HCC: Small: Collaborative Research: Cloud Primer: Leveraging Common Sense Computing to Learn Parent-Child Interaction Models for Early Childhood Literacy

为幼儿提供发展早期识字技能的机会对他们在学校取得成功、在学习阅读方面取得成功以及在生活中取得成功非常重要。该项目的重点是在平板电脑上创建一种新的互动阅读入门技术，通过使用针对成年参与者的有针对性的讨论主题建议系统，培养早期识字技能和分享亲子阅读。Cloud Primer将在一个读者社区中众包亲子二人组的互动和讨论。然后，它将利用这些信息与常识知识库相结合，开发相互作用的计算模型。然后，在与幼儿共享阅读活动中，这些模型将被用来向家长提供上下文敏感的讨论话题建议。这项工作将在为期一周的家庭学习中进行评估。智力价值：该项目将对人与人和人与计算机交互的模型以及它们在促进参与和学习方面的应用做出基础理论贡献。这项努力还将产生新的见解，即如何将常识推理与大规模数据收集相结合，开发出互动技术，优雅地处理不一致和噪音，在不受限制的真实世界环境中提供多样化和有语义意义的回应。广泛的影响：研究表明，美国三分之一的儿童在没有准备的情况下进入幼儿园，大多数开始落后的儿童通常会留下来。Cloud Primer将通过利用读者社区来定义一组常见的讨论主题，积极让家长接触这些主题，并通过简单的触摸界面为读前年龄的儿童提供参与讨论的机制，从而抵消这一趋势。与目前的数字阅读技术相比，新的情境感知和常识感知的互动阅读入门读物将是一个根本性的进步，目前的数字阅读技术单独使用时既不能有效地实现教育目标，也不支持联合阅读和成人参与。该项目将通过本科生研究、研究生论文研究、研究生课程开发以及面向妇女和代表性不足的少数民族的外联方案，进一步促进教育。为了促进这一领域的研究，该项目将与Cloud Primer软件一起，向研究界免费提供在研究过程中捕获和注释的所有亲子互动数据。此外，通过本研究过程开发的计算方法将在早期识字以外的互动领域应用，如外语学习。

Providing young children with opportunities to develop early literacy skills is important to their success in school, their success in learning to read, and their success in life. This project focuses on the creation of a new interactive reading primer technology on tablet computers that will foster early literacy skills and shared parent-child reading through the use of a targeted discussion-topic suggestion system aimed at the adult participant. The Cloud Primer will crowdsource the interactions and discussions of parent-child dyads across a community of readers. It will then leverage this information in combination with a common sense knowledge base to develop computational models of the interactions. These models will then be used to provide context-sensitive discussion topic suggestions to parents during the shared reading activity with young children. The work will be evaluated in week-long at-home studies.Intellectual merit: The project will make fundamental theoretical contributions to models of human-human and human-computer interaction, and their use in fostering engagement and learning. The effort will also produce new insights into how common sense reasoning can be integrated with large-scale data collection to develop interactive technologies that deal gracefully with inconsistencies and noise to provide diverse and semantically meaningful responses in unconstrained, real-world environments.Broader impacts: Research shows that one in three children in the United States enter kindergarten unprepared, and the majority of children who start behind typically stay behind. The Cloud Primer will counteract this trend by leveraging a community of readers to define a set of common discussion topics, actively exposing parents to these topics, and, through a simple touch interface, providing children of pre-reading age a mechanism for engaging adults in discussion. The new context and common sense aware interactive reading primer will be a fundamental advance over current digital reading technologies, which neither effectively achieve educational goals when used alone, nor support joint reading and adult engagement. The project will further contribute to education through undergraduate research, graduate thesis research, graduate course development, and outreach programs to women and under-represented minorities. To promote research in this area, the project will make all parent-child interaction data captured and annotated in the process of this research freely available to the research community, together with the Cloud Primer software. Furthermore, the computational methods developed through the course of this research will have applications in interactive domains beyond early literacy, such as foreign language learning.