Seminario Virtual: "Siamese Neural Networks for Curriculum Alignment" a cargo del Dr. Pablo Duboué

Enlace de Google Meet para acceder al seminario.

Link al CV del Dr. Pablo Duboué.

ABSTRACT:

Last October, I was very fortunate to have been invited to a hackathon on semi-automatic curriculum alignment in a crisis context (explained below). This hackathon was held at Google San Francisco and was co-hosted by Google.org, Vodafone foundation, UNHCR, Learning Equality and UNESCO. It featured about 30 participants from a variety of backgrounds, including six teachers from two camps operated by the UN High Council on Refugees.

What is curriculum alignment?

When students move from one school system to another, due to hanging cities, provinces or countries, somebody has to align the topics the students have learned with the topics their new classmates have already learned. With this alignment, remedial lessons and better understanding of the interaction and behaviour of the new students can be accomplished.

What constitutes a crisis context?

This process, curriculum alignment, faces particular challenges for

students that have been displaced and seek refuge on camps operated by international relief organizations: the number of students that require curriculum alignment can be very large and students arrive without advance notice from a variety of jurisdictions. Some of the people at camps walk 3,000 kilometers to get to them. Moreover, the teachers at the camps have to tend to 140-student classrooms and some do not have formal training in education, which makes curriculum alignment particularly hard for them.

A San Diego non-profit contributing in the educational technology space, Learning Equality, has worked with educators and other

stakeholders to identify curriculum alignment as an important technology piece needed at the camps.

What did we build?

The hackathon had a number of deliverables. In this talk, I will present the work from the team I joined, that built a Siamese neural network for curriculum alignment. This network improved 10x from a baseline system, using data annotated by a separate team of curricular

experts. Besides sharing my overall experience at the hackathon, I will also discuss the details behind the developed solution, available at here.

.A small demo I put together after the hackathon is also on-line at here.