Professor Betke Receives NSF Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies Grant

Hariri Institute Steering Committee member and professor of computer science, Margrit Betke, and Institute Affiliate and associate dean, Stan Sclaroff (CS), have been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation’s program on Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies, a group dedicated to advancing how people learn in technology-rich environments. The project will build on previous NSF projects regarding advanced computer vision and affect detection in intelligent tutoring systems. These projects were an effort to detect student emotion, such as boredom or confusion, with which a computer tutor could alter the learning environment. Betke and Sclaroff will expand upon this focus to also detect persistence, self-efficacy, and ‘grit’. Tools like these would allow a computer tutor to adapt to a singular student’s learning style. Such technology would give online learning sites the ability to mimic and be more adaptive than an in-person classroom setting.

Professors Betke and Sclaroff will work with collaborators at Clark University, in particular, Assistant Professor John Magee, BU PhD ’11, as well as with colleagues at WPI and UMass Amherst. The grant is titled “INT: Collaborative Research: Detecting, Predicting and Remediating Student Affect and Grit using Computer Vision.” 

Read more