Intelligent Tutoring Systems

Overview

My dissertation work was on recalling tutorial stories at pedagogically appropriate time. The system was called SPIEL, Story Producer for Interactive Environments for Learning. The system used detailed representations of stories and their "points" and a RETE-like compilation mechanism to build an opportunistic memory of stories that would be trigger by student actions.
One of the most interesting aspects of this work was the need of strategic knowledge in matching between story and student situation. A story is not useful just because it is similar to the student's situation — in fact, excessive similarity is a problem. A story has to have some pedagogical relationship to the situation, and this is what makes it worth telling.

Selected Publications

Burke, R. Conceptual Indexing and Active Retrieval of Video for Interactive Learning Environments. Knowledge-Based Systems, 9(8), pages 491-499, 1996.

Burke, R. & Kass, A. Supporting Learning through Active Retrieval of Video Stories. Expert Systems with Applications, 9(3): 361-378, 1995. (PDF, 152K)

Burke, R. & Kass, A. Refining the Universal Indexing Frame to Support Retrieval of Tutorial Stories. In AAAI Workshop on Indexing and Reuse in Multimedia Systems, pages 1-11. AAAI, 1994. (PDF, 42K)

Burke R. & Kass, A. Tailoring Retrieval to Support Case-Based Teaching. Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 493-498. AAAI, 1994. (PDF, 33K)

Kass, A.; Burke, R.; Blevis, E. & Williamson, M. Constructing learning environments for complex social skills. Journal of the Learning Sciences 3(4): 387-427, 1994. (Postscript, 1.7M)

Burke, R. Representation, Storage and Retrieval of Tutorial Stories in a Social Simulation. PhD Thesis, Northwestern University, 1993. Issued as Technical Report #50, Institute for the Learning Sciences, 1993. (Available from Northwestern University.)

Burke, R. & Kass, A. Integrating case presentation and simulation-based learning-by-doing. In Proceedings of the 14th Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pages 629-634. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1992.