PhD Thesis: Multimodal Algebra Equation Solving

 Active Learning in Problem Solving (ALPS)

Students working in Cognitive Tutors (originally built by Carnegie Mellon's PACT Center) receive dynamic feedback and help upon request while they are problem-solving, but they are not able to ask conceptual questions that go beyond the problem currently being solved. ALPS is an approach designed to provide students with such a mechanism, by integrating Synthetic Interview technology with the existing Cognitive Tutor. Students can type in any question in their own words, while working in the Tutor, and they receive a pre-recorded video clip in response. Because they are pre-recorded, the designers must get a sense of the types of questions to expect to receive, and how best to categorize and answer them. Preliminary results from this line of work have shown that students ask questions in such a system with heavy emphasis on performance goals. A pdf of the Intelligent Tutoring Systems conference paper about this work is here. An open future area of research is how to encourage students to ask deeper questions and shift their goals more toward learning. Until 2004, I helped collect data on student question-asking patterns during tutoring and types of instruction that encourage more active question-asking. The current group's page is here.

 Evolving Board Evaluation Functions via Genetic Programming (Master's Thesis)

For my Master's thesis at Drexel University, I applied genetic programming techniques to the evolution of a strategy for evaluating potential moves in a one-step lookahead intelligent agent heuristic for a complex strategy-based game. The game I used is Acquire, whose object is to amass wealth while investing stock in hotel chains and effecting mergers of these chains as they grow. Genetic programming was used to evolve the board evaluation functions used by agent players of the game. The analysis of game interactions is recognized as a valid analogy to common real-world problems, which often present difficulty in designing algorithms to solve them. Genetic programming, as a branch of evolutionary computation, provides advantages over traditional algorithms in solving these complex real-world problems in speed, robustness and flexibility. The thesis contributed to work in artificial intelligence in providing computer systems with the tools they need to learn how to operate within a domain, given only the basic building blocks. A pdf version of the thesis document is here.

 Conceptual Understanding and Prototyping (CUP)

My main undergraduate research project was CUP, a 3D conceptual modeling system for assembly design. At the time, many tools existed to support computer-aided design in engineering disciplines during mature stages of the design process only. The conceptual design phase, which focuses on not the geometry but the structure, behavior and function of an artifact, however, can often determine a large percentage of the overall cost of the product, as many fundamental decisions are made during this stage. CAD tools available often forced designers to make detailed geometry or layout decisions without allowing a means for markup of an artifact's structure, function and behavior. CUP was designed as a tool to allow engineers to capture the design intent inherent in the conceptual design process. The definitive CUP journal paper is here. A downloadable Java version of the software is still available here. CUP has since been extended into a secure, multi-user collaborative conceptual design environment called MUG, and is an ongoing project at the Geometric and Intelligent Computing Laboratory at Drexel University.

 Acquire Game-Playing System

This project was a group project for the Software Engineering Workshop capstone course as part of the computer science degree at Drexel University. My teammates were Luiza da Silva, Mike Czajkowski, and Xuan Thuy Tran. We built a distributed system of intelligent agents playing the game of Acquire with utility theory-based strategies, starting from the ground up with a software engineering requirements document and design document and then building the system. This project is no longer maintained, but you can see our project webpage created for the class here.

 Robot Lab

In my senior year at Drexel University, I took a robot building laboratory class. For the final project, I investigated the accuracy of two of the default methods for using the sonar sensors that we used with our hardware kits. I did this via a simple experimental design wherein I recorded the sonar sensor's readings of distance at certain known distances and orientations. This project is no longer maintained, but you can see the webpage I created for it for the class here.

 Introduction to HCI (Drexel)

My very first HCI project -- a group project for the final grade in a course taught by Dr. Tom Hewett at Drexel University. We reported a case study of three engineers using a paper mock-up of an interface for searching design repositories for past artifacts based on their structure, function and behavior annotations, in the conceptual design phase of building a new artifact. You can read the paper that was the result of this project, including the case studies, here.

 Software Design -- KWIC (Keyword in Context)

For a software engineering course called Software Design, my team and I had to implement a simple "keyword in context" program using 3 different software design patterns -- implicit invocation, pipe-and-filter, and object-oriented. We were then supposed to compare the three processes and implementations. KWIC is a standard software engineering toy problem; it is an indexing system consisting of all "circular shifts" (repeatedly removing the first word and appending it to the end of a line) of a particular set of lines in alphabetical order. This project is no longer maintained, but you can see our project webpage created for the class here.