AI for Automated Educational Assessments and Labor Market Insight

Joint Seminar

Dept. of Electronic & Computer Engineering
Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering
Human Language Technology Center
Seminar Series on Big Data


Title: "AI for Automated Educational Assessments and Labor Market Insight"
by Varun Aggarwal, Co-founder, Aspiring Minds

Date: 26 Apr 2016 (Tue)
Time: 3:00pm - 4:30pm
Venue: Rm 2405, 2/F (Lift 17, 18), Academic Complex, HKUST


Abstract

Learners need real-time feedback on their assignments/test attempts to 
enhance learning. They also need credentials to demonstrate their learning 
to employers to get matching jobs. Automated and semi-automated 
assessments are key to scale learning and delivering its socio-economic 
benefits.

We use AI techniques to build automated assessments, link assessment 
results to job success and understand the labor markets. In this talk, I 
will discuss examples of using machine learning and crowdsourcing to 
automatically evaluate computer programs and free flow spoken English. 
Then I discuss an example of connecting results of such assessments to job 
performance by building interpretable models. Finally, I discuss how large 
scale automated assessment and employment outcome data could provide labor 
market insights. All these technologies together help scale learning and 
drive meritocracy in the labor market.


References:

a. "A system to grade computer programming skills using machine 
learning.", S. Srikant and V. Aggarwal, KDD 2014

b. "Automatic Spontaneous Speech Grading: A Novel Feature Derivation 
Technique using the Crowd.", V. Shashidhar, N. Pandey, V. Aggarwal, ACL 
2015

c. "Learning Models for Personalized Educational Feedback and Job 
Selection", V. Shashidhar, S. Srikant, V. Aggarwal, Machine Learning for 
Education, Workshop at ICML 2015

d.  http://research.aspiringminds.com/whitepaper-automated-assessments/


Biography

Varun Aggarwal is the CTO of Aspiring Minds. He completed his Masters in 
EECS from MIT in 2007, following which he co-founded Aspiring Minds to 
enable feedback and meritocracy in the job market. Aspiring Minds provides 
job credentials to a million candidates every year and works with over a 
thousand corporations.

During his graduate studies, Varun worked on developing and applying 
statistical learning and optimization techniques to real-world problems 
such as circuit modeling, parallel processing and network coding. At 
Aspiring Minds, Varun leads development of cutting edge products using 
machine learning and AI techniques. Aspiring Minda??s two key products in 
this space include automatic assessment of spoken English and automatic 
grading of computer programs. Together with the team at Aspiring Minds, he 
has authored multiple reports capturing employability trends and student 
learning levels, which have been widely quoted in the media.

He has been a speaker and panelist at various institutions and forums 
including Harvard, MIT, British Council Global Education Dialogue, Legatum 
Center, INSEAD and IBM T J Watson Research Center. He has been active in 
the data science community and is a co-founder of datasciencekids.org and 
ml-india.org.