BrainTrust

PI: Andrew Olney

Intelligent tutoring systems are very effective but require a great deal of AI knowledge engineering, making them expensive to produce.

The BrainTrust project addresses this authoring problem by inverting the tutoring system:

When a student navigates to an online textbook, the BrainTrust browser generates a virtual student.
As the human teaches the student, they engage in reading comprehension activities that
- Help the student better understand the text
- Create knowledge representations for a future intelligent tutoring system for that text

Past Funding:

Enhanced Authoring with the BrainTrust System. Funding Agency: Office of Naval Research. $211,024.
EAGER: Using Crowd-sourced Virtual Students to Create Intelligent Tutors. Funding Agency: NSF. $163,830.

Selected Publications:

Olney, A. M., Pavlik Jr., P. J., & Maass, J. K. (2017). Improving Reading Comprehension with Automatically Generated Cloze Item Practice. In E. André, R. Baker, X. Hu, M. M. T. Rodrigo, & B. du Boulay (Eds.), Artificial Intelligence in Education (pp. 262–273). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61425-0
Olney, A. M., Hosman, E., Graesser, A., & D'Mello, S. K. (2017). Tracking Online Reading of College Students. In X. Hu, T. Barnes, A. Hershkovitz, & L. Paquette (Eds.), Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (pp. 406–407).
Olney, A. M., Walker, B., Davis, R. N., & Graesser, A. (2017). The Reading Ability of College Freshmen. In X. Hu, T. Barnes, A. Hershkovitz, & L. Paquette (Eds.), Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (pp. 396–397).
Olney, A. M., Brawner, K., Pavlik, P., & Koedinger, K. R. (2015). Emerging Trends in Automated Authoring. Design recommendations for adaptive intelligent tutoring systems: Learner modeling, Vol. 3 of Adaptive Tutoring (pp. 227-242). Orlando: U.S. Army Research Laboratory.
Olney, A. M., & Cade, W. L. (2015). Authoring Intelligent Tutoring Systems Using Human Computation: Designing for Intrinsic Motivation. In D. D. Schmorrow & C. M. Fidopiastis (Eds.), Foundations of Augmented Cognition (Vol. 9183, pp. 628–639). Springer International Publishing.