Diet and exercise are often referred to as lifestyle "choices". And many people seem to... more Diet and exercise are often referred to as lifestyle "choices". And many people seem to be making poor choices. Can recommender systems help? Maybe. But we should be careful not to apply them where they can't help. I will suggest that they are potentially useful for problems of discovery and attention focusing, but not for in-depth evaluation and especially not for motivation, where the desirable action is known but not taken. I will offer examples of both promising and not-so-promising opportunities for exploration of recommender system applications in health behavior change, and suggest other conceptual frameworks that may be more useful where recommender systems are not the right lens.
Proceedings of the fifth ACM/IEEE Workshop on Hot Topics in Web Systems and Technologies, 2017
This paper presents a knowledge and reasoning toolkit for developing cognitive applications which... more This paper presents a knowledge and reasoning toolkit for developing cognitive applications which have significant requirements for managing structured and semi-structured data. Our system provides enhanced querying and reasoning capabilities along with natural language processing support and the ability to automatically extract data from PDF documents. We also have the capability to manage ontologies in a user-friendly way. Our system is implemented as a set of Web services, and we provide enhanced clients to allow applications to easily access our knowledge and reasoning toolkit.
Proceedings of ICC '93 - IEEE International Conference on Communications
ABSTRACT A knowledge-based intelligent tutoring system that supports the efficient development of... more ABSTRACT A knowledge-based intelligent tutoring system that supports the efficient development of sophisticated online training on the use of telephony operations support systems (OSSs) is presented. Among the topics discussed are the accessing of information, hands-on OSS exercises, problem solving skills, course material and course authoring
This paper describes an intelligent computer-based tutor for LISP that incorporates some of the i... more This paper describes an intelligent computer-based tutor for LISP that incorporates some of the ingredients of good private tutoring. The tutor consists of a problem-solver that generates steps toward a solution and an advisor that compares the problem-solver's steps to the student's steps. Our system can interact with students in a number of different problem spaces for algorithm design and coding. The tutor reduces memory demands by displaying relevant contextual information and directs problem-solving by immediately intervening when a student generates an unacceptable partial answer. Initial experiments indicate that our tutor is approximately twice as effective as classroom instruction.
The “Tools for Automatic Generation of Learning Object Metadata” project has been underway at IBM... more The “Tools for Automatic Generation of Learning Object Metadata” project has been underway at IBM Research to address the requirement of developing advanced distributed learning delivery architecture and services for a large US g overnment agency. We have developed a system called MAGIC ( Metadata Automated Generation for Instructional Content) to assist content authors and course developers in generating metadat a for learning objects and information assets to enable wider reus e of these objects across departments and organizations. Usin g the MAGIC system through a Web-based user interface, content authors review and edit automatically-generated metadata su fficient to register and describe their assets for use and disc overy in current and future distributed learning applications comply ing with the ADL (Advanced Distributed Learning) SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) standard. Course developers can use the system to assist in the conversion of e xisting courses to...
The Spoken Web project is building a telecom Web that provides a platform for information access ... more The Spoken Web project is building a telecom Web that provides a platform for information access and collaborative problem-solving for the developing world. Phone-based audio navigation to relevant content in this new kind of Web has become a major challenge. In this paper we delineate the opportunities for applying collaborative filtering to improve audio navigation on the telecom Web and describe our initial experiences with similarity-based and latent variable methods of collaborative filtering.
Recent growth in broadband access and prolifer- ation of small personal devices that capture imag... more Recent growth in broadband access and prolifer- ation of small personal devices that capture images and videos has led to explosive growth of multimedia content available everywhereVfrom personal disks to the Web. While digital media capture and upload has become nearly universal with newer device technology, there is still a need for better tools and technologies to search large collections of multimedia data and to find and deliver the right content to a user according to her current needs and preferences. A renewed focus on the subjective dimension in the multimedia lifecycle, from creation, distribution, to delivery and consumption, is required to address this need beyond what is feasible today. Integration of the subjective aspects of the media itselfVits affective, perceptual, and physiological potential (both intended and achieved), together with those of the users themselves will allow for personalizing the content access, beyond today's facility. This integration, trans...
: A set of principles are derived from the ACT theory of cognition for designing intelligent tuto... more : A set of principles are derived from the ACT theory of cognition for designing intelligent tutors: identify the goal structure of the problem space, provide instruction on the problem-solving context, provide immediate feedback in errors, minimize working memory loads, use production system models of the student, adjust the grain size of instruction according to learning principles, enable the student to approach the target skills by successive approximation, and promote use of general problem-solving rules over analogy. These principles have successfully guided our design of tutors for college students learning to program LISP and for high school students learning geometry.
IBM Research is engaged in a research program in symbiotic cognitive computing to investigate how... more IBM Research is engaged in a research program in symbiotic cognitive computing to investigate how to embed cognitive computing in physical spaces. This article proposes 5 key principles of symbiotic cognitive computing. We describe how these principles are applied in a particular symbiotic cognitive computing environment and in an illustrative application.
Diet and exercise are often referred to as lifestyle "choices". And many people seem to... more Diet and exercise are often referred to as lifestyle "choices". And many people seem to be making poor choices. Can recommender systems help? Maybe. But we should be careful not to apply them where they can't help. I will suggest that they are potentially useful for problems of discovery and attention focusing, but not for in-depth evaluation and especially not for motivation, where the desirable action is known but not taken. I will offer examples of both promising and not-so-promising opportunities for exploration of recommender system applications in health behavior change, and suggest other conceptual frameworks that may be more useful where recommender systems are not the right lens.
Proceedings of the fifth ACM/IEEE Workshop on Hot Topics in Web Systems and Technologies, 2017
This paper presents a knowledge and reasoning toolkit for developing cognitive applications which... more This paper presents a knowledge and reasoning toolkit for developing cognitive applications which have significant requirements for managing structured and semi-structured data. Our system provides enhanced querying and reasoning capabilities along with natural language processing support and the ability to automatically extract data from PDF documents. We also have the capability to manage ontologies in a user-friendly way. Our system is implemented as a set of Web services, and we provide enhanced clients to allow applications to easily access our knowledge and reasoning toolkit.
Proceedings of ICC '93 - IEEE International Conference on Communications
ABSTRACT A knowledge-based intelligent tutoring system that supports the efficient development of... more ABSTRACT A knowledge-based intelligent tutoring system that supports the efficient development of sophisticated online training on the use of telephony operations support systems (OSSs) is presented. Among the topics discussed are the accessing of information, hands-on OSS exercises, problem solving skills, course material and course authoring
This paper describes an intelligent computer-based tutor for LISP that incorporates some of the i... more This paper describes an intelligent computer-based tutor for LISP that incorporates some of the ingredients of good private tutoring. The tutor consists of a problem-solver that generates steps toward a solution and an advisor that compares the problem-solver's steps to the student's steps. Our system can interact with students in a number of different problem spaces for algorithm design and coding. The tutor reduces memory demands by displaying relevant contextual information and directs problem-solving by immediately intervening when a student generates an unacceptable partial answer. Initial experiments indicate that our tutor is approximately twice as effective as classroom instruction.
The “Tools for Automatic Generation of Learning Object Metadata” project has been underway at IBM... more The “Tools for Automatic Generation of Learning Object Metadata” project has been underway at IBM Research to address the requirement of developing advanced distributed learning delivery architecture and services for a large US g overnment agency. We have developed a system called MAGIC ( Metadata Automated Generation for Instructional Content) to assist content authors and course developers in generating metadat a for learning objects and information assets to enable wider reus e of these objects across departments and organizations. Usin g the MAGIC system through a Web-based user interface, content authors review and edit automatically-generated metadata su fficient to register and describe their assets for use and disc overy in current and future distributed learning applications comply ing with the ADL (Advanced Distributed Learning) SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) standard. Course developers can use the system to assist in the conversion of e xisting courses to...
The Spoken Web project is building a telecom Web that provides a platform for information access ... more The Spoken Web project is building a telecom Web that provides a platform for information access and collaborative problem-solving for the developing world. Phone-based audio navigation to relevant content in this new kind of Web has become a major challenge. In this paper we delineate the opportunities for applying collaborative filtering to improve audio navigation on the telecom Web and describe our initial experiences with similarity-based and latent variable methods of collaborative filtering.
Recent growth in broadband access and prolifer- ation of small personal devices that capture imag... more Recent growth in broadband access and prolifer- ation of small personal devices that capture images and videos has led to explosive growth of multimedia content available everywhereVfrom personal disks to the Web. While digital media capture and upload has become nearly universal with newer device technology, there is still a need for better tools and technologies to search large collections of multimedia data and to find and deliver the right content to a user according to her current needs and preferences. A renewed focus on the subjective dimension in the multimedia lifecycle, from creation, distribution, to delivery and consumption, is required to address this need beyond what is feasible today. Integration of the subjective aspects of the media itselfVits affective, perceptual, and physiological potential (both intended and achieved), together with those of the users themselves will allow for personalizing the content access, beyond today's facility. This integration, trans...
: A set of principles are derived from the ACT theory of cognition for designing intelligent tuto... more : A set of principles are derived from the ACT theory of cognition for designing intelligent tutors: identify the goal structure of the problem space, provide instruction on the problem-solving context, provide immediate feedback in errors, minimize working memory loads, use production system models of the student, adjust the grain size of instruction according to learning principles, enable the student to approach the target skills by successive approximation, and promote use of general problem-solving rules over analogy. These principles have successfully guided our design of tutors for college students learning to program LISP and for high school students learning geometry.
IBM Research is engaged in a research program in symbiotic cognitive computing to investigate how... more IBM Research is engaged in a research program in symbiotic cognitive computing to investigate how to embed cognitive computing in physical spaces. This article proposes 5 key principles of symbiotic cognitive computing. We describe how these principles are applied in a particular symbiotic cognitive computing environment and in an illustrative application.
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Papers by Robert Farrell