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Designing Intelligent Systems for Online Education: Open Challenges and Future Directions
The design and delivering of platforms for online education is fostering increasingly intense research. Scaling up education online brings new emerging needs related with hardly manageable classes, overwhelming content alternatives, and academic dishonesty while interacting remotely, as examples. However, with the impressive progress of the data mining and machine learning fields, combined with the large amounts of learning-related data and high-performance computing, it has been possible to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of learning and teaching online. Methods at the analytical and algorithmic levels are constantly being developed and hybrid approaches are receiving an increasing attention. Recent methods are analyzing not only the online traces left by students a posteriori, but also the extent to which this data can be turned into actionable insights and models, to support the above needs in a computationally efficient, adaptive and timely way. In this paper, we present relevant open challenges lying at the intersection between the machine learning and educational communities, that need to be addressed to further develop the field of intelligent systems for online education. Several areas of research in this field are identified, such as data availability and sharing, time-wise and multi-modal data modelling, generalizability, fairness, explainability, interpretability, privacy, and ethics behind models delivered for supporting education. Practical challenges and recommendations for possible research directions are provided for each of them, paving the way for future advances in this field.
Extracting Topics from Open Educational Resources
In recent years, Open Educational Resources (OERs) were earmarked as critical when mitigating the increasing need for education globally. Obviously, OERs have high-potential to satisfy learners in many different circumstances, as they are available in a wide range of contexts. However, the low-quality of OER metadata, in general, is one of the main reasons behind the lack of personalised services such as search and recommendation. As a result, the applicability of OERs remains limited. Nevertheless, OER metadata about covered topics (subjects) is essentially required by learners to build effective learning pathways towards their individual learning objectives. Therefore, in this paper, we report on a work in progress project proposing an OER topic extraction approach, applying text mining techniques, to generate high-quality OER metadata about topic distribution. This is done by: 1) collecting 123 lectures from Coursera and Khan Academy in the area of data science related skills, 2) applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) on the collected resources in order to extract existing topics related to these skills, and 3) defining topic distributions covered by a particular OER. To evaluate our model, we used the data-set of educational resources from Youtube, and compared our topic distribution results with their manually defined target topics with the help of 3 experts in the area of data science. As a result, our model extracted topics with 79% of F1-score.
SciBERT-based Semantification of Bioassays in the Open Research Knowledge Graph
As a novel contribution to the problem of semantifying bio- logical assays, in this paper, we propose a neural-network-based approach to automatically semantify, thereby structure, unstructured bioassay text descriptions. Experimental evaluations, to this end, show promise as the neural-based semantification significantly outperforms a naive frequencybased baseline approach. Specifically, the neural method attains 72% F1 versus 47% F1 from the frequency-based method. The work in this paper aligns with the present cutting-edge trend of the scholarly knowledge digitalization impetus which aim to convert the long-standing document-based format of scholarly content into knowledge graphs (KG). To this end, our selected data domain of bioassays are a prime candidate for structuring into KGs.
Kafka-ML: Connecting the data stream with ML/AI frameworks
Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) depend on data sources to train, improve, and make predictions through their algorithms. With the digital revolution and current paradigms like the Internet of Things, this information is turning from static data to continuous data streams. However, most of the ML/AI frameworks used nowadays are not fully prepared for this revolution. In this paper, we propose Kafka-ML, a novel and open-source framework that enables the management of ML/AI pipelines through data streams. Kafka-ML provides an accessible and user-friendly Web user interface where users can easily define ML models, to then train, evaluate, and deploy them for inferences. Kafka-ML itself and the components it deploys are fully managed through containerization technologies, which ensure their portability, easy distribution, and other features such as fault-tolerance and high availability. Finally, a novel approach has been introduced to manage and reuse data streams, which may eliminate the need for data storage or file systems.