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For research to go in the right direction, it is essential to be able to compare and quantify performance of different algorithms focused on the same problem. Choosing a suitable evaluation metric requires deep understanding of the pursued…
In this work, I present an automatic system for the evaluation of closed-type exercises in physics at the high school level or in the first year of a degree where physics is a mandatory course. It is expected that this will allow students…
Incorporating computer programming exercises into introductory physics is a delicate task that involves a number of choices that may have an effect on student learning. We present a "hybrid" approach that speaks to a number of common…
Measuring learning progress is essential for curiosity-driven exploration in reinforcement learning, but widely used signals such as prediction error often fail to distinguish meaningful, learnable patterns from random noise. This paper…
Common practice in modern machine learning involves fitting a large number of parameters relative to the number of observations. These overparameterized models can exhibit surprising generalization behavior, e.g., ``double descent'' in the…
This paper summarizes some challenges encountered and best practices established in several years of teaching Machine Learning for the Physical Sciences at the undergraduate and graduate level. I discuss motivations for teaching ML to…
There is consistent and growing evidence that physics instruction disproportionately harms female students' self-efficacy, their beliefs about their ability to learn and do physics. This harm is problematic because self-efficacy supports…
Blended mathematical sensemaking in science (MSS) involves deep conceptual understanding of quantitative relationships describing scientific phenomena. Previously we developed the cognitive framework describing proficiency in MSS across…
In this companion paper, we explore the use of isomorphic problem pairs (IPPs) to assess introductory physics students' ability to solve and successfully transfer problem-solving knowledge from one context to another in mechanics. We call…
Machine learning models have exhibited exceptional results in various domains. The most prevalent approach for learning is the empirical risk minimizer (ERM), which adapts the model's weights to reduce the loss on a training set and…
Statistical machine learning theory often tries to give generalization guarantees of machine learning models. Those models naturally underlie some fluctuation, as they are based on a data sample. If we were unlucky, and gathered a sample…
We draw attention on the procedure, where Standard Model predictions and experimental results are compared and certain new physics scenarios are ruled out, that requires great attention, since there is still a room for new physics,…
Estimating average treatment effects from observational data is challenging under practical violations of the positivity assumption. Targeted Maximum Likelihood Estimators (TMLEs) are widely used because of their double robustness and…
Forecast evaluation plays a key role in how empirical evidence shapes the development of the discipline. Domain experts are interested in error measures relevant for their decision making needs. Such measures may produce unreliable results.…
Accurate estimates of long-term risk probabilities and their gradients are critical for many stochastic safe control methods. However, computing such risk probabilities in real-time and in unseen or changing environments is challenging.…
When training and evaluating machine reading comprehension models, it is very important to work with high-quality datasets that are also representative of real-world reading comprehension tasks. This requirement includes, for instance,…
Many Physics Education Researchers have discussed the positive correlation between students' incoming mathematics skills and performance in their physics classes. Thus, in order to strengthen their performance gains in their physics…
Subjective teacher evaluations play a key role in shaping students' educational trajectories. Previous studies have shown that students of low socioeconomic status (SES) receive worse subjective evaluations than their high SES peers, even…
Physics faculty care about their students learning physics content. In addition, they usually hope that their students will learn some deeper lessons about thinking critically and scientifically. They hope that as a result of taking a…
When learning a new motor behavior, e.g. reaching in a force field, the nervous system builds an internal representation. Examining how subsequent reaches in unpracticed directions generalize reveals this representation. Though it is the…