Seminar by Viraj Kumar
Automatic Problem Generation: An exploration with Finite Automata
Viraj Kumar
PES Institute of Technology, Bangalore
Date: Wednesday, February 12th, 2014
Time: 4:00 PM
Venue: CS101.Abstract:
Advances in information technology present academic institutions with an opportunity to reach out to growing numbers of students, with MOOCs representing one extreme of this trend. A quieter change has occurred even in traditional classes with the steady adoption of software assessment tools for quizzes, programming assignments, electronics labs, etc. These tools have streamlined administrative and grading processes to the point where educators feel it is possible to handle larger batches of students without sacrificing the quality of assessment and feedback, provided the assessment is standardized for all students. In some cases, however, there is a need for individualized assessment, and there is comparatively little research on automatic problem generation. This talk will focus on automatic problem generation for the Theory of Computation course. Specifically, we consider problems of the type "Construct a finite automaton for the regular language L = {...}" and show how such problems (and their solutions) can be generated automatically. This research has been conducted by undergraduate students at PES Institute of Technology (Bangalore), under the guidance of Sumit Gulwani (Microsoft Research) and the speaker.
About the speaker:
Viraj Kumar has an MSc from IIT Bombay, and MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He conducts research in computer-aided pedagogy. He is a collaborative faculty for the NPTEL MOOC on "Programming, Data Structures and Algorithms", and is part of the Massively Empowered Classrooms project conducted by Microsoft Research India.