NDLI: AI in Informal Science Education: Bringing Turing Back to Life to Perform the Turing Test

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Applying a Framework for Student Modeling in Exploratory Learning Environments: Comparing Data Representation Granularity to Handle Environment Complexity

AI in Informal Science Education: Bringing Turing Back to Life to Perform the Turing Test

International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education : Volume 27, Issue 1, March 2017

International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education : Volume 26

International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education : Volume 25

International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education : Volume 24

International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education : Volume 23

AI in Informal Science Education: Bringing Turing Back to Life to Perform the Turing Test

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Leigh, Jason Walls, Christopher Wilder, Bryan DeMara, Ronald F. Lee, Sang Yoon Parker, Jeanne Wong, Josiah Lanman, Brandan Parker, Shane Gonzalez, AveliJ. Barham, Clayton Hollister, James R.
Copyright Year	2017
Abstract	This paper describes an interactive museum exhibit featuring an avatar of Alan Turing that informs museum visitors about artificial intelligence and Turing’s seminal Turing Test for machine intelligence. The objective of the exhibit is to engage and motivate visiting children in the hope of sparking an interest in them about computer science and artificial intelligence, and cause them to consider pursuing future studies and/or careers in these fields. The exhibit interacts with the visitors, allowing them to participate in a simplified version of Turing’s test that is brief and informal to suit the limitations of a five-minute exhibit. In this exhibit, the visitor (targeted towards middle school age children) invokes an avatar of his/her own choice, and acts to endow it with human-like qualities (voice, brain, eyesight and hearing). Then, the visitor engages the avatar in a (brief) question-and-answer session to determine whether the visitor thinks that he/she is interacting with a real human on a video conference or with an avatar. We consider this interaction to be an extension of the original Turing Test because, unlike Turing’s original that used text via a teletype, this version features a graphical embodiment of an agent with which one can converse in spoken natural language. This extension serves to make passing the Turing Test more difficult, as now the avatar must not only communicate like a human, but also look, sound and act the part. It also makes the exhibit visual, dynamic and interesting to the visitors. Evaluations were performed with museum visitors, both in backrooms with prototypes as well as on the museum floor with the final version. The formative and summative evaluations performed indicated overall success in engaging the museum visitors and increasing their interest in computer science. More specifically, the formative testing, mostly done in quiet back rooms with selected test subjects, indicated that on the important questions about enjoyment of exhibit and increased interest in computer science by the test subjects, their self-reported Likert scale responses (1 being negative and 5 being positive) increased from 3.16 in the first evaluation to 4.38 in the third one for increased interest in CS. Likewise for the question about exhibit enjoyment (from 3.92 to 4.56). The summative evaluation, done through unobtrusive observation of exhibit use on museum floor, indicated that almost 74% of the parties that initiated the exhibit were either highly or moderately engaged by the exhibit. However, there was one major negative finding, namely the overly long duration of the exhibit, which may have caused premature abandonment of the exhibit in several cases during the summative evaluation. These tests and their results are presented and discussed in detail in this paper. The exhibit has been on permanent display at the Orlando (FL) Science Center since June 2014 and has received a strongly positive response from visitors since that time.
Starting Page	353
Ending Page	384
Page Count	32
File Format	PDF
ISSN	15604292
Journal	International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education
Volume Number	27
Issue Number	2
e-ISSN	15604306
Language	English
Publisher	Springer New York
Publisher Date	2017-03-16
Publisher Institution	International AIED Society
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Informal science education Avatars Educational Technology User Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction Artificial Intelligence (incl. Robotics) Science museum exhibit Computers and Education Turing test Artificial virtual humans Embodied conversational agents
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Education Computational Theory and Mathematics E-learning

Sl.	Authority	Responsibilities	Communication Details
1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
5	Website/Portal (Helpdesk)	Queries regarding NDLI and its services	support@ndl.gov.in
6	Contents and Copyright Issues	Queries related to content curation and copyright issues	content@ndl.gov.in
7	National Digital Library of India Club (NDLI Club)	Queries related to NDLI Club formation, support, user awareness program, seminar/symposium, collaboration, social media, promotion, and outreach	clubsupport@ndl.gov.in
8	Digital Preservation Centre (DPC)	Assistance with digitizing and archiving copyright-free printed books	dpc@ndl.gov.in
9	IDR Setup or Support	Queries related to establishment and support of Institutional Digital Repository (IDR) and IDR workshops	idr@ndl.gov.in

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