Integrating research into the core curriculum. A case study

摘要

Summary form only given. This presentation describes an approachto providing undergraduates with a “real-world” researchexperience within the context of a core computer science course. As arequired course, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI) istypically taught in the junior/senior year, and normally coversfundamental topics in AI as well as Lisp programming. The author wantedto give the students an experience of what is involved in a real AIresearch project, such as the Visual Interaction Assistant forRadiology. This intelligent assistant is based on extensive cognitivedata collection from radiologists reading chest X-rays, and there areseveral open analysis problems which still need to be resolved. Itseemed that the “think aloud” reports of the radiologistscould be used as a vehicle to help the students learn how to extractcomputationally meaningful information from a domain expert's thoughtsand words. Many issues arising in this exercise are applicable to thedevelopment of expert systems in other domains as well, for example:handling specialized vocabulary, developing quantitative measures andqualitative concept labeling procedures, applying subjective ratings,aggregating data, and interpreting results of the analyses bothindividually and in the context of the whole experiment. The requiredtasks included a time analysis using the original video data, a conceptanalysis where the words in the protocols were categorized and labeled,and a performance analysis where the subjects' diagnoses were comparedwith those of the project expert