able to make concrete, quantitative predictions about the learner's behavior."
"Ultimately, we hope that the work can be used to help teachers develop lesson plans and curricula that promote learning in a wide variety of fields," Rogers says, citing math, science and reading as examples. "And, just as important, the effort to bring cognitive models of learning to bear on real-world problems is bound to lead to important new advances in our understanding of how people learn generally."
Zhu presented some of his research earlier this year in Austin, Texas, at the 29th annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence, organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
A two-year seed grant from the UW-Madison Graduate School currently supports this work. Future funding from outside sources will be sought.
"With machine teaching, it's conceptually easy, but quite challenging to implement in the real world. It's a major undertaking," says Zhu.
INFORMATION:
In addition to Zhu and Rogers, the UW research team includes computer science professors Michael Ferris, Bilge Mutlu and Stephen Wright; engineering professor Rob Nowak; psychology professor Martha Alibali; and educational psychology professors Martina Rau and Percival Matthews.
Machine teaching probes fundamental mathematical and scientific concepts. In part because of that, the team's research is open-ended at this stage. To follow the team's progress and learn more, visit Zhu's website at http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~jerryzhu/machineteaching/. END
Typhoon Soudelor dropped over two feet of rainfall when it made landfall in China in early August, and soaked Taiwan. NASA estimated that rainfall using data from the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission.
Soudelor formed in the middle of the Pacific Ocean well east of Guam on July 20, 2015. Soudelor became more powerful with peak intensity of about 155 knots (178 mph) reached on August 3, 2015 when the super typhoon was well east of Taiwan over the open waters of the Pacific Ocean.
Soudelor's winds died down a little but rebounded to with over 100 knots (115 ...
Swine housing has been a hot topic in recent years, not only in the United States, but in many countries, such as Denmark. Due to genetic advancements in recent years, the average litter size in Denmark is 16.6 total born piglets. With increased number of piglets, determining the optimal housing system for both the piglet and sow is critical.
In Denmark, gestation crates were banned in new buildings in 1999 and from all existing units in 2013. As of January 1, 2015, sows are required to be loose housed from time of weaning until seven days before expected parturition ...
August 6, 2015 - According to the Association for Pet Obesity Prevention in 2014, approximately 53% and 58% of dogs and cats, respectively, in the United States were overweight and obese. These numbers have steadily increased since 2010. However, most pet owners (? 90%) do not realize and cannot identify that their pets are overweight/obese.
What can we do about this growing problem? Pet food companies and nutritionists are searching for ingredients, like prebiotics and probiotics, to combat these conditions. But, could the problem have another solution?
Dr. Aulus Carciofi, ...
The signs that an abused child might later commit crimes might not be obvious -- that boisterous playground behavior from a third-grade boy, for example, or the 10-year-old girl who seems a little anxious or withdrawn.
But new research from the University of Washington suggests that troubling behaviors exhibited by abused children can be predictors of later criminal activity, and that those indicators differ between boys and girls.
The study, published Aug. 11 in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, found that elementary-aged boys who show "externalizing" behaviors ...
It is a paradox: Patients with advanced congestive heart failure lose skeletal muscle mass, but their heart muscles become enlarged to provide the body with an adequate supply of blood and thus with oxygen. It has long been known that the protein angiotensin II plays a villainous role in this process, but the exact mechanism has remained unclear. Now, after seven years of fitting the pieces of this puzzle together, the biologist Dr. Philipp Du Bois and the cardiologist PD Dr. Jens Fielitz of the Experimental and Clinical Research Center (ECRC), a joint cooperation between ...
DURHAM, N.H. -- When the sun hurls a billion tons of high-energy particles and magnetic fields into space at speeds of more than a million miles per hour and the "space weather" conditions are right, the resulting geomagnetic storm at Earth can wreak havoc on communication and navigation systems, electrical power grids, and pose radiation hazards to astronauts and airline passengers and crew.
Being able to predict when those conditions are right is a key scientific goal, and researchers from the University of New Hampshire's Space Science Center (SSC) are now adding ...
Findings from a pair of new studies could speed up the development of a universally accurate diagnostic test for human herpes simplex viruses (HSV), according to researchers at Johns Hopkins and Harvard universities and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The work may also lead to the development of a vaccine that protects against the virus.
Depending on the strain and other factors, HSV can cause cold sores -- classically associated with HSV1 -- or genital herpes -- classically HSV2 -- with the latter being the more serious of the two diseases, particularly because ...
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Nutrient-rich water from melting Antarctic glaciers nourishes the ocean food chain, creating feeding "hot spots" in large gaps in the sea ice, according to a new study.
New research finds that iron stored in the region's glaciers is being shuttled by melting water to open areas of the ocean, called polynyas, where it stimulates growth of phytoplankton, ocean algae that form the base of the marine food chain. Krill and fish thrive on phytoplankton, and these smaller animals support penguins, seals and whales that feed and breed in the polynyas that ...
It has been well established that women who have had several abortions or miscarriages are likely to face a slightly higher risk of complications in subsequent pregnancies. They may experience vaginal bleeding during early pregnancy, preterm birth, low fetal birth weight, and placenta-related complications. Women with a medical history of several interrupted pregnancies are usually advised to take extra precautions to ensure healthy full-term pregnancies later in life.
New Tel Aviv University research published in the Journal of Maternal-Fetal and Neonatal Medicine finds ...
CINCINNATI - Researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center have developed a user-friendly, integrated platform for analyzing the transcriptomic and epigenomic "big data."
Reporting their platform in Genome Biology, scientists say that the new platform--called BioWardrobe--could help biomedical researchers answer questions about both basic biology and disease.
The recent proliferation of next-generation sequencing (NGS)-based methods for analysis of gene expression, chromatin structure and protein-DNA interactions have opened new horizons for molecular ...
