Towards Intelligent Tutoring with Mathematical Sketching
Mathematical sketching lets users create dynamic illustrations through the association of hand written mathematics and free-form drawings. These dynamic illustrations have the potential to provide useful insights into a variety of abstract concepts in Physics. Thus, mathematical sketching lends itself, with its pencil-and-paper-based interaction approach, to be a natural interface to intelligent tutoring applications. Although mathematical sketching supports a wide variety of dynamic illustrations, it is significantly limited because users must directly specify how objects behave with position and/or rotation functions of time. In contrast, problems students are asked to solve infrequently conform to this dynamic illustration creation scheme. Thus, mathematical sketching needs to be broadened to include inferencing capabilities to make a proper dynamic illustration, given information that is only indirectly or partially related to providing a behavioral specification for the animation. In this talk, I will present our current progress toward empowering mathematical sketching to support a more robust set of dynamic illustrations that would cover the majority of concepts found in an introductory Physics course.
Speaker Details
Joseph J. LaViola Jr. is the SAIC Faculty Fellow and assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and directs the Interactive Systems and User Experience Lab at the University of Central Florida. He is also an adjunct assistant research professor in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. His primary research interests include pen-based interactive computing, 3D spatial interfaces for video games, predictive motion tracking, multimodal interaction in virtual environments, and user interface evaluation. His work has appeared in journals such as ACM TOCHI, IEEE PAMI, Presence, and IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications, and he has presented research at conferences including ACM SIGGRAPH, ACM CHI, the ACM Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, IEEE Virtual Reality, and Eurographics Virtual Environments. He has also co-authored “3D User Interfaces: Theory and Practice,” the first comprehensive book on 3D user interfaces. In 2009, he won an NSF Career Award to conduct research on mathematical sketching. Joseph received a Sc.M. in Computer Science in 2000, a Sc.M. in Applied Mathematics in 2001, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2005 from Brown University.
- Date:
- Speakers:
- Joseph J. LaViola Jr.
- Affiliation:
- University of Central Florida
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Jeff Running
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