Vanessa Putnam

Cristina Conati, Oswald Barral, Vanessa Putnam et al.

Our research is a step toward ascertaining the need for personalization, in XAI, and we do so in the context of investigating the value of explanations of AI-driven hints and feedback are useful in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). We added an explanation functionality for the adaptive hints provided by the Adaptive CSP (ACSP) applet, an interactive simulation that helps students learn an algorithm for constraint satisfaction problems by providing AI-driven hints adapted to their predicted level of learning. We present the design of the explanation functionality and the results of a controlled study to evaluate its impact on students' learning and perception of the ACPS hints. The study includes an analysis of how these outcomes are modulated by several user characteristics such as personality traits and cognitive abilities, to asses if explanations should be personalized to these characteristics. Our results indicate that providing explanations increase students' trust in the ACPS hints, perceived usefulness of the hints, and intention to use them again. In addition, we show that students' access of the explanation and learning gains are modulated by user characteristics, providing insights toward designing personalized Explainable AI (XAI) for ITS.

Shane D. Sims, Vanessa Putnam, Cristina Conati

Encouraged by the success of deep learning in a variety of domains, we investigate the suitability and effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) in a domain where deep learning has not yet been used; namely detecting confusion from eye-tracking data. Through experiments with a dataset of user interactions with ValueChart (an interactive visualization tool), we found that RNNs learn a feature representation from the raw data that allows for a more powerful classifier than previous methods that use engineered features. This is evidenced by the stronger performance of the RNN (0.74/0.71 sensitivity/specificity), as compared to a Random Forest classifier (0.51/0.70 sensitivity/specificity), when both are trained on an un-augmented dataset. However, using engineered features allows for simple data augmentation methods to be used. These same methods are not as effective at augmentation for the feature representation learned from the raw data, likely due to an inability to match the temporal dynamics of the data.