AI Institute: Institute for Student-AI Teaming

科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）学习的核心挑战是如何通过丰富的社会协作学习经验来促进深度概念学习。为了应对这一挑战，学生-人工智能团队研究所将重新定义人工智能在教育中的作用，朝着人工智能被视为社会协作伙伴的未来迈进，人工智能可以帮助学生更有效、更有吸引力、更公平地工作和学习，同时帮助教育工作者专注于他们最擅长的事情：激励和教育学生。该研究所将开发、部署和研究人工智能合作伙伴，这些合作伙伴可以在现实世界的教室和远程学习环境中通过语音、手势、凝视和面部表情与学生和教师进行自然互动。人工智能合作伙伴的设计将与教育工作者密切合作，旨在支持学生培养STEM能力、学科实践，以及21世纪协作解决问题和批判性思维的技能。这些人工智能合作伙伴将观察、参与并支持小组学生进行深入和持续的学习对话，同时协助教师在个人、小组和全班层面安排有效的学习体验。重点内容领域将是人工智能教育，从而有助于培养未来人工智能研究人员和从业者的多样化劳动力。该研究所的长期影响是帮助实现“全民教育”的巨大挑战，通过引领国家走向一个未来，所有学生——尤其是那些在STEM中身份代表性不足的学生——经常参与丰富而有益的人工智能支持的协作学习体验，并在大量教室中进行扩展，从而加深学生对STEM的参与和坚持，更具包容性的课堂文化。以及学习效果的显著改善。该研究所将通过各种青年的持续参与和在全国传播人工智能课程来支持劳动力发展。实现这一影响将要求该研究所在人工智能技术方面取得基础性进展，这与国家人工智能研究与发展计划相一致，该计划要求在人类与人工智能的合作方面取得重大进展。学生-人工智能团队研究所汇集了来自九所大学（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校、科罗拉多州立大学、加州大学圣克鲁斯分校、加州大学伯克利分校、布兰代斯大学、伍斯特理工学院、佐治亚理工学院、伊利诺伊大学香槟分校、威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）的研究人员，以及来自学术界、K-12学区和工业界的合作伙伴。该研究所将采用负责任的创新和多元文化的方法，通过整合超过12个跨学科研究领域（包括计算、学习、认知和情感科学）的基础和使用启发型人工智能研究，开发道德人工智能技术。该研究项目将与K12教育工作者、性别和种族多样化的学生、家长和其他社区利益相关者密切合作，以确保最终的技术满足社区需求并反映社区价值观。通过采用人工智能教学法，让5000名初高中学生参与创新的人工智能教育，努力培养未来人工智能研究人员和实践者的多样化劳动力。该研究所的研究项目将在多模态处理、自然语言理解、情感计算和知识表示方面取得根本性进展，以开发人工智能模型，这些模型可以在多个层面上自主监控正在展开的学习话语——理解内容、会话动态、手势和社交信号——并学习生成适当的对话动作，成为学习对话中的有效伙伴。它将以理论框架的形式推进学生-人工智能团队的新科学，创新的互动范式，考虑互动的认知、情感和社会维度，以及新颖的人类-人工智能架构，用于协调学生和教师与人工智能学习伙伴的有效互动。该研究所将通过开发方法来推动包容性共同设计的科学，使不同的利益相关者能够为他们的学校和社区设想、共同创造和批评人工智能技术。这些进步将通过高度跨学科的研究方法来实现，包括算法开发、以用户为中心的设计、神经生理学建模、基于设计的研究、课程协同设计和课堂现场试验。包括课程和软件在内的研究产品将公开和广泛传播，包括在征得同意、数据安全和隐私保护后共享数据。为了促进合作和知识转移，一个专门的社区中心将提供服务，整合参与者和伙伴组织，并协调向更广泛的社区开放研究所。将在内部和通过外部咨询委员会根据效力、公平、效率、普遍性和影响等指标对研究所进行评价。总体而言，该研究所将成为一个国家连接点，使不同的利益相关者能够负责任地参与学生-人工智能协作技术的共同设计。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

A central challenge of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning is how to promote deep conceptual learning via rich socio-collaborative learning experiences. To meet this challenge, the Institute for Student-AI Teaming will reframe the role of AI (Artificial Intelligence) in education, moving towards a future where AI is viewed as a social, collaborative partner that helps students work and learn more effectively, engagingly, and equitably, while helping educators focus on what they do best: inspiring and teaching students. The Institute will develop, deploy, and study AI Partners that interact naturally with students and teachers through speech, gesture, gaze, and facial expression in real-world classrooms and remote learning settings. The AI partners will be designed in close collaboration with educators with the aim of supporting students to develop STEM competencies, disciplinary practices, and 21st century skills of collaborative problem solving and critical thinking. These AI Partners will observe, participate in, and support small groups of students to engage in deep and sustained learning conversations, while assisting teachers in orchestrating effective learning experiences at the individual, small group, and whole-class levels. The focal content domain will be AI education, thus contributing to growing a diverse workforce of future AI researchers and practitioners. The long-term impact of the Institute is to help realize the grand challenge of “Education for All”, by leading the nation towards a future where all students – especially those whose identities are underrepresented in STEM – routinely participate in rich and rewarding AI-enabled collaborative learning experiences that scale across a large number of classrooms, resulting in deeper student engagement and persistence in STEM, more inclusive classroom cultures, and significant improvements in learning outcomes. The Institute will support workforce development though sustained engagement of diverse youth and national dissemination of AI-enabled curricula. Realizing this impact will require the Institute to develop foundational advances in AI technology, consistent with the National AI Research and Development plan which calls for significant advances in human-AI collaboration. The Institute for Student-AI Teaming brings together a geographically distributed team of researchers from nine Universities (University of Colorado Boulder; Colorado State University; University of California, Santa Cruz; University of California, Berkeley; Brandeis University; Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Georgia Institute of Technology; University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne; University of Wisconsin-Madison) with partners from academia, K-12 school districts, and industry. The Institute will adopt responsible innovation and polycultural approaches for developing ethical AI technologies by integrating foundational and use-inspired AI research across more than 12 interdisciplinary research areas - spanning the computing, learning, cognitive and affective sciences. This research program will be conducted in close partnership with K12 educators, gender and racially diverse students, parents, and other community stakeholders to ensure that the resulting technologies address community needs and reflect community values. Efforts will grow a diverse workforce of future AI researchers and practitioners by engaging 5,000 middle/high school students in innovative AI education through AI-enabled pedagogies. The Institute’s research program will yield fundamental advances in multimodal processing, natural language understanding, affective computing, and knowledge representation to develop AI models that can autonomously monitor the unfolding learning discourse at multiple levels – understanding the content, the conversational dynamics, gestures, and social signals– and learn to generate appropriate dialog moves to be effective partners in the learning conversations. It will advance the new science of student-AI teaming in the form of theoretical frameworks, innovative interaction paradigms that consider the cognitive, affective, and social dimensions of the interaction, and novel human-AI architectures for orchestrating effective student and teacher interactions with AI learning partners. The Institute will advance the science of inclusive co-design by developing methodologies to empower diverse stakeholders to envision, co-create, and critique AI technologies for their schools and communities. These advances will be achieved through a highly interdisciplinary research methodology blending algorithm development, user-centered design, neurophysiological modeling, design-based research, curriculum co-design, and classroom field trials. Research products, including curricula and software, will be openly and broadly disseminated, including sharing of data after establishing consent, data security, and privacy-protection. To promote collaboration and knowledge transfer, a dedicated Community Hub will provide services to integrate participants and partner organizations and will coordinate opening up the Institute to the broader community. The Institute will be evaluated along metrics of effectiveness, equity, efficiency, generalizability, and impact, both internally and via an external advisory board. Overall, the Institute will serve as a national nexus point for empowering diverse stakeholders to engage in responsible co-design of student-AI collaborative technologies.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.