Making Research Tools Accessible for All AI Students

Goal:

Sarah Sood, Christine Alvarado, and Zach Dodds

Create scaffolded, motivating assignments that help students use research and development tools early.

Students build comfort and confidence, then leverage it on larger, course-capstone projects.

Result:

Emotional Reasoning through Search

Resource

Sarah Sood, Christine Alvarado, and Zach Dodds

Trained using Bayesian, Case-based Reasoning, and information-retrieval approaches on 106,000 movie and product reviews, the Reasoning Through Search system quantifies the emotion of input text on a spectrum from extremely negative (-1) and overwhelmingly positive (+1).

Results

EmoCloud

A Foundation in Pen-based Computing

Resource

Sarah Sood, Christine Alvarado, and Zach Dodds

Windows Presentation Foundation is Microsoft’s API for accessing students’ own hand-drawn strokes, including time-stamp information and pen status. To help focus on implementing algorithms, the first HW asks students to build a windows-journal-like pen-based application with WPF.

Results

one with autocorrection

journal result

Getting Set with OpenCV

Resource

Sarah Sood, Christine Alvarado, and Zach Dodds

OpenCV is a powerful C++-based library of visual routines. Its role in Stanley’s vision systems is one of its claims to fame. As researchware, OpenCV is not easy for students to simply “pick up”; we motivate their use of the software by asking them to implement a player for the game of Set.

Results

Three sets found!and grew into a robot vision system