Understanding and Facilitating Collaborations

Stand 1 Multimodal

iSAT team members demonstrate a collaborative activity with real-time multimodal analysis.

Strand 1 researchers are working to answer the foun­dational question: What AI advances are needed to understand and facilitate collaborative learning conver­sations? Foundational AI research in natural language understanding, multimodal processing, and knowledge representation is needed to develop AI models that can autonomously monitor the unfolding collaborative learning discourse at multiple levels—understanding the content, the conversational dynamics, gestures, and social signals (e.g., facial expressions)—and learn to generate appropriate conversational moves to be an effective partner in the learning conversation. Strand 1 develops mechanisms to sift through and integrate information from multiple student-AI conversations both within a class and over time. The main areas of focus for Strand 1 are: Speech Processing and Diarization, Content Analysis & Dialogue Management (also known as MMIA: Multimodal interactive agent) and Situated Grounding.