Applying Machine Learning to support Human Learning
COM2 Level 4
Executive Classroom, COM2-04-02
ABSTRACT:
Rapid changes enabled by technology are making it an imperative for virtually every human being to commit to lifelong learning. The growth of online courses has led to the widespread availability of high quality video lectures on practically any topic. However, much of formal learning, in educational institutions as well as corporations, makes inadequate use of these resources, and purely online learning continues to face challenges that limit its effectiveness. We describe our attempts to improve learning via a platform called VideoKen. Our platform uses novel techniques to support search and recommendation of educational videos on a given topic. VideoKen applies machine learning techniques to index videos, inspired by the analogy with text books, by automatically generating a table of contents and a glossary, and to gain insights from the learner's interactions with the videos. VideoKen also supports social learning at multiple levels. It enables faculty to conveniently share their curated video content within and across institutes, thus helping each other as a community. Likewise, it enables learners also to curate specific video clips and share with their classmates, friends or the organization at large. We describe many outstanding challenges in creating an engaging and personalized learning experience for each learner, and describe our preliminary efforts to deal with those challenges.
BIODATA:
Dr. Manish Gupta is a co-founder and CEO of VideoKen, an educational technology startup, and the Infosys Foundation Chair Professor at IIIT Bangalore. Previously, Manish has served as Vice President and Director of Xerox Research Centre India, and has held various leadership positions with IBM, including that of Director, IBM Research - India and Chief Technologist, IBM India/South Asia. As a Senior Manager at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, he led the team developing system software for the Blue Gene/L supercomputer. IBM was awarded a National Medal of Technology and Innovation for Blue Gene by US President Barack Obama in 2009. Manish holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He has co-authored about 75 papers, with more than 6,000 citations in Google Scholar (and an h-index of 43) in the areas of high-performance computing, compilers, and virtual machine optimizations, and has been granted 19 US patents. While at IBM, Manish received an Outstanding Innovation Award, two Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards and the Lou Gerstner Team Award for Client Excellence. Manish is currently serving as the chair of IKDD, the ACM India Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, and was General Co-Chair for IKDD Conference on Data Sciences 2015. He is an ACM Fellow, a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, and a recipient of a Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Delhi.