This seminar took place on 5th February 2019 at Moray House School of Education
Abstract
The proliferation of educational software provides new opportunities for using computational methods to support students in their learning and teachers and researchers in their understanding of how students learn. This talk will identify several research problems within this context and present some initial solutions that synthesise approaches from artificial intelligence, HCI and data mining.
I will present work on for making sense of students’ activities using open-ended and exploratory educational software; methods for visualising these activities to teachers as well as other students; and tools for supporting group learning in the classroom using machine learning.
Biography
Dr. Kobi Gal is faculty at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh and the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His work investigates representations and algorithms for making decisions in heterogeneous groups comprising both people and computational agents. He has worked on combining artificial intelligence algorithms with educational technology towards supporting students in their learning and teachers to understand how students learn.
Gal is the recipient of the Wolf foundation's 2013 Krill prize for young Israeli scientists, a Marie Curie International fellowship, and a three-time recipient of Harvard University's outstanding teacher award. He has won the best paper at EC 2016 (together with Moshe Mash, Ariel Procaccia and Yair Zick), best student paper at EDM 2014 (with Phd student Avi Segal, Bracha Shapira, and Ziv Katzir).