Keynote Speakers

Ashok K. Goel. Georgia Institute of Technology (USA)

Keynote speech: AI for Adult Learning and Online Education

Millions of adults of various ages need reskilling and upskilling in our technological society. These millions of adult learners offer a new, large, and diverse challenge to education. Given that many adult learners cannot leave their jobs or families, online education offers a medium for reaching them where they live and work. Online education also provides access to unprecedented amount of data on learners and learning. Our vision at the National AI Institute for Adult Learning and Online Education (AI-ALOE) is to develop novel AI cognitive assistants that work with this data to enhance the quality of adult online learning through personalization of learning. Successful realization of this vision requires progress on understanding the motivations, needs, and capacities of adult learners, participatory design of AI cognitive assistants, human-AI collaboration, large-scale learning analytics, and an infrastructure for deploying the AI cognitive assistants, collecting and analyzing the data on learning, and feeding the results to the cognitive assistants, teachers, and learners alike. I will describe the research program at AI-ALOE in some detail.

About Ashok K. Goel

Ashok K. Goel is a Professor of Computer Science and Human-Centered Computing in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Chief Scientist with Georgia Tech’s Center for 21st Century Universities. For more than thirty-five years, he has conducted research into cognitive systems at the intersection of artificial intelligence and cognitive science with a focus on computational design and creativity. For the last decade or so, much of his research has focused on AI in education and education in AI. He is a Fellow of AAAI and the Cognitive Science Society, an editor emeritus of AAAI’s AI Magazine, and a recipient of AAAI’s Outstanding AI Educator Award. Ashok is the Executive Director of the recently established National AI Institute for Adult Learning and Online Education.