AI Matters: our blog

Title: ACM SIGAI Webinar: Enlichenment: Insights Towards AI Impact in Education through a Mycelial Partnership between Research, Policy, and Practice

For Event Registration Please see the ACM Webinar Site: https://webinars.on24.com/acm/rose

Date: Thursday, June 24, 2021

Time: 12:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time

Duration: 1 hour

Summary: As we begin to emerge from COVID-19, in the face of tremendous learning loss and widening achievement gaps, we, as a society, are grappling with envisioning the future of education. In the field of Artificial Intelligence, we ask what our role might be in this emerging reality. This ACM SIGAI Learning Webinar will engage the audience in consideration of these issues in light of insights gained from recent research. Since the early 70s, the field of Artificial Intelligence and the fields of Human Learning and Teaching have partnered together to study how to use technology to understand and support human learning. Nevertheless, despite tremendous growth in these fields over the decades, and notable large-scale success, the emergency move to universal online learning at all levels over the past year has exposed gaps and breakdowns in the path from basic research into practice. 

As the new administration reacts by committing to invest substantial research dollars into addressing the “COVID Melt,” or learning loss, we must ask ourselves how to prepare for potentially future emergencies so that such tremendous and inequitable learning loss can be prevented from happening again. The International Alliance to Advance Learning in a Digital Era (IAALDE) is partnering with the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to foster productive synergy between the worlds of research, policy, and practice, beginning with a recent kickoff event.  Administrators and policy makers/implementors of policy were invited to engage with world class leading researchers across a broad spectrum of research in technology enhanced learning to accelerate the path from research into real educational impact through practice. The goal is that the work going forward would benefit tremendously from increased grounding from the lived experiences of administrators and implementors of policy in schools. At the same time, that greater awareness of research findings might offer opportunities to reflect and reconsider practices on the ground in schools. This discussion, involving over 100 delegates, was meant to lay the foundation for documents, resources, and activities to move the conversation forward. Find out more about insights learned, next steps, and how you can get involved on June 3!

Speaker: Carolyn P. Rose, Professor, Language Technologies and Human-Computer Interaction, Carnegie Mellon University

Carolyn Rose is a Professor of Language Technologies and Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research program focuses on computational modeling of discourse to enable scientific understanding of the social and pragmatic nature of conversational interaction of all forms, and using this understanding to build intelligent computational systems for improving collaborative interactions. Her research group’s highly interdisciplinary work, published in over 270 peer reviewed publications, is represented in the top venues of 5 fields: namely, Language Technologies, Learning Sciences, Cognitive Science, Educational Technology, and Human-Computer Interaction, with awards in 3 of these fields. She is a Past President and Inaugural Fellow of the International Society of the Learning Sciences, Senior Member of IEEE, Founding Chair of the International Alliance to Advance Learning in the Digital Era, and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning. She also serves as a 2020-2021 AAAS Fellow under the Leshner Institute for Public Engagement with Science, with a focus on public engagement with Artificial Intelligence.

Moderator: Todd W. Neller Professor, Computer Science, Gettysburg College

Todd W. Neller is a Professor of Computer Science at Gettysburg College, and was the recipient of the 2018 AAAI/EAAI Outstanding Educator Award. A Cornell University Merrill Presidential Scholar, he received a B.S. in Computer Science with distinction in 1993. In 2000, he received his Ph.D. with distinction in teaching at Stanford University, where he was awarded a Stanford University Lieberman Fellowship, and the George E. Forsythe Memorial Award for excellence in teaching. His dissertation concerned extensions of artificial intelligence (AI) search algorithms to hybrid dynamical systems, and the refutation of hybrid system properties through simulation and information-based optimization. A game enthusiast, Neller has enjoyed pursuing game AI challenges, computing optimal play for jeopardy dice games such as Pass the Pigs and bluffing dice games such as Dudo, creating new reasoning algorithms for Clue/Cluedo, analyzing optimal Risk attack and defense policies, and designing games and puzzles.