Internships Available for the Ateneo Laboratory for the Learning Sciences

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The Ateneo Laboratory for the Learning Sciences is calling for applicants for summer internships for the following projects:

1. Development of an Educational Data Mining Workbench
Machine-learning software and techniques have made it easier for educational software and intelligent tutoring researchers to create real-time detectors of cognition as well as of metacognitive and motivational behavior that can be used to improve student science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) learning. However, there are still critical problems to overcome. First and foremost of these is: How do we get the data into the machine learning software for learning in the first place? The Educational Data Mining (EDM) Workbench is designed to address this “data labeling bottleneck” and the difficulty in distilling relevant features for machine learning. Now on version 2, interns can expect to contribute to the development and testing of the EDM Workbench using Java and NetBeans.

2. Development of Affect-Sensitive Interfaces
The researchers undertaking this project aim to develop several emotionally intelligent Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) that can recognize and respond effectively to user affect. ECAs can be built for a variety of contexts including affect-sensitive educational software, games, productivity tools, business tools and others.

3. Computer Science Education Projects
The computer science education projects of ALLS take on two dimensions: Computer science education at the high school level and the analysis of novice programmer compilation behaviors. The former refers to the Ateneo Summer Programming Camp and the special Ateneo High School Computer Science training program, both of which prepare selected students for competition programming. The latter refers to the development of tools to study novice programmer errors, behaviors, and affect and to design appropriate pedagogical interventions.

Interns will be expected to work at the ALLS during the months of April and May 2012 and may use their internship projects. They will be provided with an allowance during this time. Interested parties can inquire at the CSDiv Office.