SRL MS Thesis Defense of Swarna Keshavabhotla. Friday, June 10. Title: PerSketchTivity: Recognition and Progressive Learning Analysis

Thesis Defense

Friday, June 10

Title: PerSketchTivity: Recognition and Progressive Learning Analysis

Swarna Keshavabhotla

3:30pm Friday, June 10, 2016

Room 326 Teague Building

Abstract

Development of novice computing technologies has opened the door for computer- based tutoring systems in areas where it was previously not possible. Sketch-based tutoring systems are being developed for subject domains, which involve diagram- matic representations for problem solving. In this thesis, we present PerSketchTivity, a sketch-based tutoring system for design sketching that allows students to hone their skills in design sketching and self-regulated learning through real-time feedback. Students learn design-sketching fundamentals through drawing exercises of reference shapes starting from basic to complex shapes in all dimensions and subsequently receive real-time feedback assessing their performance.

PerSketchTivity consists of a recognition system, which recognizes the correctness of the sketch on the fly, on completion, feedback system provides real-time feedback and the evaluation system evaluates the sketch based on various features like error, smoothness and speed. The focus of this thesis is to evaluate the performance of the system in terms of the recognition efficiency and also the impact on the drawing skills of the students practicing with this system.

Biography

Swarna Keshavabhotla is a MS candidate at Texas A&M University department of Computer Science and Engineering. She is a member of Dr. Tracy Hammond's Sketch Recognition Lab. The focus of her research is development of sketch recognition algorithms for assessment in Intelligent Tutoring Systems and feedback mechanisms for enhancing the impact of the system on students' skills. Swarna received her Bachelors degree in India.

Advisor: Dr. Tracy Hammond

SRL MS Thesis Defense of Siddhartha Karthik Copesetty. Friday, June 10. Title: Labeling by Example

Thesis Defense

Friday, June 10

 

Title: Labeling by Example

Siddhartha Karthik Copesetty

1:00pm Friday, June 10, 2016

Room 326 Teague Building

Abstract

Sketch Recognition is recognition of hand drawn diagrams. Recognizing sketches instantaneously, is necessary to build beautiful interfaces with real time feedback. There are various techniques to quickly recognize sketches into ten or even twenty classes. But, what if we have 100,000 sketches and want to classify them into 3000 different classes? Using the existing techniques, it takes forever and ever to accurately classify an incoming sketch into one of these 3000 classes. For example, a class of hundred sketches takes two hours to get classified into one of the 3000 classes. This is very very slow, takes significant computation overhead and is not practical. So, to make things faster, we propose to have multiple stages of recognition. In the initial stage, the sketch is recognized starting from the outer level, moving level by level into the center of the sketch. This recognition is done by matching it against a set of sketch domain descriptions, resulting in a list of classes that the sketch could possible be, along with the accuracy and precision for each. For the ones with accuracy less than a threshold value, they go through a second stage of recognition. In this stage, feature values are calculated and evaluated against our model to accurately classify the sketch. Thus, the time taken to classify such huge datasets of sketches decreases significantly with increase in accuracy and precision.

Biography

Siddhartha Karthik Copesetty is a master’s student in the Sketch Recognition Lab. He completed his undergraduate degree in Computer Science at National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, India. He was a software engineering intern at Yahoo!, Sunnyvale last summer.

Advisor: Dr. Tracy Hammond

SRL PhD Dissertation defense Stephanie Valentine. Friday, June 10. Title: Design, Deployment, Identity, & Conformity: An Analysis of Children's Online Social Networks

Dissertation Defense

Friday, June 10

Title: Design, Deployment, Identity, & Conformity: An Analysis of Children's Online Social Networks

Stephanie Valentine

10:00am Friday, June 10, 2016

Room 326 Teague Building

Abstract

Preadolescents (children aged 7 to 12 years) are participating on online social networks whether we, as a society, like it or not. Enacted by the United States Congress in 1998, the collection of online data about children under the age of 13 is illegal without express parental consent. As such, most mainstream social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram limit their registration by requiring new users to assert that they are at least 13 years of age, an assertion which is often falsified. Researchers, bound by the same legal requirements regarding online data collection, have resorted to surveys and interviews to understand how and why children interact on social networks. While valuable, these prior works explain only what children say they do online, and not what they actually do on a daily basis. In this work, we describe the design, development, deployment, and analysis of our own online social network for children, KidGab. This work explores common social networking affordances for adults and their suitability for child audiences; analyzes the participatory behaviors of our users (Girl Scouts from around central Texas) and describes how they shaped KidGab's continuing growth; discusses our quantitative analysis of users' tendencies and proclivities toward identity exploration; leverages graph algorithms and link-analysis techniques to understand the sociality of conformity on the network; and finally, this work describes the lessons we learned about children's social networks and social networking througout KidGab's 450 days of active deployment. 

Biography

Stephanie Valentine is a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Texas A&M University. A Nebraska native, Valentine completed a BA in Computer Science with a minor in Electronic Publishing from Saint Mary's University of Minnesota. Valentine is an NSF Graduate Fellow, winner of the Susan M. Arseven ’75 Make A-Difference Award, and Vice President of the CSE Departmental graduate student association. Valentine's research focuses around understanding how children communicate in online social networks and empowering children to have safe, healthy, and expressive digital friendships. Valentine is also the founding president of Wired Youth, Inc., a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that works to educate the community about safe social networking for children as an active prevention strategy for cyberbullying, online predation, and other cyberthreats.Stephanie Valentine is a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Texas A&M University. A Nebraska native, Valentine completed a BA in Computer Science with a minor in Electronic Publishing from Saint Mary's University of Minnesota. Valentine is an NSF Graduate Fellow, winner of the Susan M. Arseven ’75 Make-A-Difference Award, recipient of the 2016 NCWIT Collegiate Award (Honorable Mention), and winner of the 2015 Texas A&M University Department of Computer Science & Engineering Mentoring Excellence Award. Valentine's research focuses around understanding how children communicate on online social networks and empowering children to have safe, healthy, and expressive digital friendships. Valentine is also the founding president of Wired Youth, Inc., a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that works to educate the community about safe social networking for children as an active prevention strategy for cyberbullying, online predation, and other cyberthreats.

Advisor: Dr. Tracy Hammond