Annabel Latham visiting SwarmLab
Dr. Annabel Latham from Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, is visiting us:
She will give a talk about:
Automated Profiling of Individual Traits: Modelling Learning Styles with Oscar Conversational Intelligent Tutoring System
Use of computational intelligence methods for automated user profiling have been widely publicised recently following the Cambridge Analytica / FaceBook scandal, with implications for the ethics and governance of tracking data held on social media and other platforms. Debate over the validity of psychological models of personality and learning styles is not new, however adaptive and targeted online advertisements that rely on such models are big business. This talk explores the application of intelligent systems to user profiling in the online learning domain. It will describe research to develop methods for profiling individual traits in a learning context, introducing a Conversational Intelligent Tutoring System called Oscar and the experiments to automatically predict each individual learner’s preferred style in order to provide an adaptive learning experience. Using the Felder-Silverman model of learning styles, a set of typical behaviours is mapped to a set of variables to capture each learner’s behaviour during an adaptive conversational tutorial. The complexities of capturing data implicitly during a real-time tutoring conversation in a live teaching/learning environment will be discussed. A number of methods and algorithms (e.g. rule-based, MLP neural networks, decision trees, fuzzy decision trees) were applied to the behaviour dataset to determine the best predictions for each of the 4 dimensions of learning style, and for attribute selection to reduce time/complexity for application in real-time tutoring conversations.