Acuitus | Projects

EDUCATION DOMINANCE
TRAINING AND HUMAN EFFECTIVENESS

Program Manager: LCDR Joseph Cohn, Ph.D.

The Education Dominance Program will enable students to learn at their own pace, in their own style, with their own Digital Tutor. In this way, students will not simply memorize information, but they will learn and understand the concepts upon which this information is built.

They will train to a standard of competence, not rote recall, in order to demonstrate significant improvements in mastery of complex concepts. Novices trained on Digital Tutor will acquire accelerated problem-solving capabilities with the goal being to enable them to be competitive with experienced operational experts.
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DARPA - TRAINING SUPERIORITY
BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES -- MAINTAINING HUMAN COMBAT
PERFORMANCE TRAINING SUPERIORITY ( D A R W A R S )

Program Manager: Dr. Ralph Chatham

DARPA's Training Superiority program aims to revolutionize training. Through a number of initiatives, DARPA seeks to take advantage of the ubiquity of the PC and of new software technologies to create immersive training environments with on-target feedback for each student. These systems also increase readiness by giving individuals and groups realistic practice across a wide range of skills, making appropriate training available instantly to anyone, anywhere, and making it so engaging that our forces choose to train, opting to come back again and again to practice and hone skills.

DARWARS is designed to get new training technology into the field quickly. It is defining an architectural framework to support deployment of training systems that allow students to train and to practice no matter where they are located. It is developing tools to allow instructors to align practice scenarios with training objectives and performance measures for individuals and for teams. And it is creating an online community of instructors and learners - modeled after the on-line communities formed around multi-player games that are so familiar to this next generation of soldiers.

Within this framework, the Acuitus mission is to develop a digital tutor that will dramatically outperform schoolhouse instructors, bringing the excellence of Command Training Center training (such as the Top Gun school) to a broad spectrum of sailors at modest cost. Specifications include improving student outcomes for existing courses by two standard deviations(i.e., “C” students performing at the A+ level), while significantly reducing the time to train, moving beyond rote memorization to teach deep understanding and problem solving skills - addressing even the most challenging subjects - and tuning training, in detail, to the strengths and weaknesses of the individual student. The objective is to deliver a revolution in training where a sailor can rapidly achieve competence and mastery, anytime, anywhere.

PUBLIC SCHOOLS :
ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY PROGRAM
PROSPERITY THROUGH INNOVATION

Program Manager: Dr. Omid Omidvar

The Advanced Technology Program (ATP) bridges the gap between the research lab and the marketplace. Funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), U.S. Department of Commerce, ATP supports projects with risky, challenging technologies that would also have significant benefit to the nation. Awards are prestigious based on rigorous, multi-tiered peer review to assess the challenge of the development risk, the innovation of the technology and the payoff to the nation. The competition is intense; in 2003, fewer than 10% of the 472 submitted proposals passed muster.

The Acuitus/ATP project set out to realize the vision of every middle-school math student having an expert personal tutor. Unfortunately, effective, highly skilled human tutors are scarce, and most charge fees beyond many family budgets. So, Acuitus is setting out to develop the digital equivalent of an expert - and affordable - math tutor.

Currently, educational software application and systems are based almost exclusively on models of how students learn, important but not sufficient for successful instruction. The missing ingredient is modeling how effective tutors teach in one-to-one situations.

Acuitus, working with faculty at Stanford University’s Department of Psychology, will carry out a multidisciplinary program that integrates research on effective instruction in areas ranging from communication, education and motivational theory to artificial intelligence and core computer science. A major challenge will be integrating these disparate pieces into a whole that complements models of student learning. The envisioned digital tutor will be able to interact - affectively and socially - with a broad range of students in ways that are almost indistinguishable from a live expert tutor.

Research credits expert tutoring with a “2-sigma improvement” in student outcomes - equivalent to a jump from the bottom tier to the top tier of a class with tutoring performance. The eventual digital system will complement classroom instruction, leveraging the teacher while at the same time reducing the workload most teachers face; in short, to bring the benefits of technology to teaching that other professions have exploited. It would help teachers to readily provide quality education to a greater number of students, closing the educational gap within classrooms and raising everyone's stanardized test scores.

CORPORATE - CUSTOMER EDUCATION

As a pilot project, Acuitus ported an advanced customer training course for one of Silicon Valley’s major IT vendors onto its prototype platform. This course was a challenging, complex course for even the best live instructors to teach. Customers were learning to use a new, highly innovative software package; the course required students to master difficult concepts and to complete difficult, multi-hour, real world problems. The digital tutor easily outperformed the best live instructors, often by a factor of four; most students completed the labs with a comprehensive understanding of the material they had been taught.