Enhancing a Personal Assistant for Life Long Learning (PAL3) with Career Guidance Components

PI: Vasile Rus

Co-PIs: Art Graesser, Andrew Olney, Frank Andrasik, Zhiqiang Cai

Sponsor: ONR

Awarded: $500,000

Dates: 6/2/16-6/30/17

This project will develop career guidance components to be integrated into a comprehensive intelligent tutoring system called Personal Assistant for Life Long Learning (PAL3), which has been developed with support from the Office Of Naval Research by a multi-institutional team led by The University of Memphis' Institute for Intelligent Systems (IIS). The project will augment PAL3 with dialogue-based career guidance facilities and the related components of question answering and question asking. The proposed career guidance module will proactively monitor and offer learners, and in particular sailors, with guidance based on their career goals and profile (e.g., subject matter mastery, skill levels) that is stored in the learner model. The augmentation will also allow learners/sailors to initiate a counseling session whenever they feel so. The IIS team will work with the Institute for Creative Technology's team at The University of Southern California to achieve the integration of the proposed components in the PAL3 system and coordinate the interaction between the components and other key modules in PAL3, such as learner modeling, the life-long learning record, and the recommender system.