April 3-4th, I visited a retreat at the "Altes Schloß Dornburg" (old palace Dornburg) about a project called "E-Teacher". The medieval palace is located high above the river Saale with a beautiful view over the Saale valley. Rather interesting to watch because of the current spring flooding...
The E-Teacher project is about feedback based learning. I know...E-Learning is anything else but new. But the only feedback provided to regular E-Learning software nowadays are multiple choice tests etc...The E-Teacher system is supposed to watch the student closely. Facial Action Codes (FACS) are translated into emotions, giving advice about how to proceed within the learning scenario. In doing so, the system needs representations for the knowledge to be taught, for the student (how does she feel...), and for various didactic strategies.
The chosen topic to teach are NP-complete probems (btw one of the millenium price problems). I was giving a talk about NPBibSearch, a bibliographic search engine focused on papers related to NP-complete problems....and of course based on an ontology representing knowledge about NP-complete problems.
