My M.Sc. thesis topic was Discovering Causal Models of Self-Regulated learning. I investigated the ability to represent Self-Regulated learning theory with an acyclic graphical causal model, and the degree to which such a model could be discovered from purely observational data given current causal structure discovery algorithms. I also evaluated the quantity of data necessary for reliably discovering such a model, the likely error rate, and a method for collecting this data from existing studies using meta-analysis. For further details seem my thesis (pdf).

This project has been ongoing for the past 2 years. Inspired by the huge amount of information gathered in user modelling initiatives over the last 30 years, and their complete lack of sharing said information I have tried to come up with a technique for briding the gap between disparate models so that information my flow between them and not be lost forever. I believe this is valuable because of reduced expense collecting information, possible solution to the cold start problem of initializing models, and improved reasoning possibilities due to dramatically larger data sets. For more information please see my Publications

SPARC ePortfolios, developed by a group of student researchers (including myself) under the direction, funding, and guidance of Dr. Vive Kumar. SPARC helps individuals to create electronic portfolios in an open ended format that allows them to be tailored well to particular uses. SPARC tracks artifacts and users and allows for marking, sharing, and feedback on portfolios. SPARC will publish portfolios to the web based on a users preferences and designs. We use SPARC as a platform for research into electronic portfolios and their educational impact as well as a platform in which we can evaluating AI techniques including user models, ontologies, and mixed initiative intelligence.

The SCORMIT! project is an advanced web spider for use in semi-automatically repackaging legacy eLearning content into SCORM packages which can then be delivered through any SCORM compliant Learning Management System (LMS). I was the initial programmer on the SCORMIT! project which was then handed off to Pat Lougheed

This project was done for a two semester course sequence in the final year of my undergraduate degree which had arts and technology students come together to create a significant project. We had an excellent project team including Brittney Brokenshire, Sarah Evans, Justin Liebregts, and Johan Yang. Yumi was a game which could interactively animate a story told out loud by a child. We had some success designing and creating a prototype of the software to control the 3D game environment given actions specified in an ontology and generating speech in response to the user. We also designed and created a prototype of the physical device the child would use, and analyzed the potential of the toy by conducting user testing and participatory design with potential users.

Robocup is a grand research challenge, to create a team of robotic soccer players which can compete against the FIFA World Cup champions by 2050. We participated in the simulation league, attempting to advance techniques for multi-agent cooperation and localization. My responsibilities included software design and development, evaluation of different the different codebases available, performing literature reviews to discover state of the art techniques, running experimental studies and doing analysis of the data. I was also responsible for mentoring new developers as they came on board, and managing the source control system. Took project from set up including selecting code base, technology, design, to deployment and mentoring of new developers

This is a project that Pat Lougheed and I did for IAT 814 - Knowledge Visualization. We attempt to create a visualization which will be useful for those wanting to map two ontologies manually. Eventually we might expand it to be useful in a semi-automatic context. The report is available here in pdf form.

This is a project the Nima Kaviani and I did for IAT 881 - Special Topics in Ontologies and the Semantic Web. The project uses an ontological representation of the ePortfolio domain for the SPARC ePortfolio system and combines that with rules written for the Java Expert System Shell (JESS) to provide live advice to students creating portfolios for the TechOne program. The prototype we created successfully offers very simple advice.

This course was taught by Dr. Vive Kumar and covered distributed, autonomous, and ubiquitous computing. For this course I developed further my agent based interoperable user modelling framework which continued in my research. I also gave a tutorial to this class on Intelligent Agents the following year.