Teaching & Mentorship Experience

The focus of this course was machine learning for knowledge-based systems. It included reviews of work on similarity-based learning (induction), explanation-based learning, analogical and case-based reasoning and learning, and knowledge compilation. It also considered other approaches to automated knowledge acquisition as well as connectionist learning.

This is an introductory graduate course teaching core computer science topics typically found in an undergraduate Computer Science curriculum, but at a graduate-level pace. It is primarily intended for students with little formal preparation in Computer Science to gain experience with fundamental Computer Science topics. After a review of programming concepts the focus of the course continues on data structures from the point of view of the operations performed upon the data and to apply analysis and design techniques to non-numeric algorithms that act on data structures. The data structures covered include lists, stacks, queues, trees and graphs. Projects focused on the writing of programs to appropriately integrate data structures and algorithms for a variety of applications .

User modeling is a cross-disciplinary research field that attempts to construct models of human behavior within a specific computer environment . Contrary to traditional artificial intelligence research, the goal is not to imitate human behavior as such, but to make the machine able to understand the expectations, goals, knowledge, information needs, and desires of a user in terms of a specific computing environment . The computer representation of this information about a user is called a user model, and systems that construct and utilize such models are called user modeling systems . A simple example of a user model would be an e-commerce site which makes use of the user’s and similar users’ purchasing and browsing behavior in order to better understand the user’s preferences. In this class, the focus was on obtaining a general understanding of user modeling, and an understanding of how to apply user modeling techniques . Students read seminal papers in the user modeling literature, as well as completed a course project where students built a system that explicitly models the user.

This course acquaints participants with the fundamental concepts and state-of-the-art computer science research in online instructional systems. Advanced interactive instructional systems serve as tutors, as learning companions or both. This course introduces their design, the technology that powers them, the learning theories that motivate them and results from experimental evaluations. We cover both the learning theory, and how to design and build systems consistent with existing theories. Each student was be paired up to work on a project that involves online learning infrastructure.