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Building autonomous -- i.e., choosing goals based on one's needs -- and adaptive -- i.e., surviving in ever-changing environments -- agents has been a holy grail of artificial intelligence (AI). A living organism is a prime example of such…
World Models help Artificial Intelligence (AI) predict outcomes, reason about its environment, and guide decision-making. While widely used in reinforcement learning, they lack the structured, adaptive representations that even young…
This paper presents a step towards a formal controller design method for autonomous agents based on knowledge awareness to improve decision-making. Our approach is to first create an organized repository of information (a knowledge base)…
Due to their interactive nature, serious games offer valuable opportunities for supporting learning in educational contexts. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have further opened the door to new forms of personalized…
Multi-modal AI systems will likely become a ubiquitous presence in our everyday lives. A promising approach to making these systems more interactive is to embody them as agents within physical and virtual environments. At present, systems…
Providing adaptive scaffolds to help learners develop self-regulated learning (SRL) processes has been an important goal for intelligent learning environments. Adaptive scaffolding is especially important in open-ended learning environments…
We present the design of an online social skills development interface for teenagers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The interface is intended to enable private conversation practice anywhere, anytime using a web-browser. Users…
Continual learning refers to the ability of humans and animals to incrementally learn over time in a given environment. Trying to simulate this learning process in machines is a challenging task, also due to the inherent difficulty in…
As the current trend of artificial intelligence is shifting towards self-supervised learning, conventional norms such as highly curated domain-specific data, application-specific learning models, extrinsic reward based learning policies…
This document chronicles this author's attempt to explore how words come to mean what they do, with a particular focus on child language acquisition and what that means for models of language understanding.\footnote{I say \emph{historical}…
Interactive storytelling is vital for preschooler development. While children's interactive partners have traditionally been their parents and teachers, recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked a surge of AI-based…
Conversational agents (CAs) embodied in speakers or chatbots are becoming very popular in some countries, and despite their adult-centred design, they have become part of children's lives, generating a need for children-centric trustworthy…
Autism Spectrum Disorder significantly influences the communication abilities, learning processes, behavior, and social interactions of individuals. Although early intervention and customized educational strategies are critical to improving…
Text based games are simulations in which an agent interacts with the world purely through natural language. They typically consist of a number of puzzles interspersed with interactions with common everyday objects and locations. Deep…
We review computational and robotics models of early language learning and development. We first explain why and how these models are used to understand better how children learn language. We argue that they provide concrete theories of…
Understanding and manipulating concrete and abstract concepts is fundamental to human intelligence. Yet, they remain challenging for artificial agents. This paper introduces a multimodal generative approach to high order abstract concept…
What is the right supervisory signal to train visual representations? Current approaches in computer vision use category labels from datasets such as ImageNet to train ConvNets. However, in case of biological agents, visual representation…
The study of adverse childhood experiences and their consequences has emerged over the past 20 years. In this study, we aimed to leverage explainable artificial intelligence, and propose a proof-of-concept prototype for a knowledge-driven…
Extended Reality in early childhood education presents high-risk challenges due to children's rapid developmental changes. While augmented and virtual reality offer immersive pedagogical benefits, they often impose excessive cognitive load…
Like many other domains in Artificial Intelligence (AI), there are specific tasks in the field of AI in Education (AIEd) for which labels are scarce and expensive, such as predicting exam score or review correctness. A common way of…