MSc Thesis Defense Announcement by Niyati Vyas: "An Approach of Using Embodied Conversational Agent for Personalized Tutoring"

SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

The School of Computer Science is pleased to present…

 

Date: Thursday March 10, 2022 

Time:  3:00PM – 5:00PM 

Passcode: If interested in attending this event, contact the Graduate Secretary at csgradinfo@uwindsor.ca with sufficient notice before the event to obtain the passcode.

 

     Since the onset of internet, the world had been slowly and steadily turning digital, taking its time. The introduction of the deadly coronavirus has forced this transformation to pick up its pace. These unprecedented times have forced all daily activities to be carried out maintaining a social distance and everything from shopping to studying is being preferred to be done online, which has given a surge to new and effective educational technologies. While many studies are actively working on linear and collaborative learning in a virtual learning environment, few have tried to exploit the use of Embodied Conversational Agent(ECA) for personalized tutoring.

     This thesis research develops a novel approach that is able to not only allow ECA to perform the role of human tutors but also interact with users in an adaptive manner, according to their level of knowledge. This approach extends the research previously accomplished by our research group that uses self-adjusted POMDP policies to guide the interaction between ECA and users. Furthermore, the construction of a generic, scalable tutoring ontology enables the dialogue management of ECA to track the history of belief states and use the trend of changes to estimate the level of user’s knowledge for the control of feedback and the tasks presented to the user. It is anticipated that the research work helps improving online learning with the ECA acting as a personal tutor.

 

Keywords: Virtual Reality, POMDP, Tutoring Ontology, ECA

 

MSc Thesis Committee: 

 MSc Thesis Defense Announcement     

 

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