Athabasca University science professors are exploring artificial intelligence research applications like no other with the support of AU students and research assistants
Artificial intelligence is a rapidly growing field, with new research and applications regularly being shared with the public to improve our lives and make our work efficient like no other.
Behind every discovery, application, and policy, there are countless academics leading the way with innovative research, promoting access, opportunity, and community. This includes many at Athabasca University, which seeks to improve the lives of students through teaching, research, and impact.
Many of these researchers at the School of Computing and Information Systems in the Faculty of Science and Technology create opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to get involved in this work. This provides practical hands-on experience developing these innovative technologies, contributing to AU’s highest contribution: making the world better and more equitable.
“This innovative research from our professors, along with the hands-on, practical research opportunities we provide to our students at both the undergraduate and graduate level, make our online degree programs stand out,” said science dean Dr. Shauna Zenteno.
Using AI to personalize learning
Dr. Oscar Lin’s work explores using AI to personalize learning paths, so that each individual student would be able to achieve the same learning outcomes in a course, but in a way that works for their unique learning style.
This work exploring adaptive learning includes developing an AI tool that could help teachers by making high-quality predictions about what sequence of learning would work best for an individual, helping teachers to better support their students.
What works for one student at one time, doesn’t always work for another student at another time,” he said. “It’s always changing."
Will AI change what it means to be human?
Dr. Jon Dron focuses bigger-picture questions about AI: specifically, the benefits and risks of using this kind of technology to help us to teach and learn.
New technologies have been changing the ways we live our lives since the earliest days of humanity, but the shift toward generative AI is profoundly different. A pen and paper, for example, still need a human directly involved to generate text. With generative AI, the technology itself is now actively participating in creating meaning in how it responds to different prompts.
"The trouble is this is very much not human, but it plays a very human role in the kinds of things we do,” Dron said. “And I am in equal parts enthralled and terrified by the possibilities of this.
Improving learning outcomes with AI
One of the challenges for teachers in an online learning environment is understanding how well students are engaging with and understanding course materials.
Dr. Ali Dewan is developing an AI-based application that could provide that feedback to students or their instructors instantly using facial recognition technology and analyzing the physical cues that students provide—much like a lecturer in person can gauge student interest based on body language.
This is at the preliminary stage where we are just trying to detect it,” he said. After detecting what types of challenge the student is facing, identifying those challenges and providing adequate feedback to students is the next step.
Creating AI research opportunities with students
Dr. Sabine Graf’s research program touches on many different types of AI applications, but one thing they all have in common is that student researchers are involved—supporting the goal of increasing student success with AI personalization.
Graf said working closely with students on research initiatives—and having those students work closely with each other, as well—not only helps students get real-world practical experience, it helps to keep students connected while they’re studying remotely.
“We really try to have not just one student working on this, and another student working on something different,” she said. “It all comes together, and we have groups of students working with each other."
Find out how students contribute to AI research
Can you tell if this article was written by AI?
With the proliferation of AI applications like ChatGPT that can write at a level as a sophisticated as many humans, the question of “did an AI write this?” has become far more important.
This has prompted Athabasca University AI researcher Dr. Maiga Chang to shift his research focus to this topic, called authorship forensics. This includes work developing AI that can differentiate between AI and human writing—or even identify the specific human author of a text.
“We do think that people when writing will prefer to use different kinds of nouns, noun combinations, pronouns; some people use letters over numbers, that sort of thing,” he said. “People have different behaviours."
Delve into this authorship forensics research
We can do a lot with AI... but who's considering the ethics?
Dr. Stella George spends a lot of time thinking about AI as part of her research program, but not exactly in the same way many other Athabasca University researchers do.
Rather than focusing on developing new algorithms to improve AI performance, or developing new applications for AI, she focuses on the ethical implications of the current boom in AI technologies. In other words, she spends less time asking questions like “Can we do this?” and “How can we do this?” and more time asking questions like, “Should we do this?” and “How can we do this responsibly?”
“I’m interested in the social impacts of AI on a macro scale, and how the use of AI tools is changing society and changing our focus as a society on where we’re putting our resources,” George explained. “AI is not free. Even if there’s no fee to use it, it’s very resource intensive.”
Exploring health-care improvements with AI
Since the late 1990s, Dr. Dunwei Wen has focused on developing the algorithms that underpin different components of artificial intelligence like neural networks, intelligent agents, and deep learning.
“My research is mostly focused on the development or advancement of AI itself,” he explained. This includes natural language processing, which helps AI to understand meaning behind words, and computer vision, which helps AI to understand meaning behind an image.
Although Wen’s focus has been mostly on advancing AI itself, he is currently working with Health Everywhere, a research project led by the University of Calgary. He is working to develop an AI application that could help clinicians identify patterns in test results and patients' histories, and help patients better understand their results by translating medical jargon into plain language.
Read about AI implications in health care
Explore AI with a master’s degree
Athabasca University’s Master of Science in Information Systems (MScIS) is a graduate program like no other, with many routes and options to meet your unique educational goals.