Vinay Chaudhri is formerly a program director in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Center at SRI International. His research focuses on the science and engineering of large knowledge base systems and spans knowledge representation and reasoning, question answering, knowledge acquisition, and innovative applications. His most recent work has been on creating an intelligent textbook in biology that answers a student’s questions and leads to significant learning gains. He has also taught a course on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning at Stanford University. In this talk, Vinay discusses these points…

1. Simply changing the medium of presentation has no impact on improving student learning.
2. An intelligent textbook relies on knowledge representation and reasoning to provide concept summaries, suggested questions and question answering.
3. The resulting learning gains are in the range of one full letter grade.