While in his research visit to the United States, Dr Daniele Di Mitri was invited to present at the Brown Bag presentation series organised by the Faculty of Educational Communication and Technology which is part of the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

What Is a Brown Bag Meeting? A brown bag meeting is an informal meeting or training that generally occurs in the workplace around lunchtime. This type of meeting is referred to as a brown bag meeting or a brown bag seminar because participants typically bring their lunches, which are associated with being packed in brown paper bags.

Presentation Title:
Restoring Context in Distance Learning with Artificial Intelligence and Multimodal Learning Experiences with Daniele Di Mitri

Presentation Date:
Tuesday, February 1st, 2022 | 12:00 pm -1:00 pm EST

Presentation Abstract: 
The COVID-19 pandemic forced more than 1.6 billion learners out of school, becoming the most challenging disruption ever endured by the global education systems. In many countries, education institutions decided to move their regular activities online, opting for remote teaching as an emergency solution to continue their education. Meanwhile, physical distancing and learning in isolation heavily challenge learners and hinder their study success. There is a compelling need to make education systems more resilient and less vulnerable to future disruptions in such a critical landscape. In particular, we have to reconsider how digital technologies can support online and hybrid teaching. If digital education technologies such as video conferencing tools and learning management systems have improved to make educational resources more available and education more flexible, the modes of interaction they implement remain essentially unnatural for the learner due to a substantial lack of context. Modern sensor-enabled computer systems allow extending the standard human-computer interfaces and facilitate richer multimodal interaction. Furthermore, advances in AI allow interpreting the data collected from multimodal and multi-sensor devices. These insights can be used to support online teaching and learning in isolation with personalised feedback and adaptation through Multimodal Learning Experiences (MLX). This guest lecture elaborates on existing approaches, architectures, and methodologies. I illustrate use cases that employ multimodal learning analytics applications that can shape the online teaching of the future.