GIFT

Tomorrow, April 28th at 0800 eastern time, Cloud GIFT will be migrating to a more capable server, as well as fixing a number of bugs reported on the forum and elsewhere. This migration is expected to take 2 hours, during which the service will be unavailable. The website, forums, downloads, and other GIFT services will be available during this time.

Hi... below is the final agenda for GIFTSym5 which will be held 10-11 May in Orlando, Florida at the University of Central Florida Partnership III Building (3039 Technology Parkway, Room 321 A&B, Orlando, FL 32826). In order to guarantee your space at GIFTSym5, please email Kat Amaya at katherine.amaya.ctr@mail.mil no later than 1 May to receive your confirmation. Space is limited. There is no cost to register for GIFTSym. We are looking forward to a great conference.

Agenda follows:

Wednesday, May 10, 2017

8:30am-9:00am Opening Keynote: Dr. Robert Sottilare
9:00am-9:20am Session #1- Architecture Update: Dr. Keith Brawner
9:20am-9:40am Session #2 - Authoring Tools Update: Dr. Scott Ososky
9:40am-10:00am Session #3 - Demo - GIFT Authoring Tools: Dr. Scott Ososky

10:00am-10:20am Break

10:20am-10:50am Session #4 - Focused Authoring for Building GIFT tutors in Specialized Domains: Dr. Benjamin Bell
10:50am-11:20am Session #5 - GIFT Course Creator Wizard - Cadets Murray, Pico and Redmon
11:20am-11:40am Session #6 - Development of an Integrated, User Friendly Authoring Tool for ITSs: Mr. Fleet Davis & Dr. Jennifer Riley
11:40am-12:00pm Session #7 - Demo - GIFT Wrap: Mr. Fleet Davis & Dr. Jennifer Riley

12:00pm-1:20pm LUNCH (on your own)

1:20pm-1:40pm Session #8 - Individual Learner Modeling Update: Dr. Gregory Goodwin
1:40pm-2:10pm Session #9 - Multi-level user modeling in GIFT to Support Complex Learning Tasks: Dr. Gautam Biswas
2:10pm-2:30pm Session #10 - Physiological Based Adaptive Training - Dr. Thomas Schnell
2:30:pm-2:50pm Session #11 - UPCATS Demonstration - Dr. Thomas Schnell

2:50pm-3:20pm Break

3:20pm-3:40pm Session #12 - Team Tutoring Update: Dr. Anne Sinatra
3:40pm-4:10pm Session #13 - Building a Backbone for Multi-Agent Tutoring in GIFT: Dr. Benjamin Nye
4:10pm-4:30pm Session #14 - Wrap up and Adjourn Day 1: Dr. Robert Sottilare

Thursday, May 11, 2017

8:30am- 8:50am Session #15 - Domain Modeling Update: Dr. Robert Sottilare
8:50am-9:20pm Session #16 - Authoring Augmented Reality Scenarios for ITSs with GIFT: Mr. Andres Vargas Gonzalez
9:20am-9:50am Session #17 - Science is Zarked: An ITS for Learning Research Methods: Ms. Samantha Warta
9:50am-10:15am Session #18 - Integrating MOOCs and ITSs: edX, GIFT and CTAT: Dr. Ryan Baker

10:15am-10:45am Break

10:45am-11:15am Session #19 - Educational Data Mining using GIFT: Dr. Alan Carlin
11:15am-11:45am Session #20 - A Data Analytics Framework to Support Training Effectiveness Evaluation: Mr. Michael Smith
11:45am-12:15pm Session #21 - Modeling Training Efficiency and ROI for Adaptive Training: Dr. James Niehaus

12:15pm-1:40pm LUNCH (on your own)

1:40pm-2:00pm Session #22 - Instructional Management Update: Dr. Benjamin Goldberg
2:00pm-2:30pm Session #22 - Developing a Pattern Recognition Structure to Tailor Mid-Lesson Feedback: Dr. JT Folsom-Kovarik
2:30pm-3:00pm Session #23 - Integrating the outer loop: validated tutors for portable courses and competencies: Dr. Elliot Robson
3:00pm-3:30pm Session #24 - Toward Simulated Students for Reinforcement Learning-Driven Tutorial Planning in GIFT: Dr. Jonathan Rowe
3:30pm-4:00pm Session #25 - Wrap up and Adjourn Day 2: Dr. Robert Sottilare

Today, April 14th at 2000 (8:00 PM) Eastern Time, Cloud GIFT be down for scheduled maintenance. It will be down for approximately 3 hours while new functionality is made available.

Tomorrow, February 10th at 0800 eastern time, Cloud GIFT will be migrating to a new server hosting provider. This migration is expected to take all day, during which the service will be unavailable. The website, forums, downloads, and other GIFT services will be available during this time. All of your content will be migrated. The new server will provide increased reliability.

GIFTSym5 will be conducted 10-11 May 2017 in Orlando, Florida at the University of Central Florida Partnership III Building (3039 Technology Parkway, Room 321 A&B, Orlando, FL 32826).

Please make plans to write a paper to share your experiences with GIFT and present it in Orlando.

Scope and Topics of Interest:
The aim of this symposium is to bring together members of the GIFT User community for an in-depth exploration of tools, methods, and standards for Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) as part of the research and development of the Generalized Intelligent Framework for Tutoring (GIFT) sponsored by the US Army Research Laboratory. GIFT is a free, modular, service-oriented architecture whose goal is to make automated authoring, automated instruction, and effect analysis easy and cost-effective. GIFT has three primary objectives:

(1) reduce the skill and time needed to author ITSs
(2) provide an automated instructional capability based upon best tutoring principles, strategies, and tactics for use in ITSs;
(3) enable experimentation to evaluate the effectiveness and impact of ITS components, tools, and methods.

The program committee invites GIFT practitioners and ITS scientists to submit papers highlighting their use of GIFT and recommendations for design enhancements in the following areas: authoring, learner and team modeling, instructional management, and evaluation of learning, retention and transfer effects. Additional topics of interest include: team tutoring strategies, multi-agent architectures for GIFT, and competency modeling/ long term learner modeling.

Submission instructions:
Paper submissions should be 8-10 pages (10 page maximum) in APA format and submitted through Easy Chair at: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=giftsym5. Only submissions in .pdf format will be accepted and a MS Word template is attached to this announcement to facilitate formatting of your paper. All submissions should be in English. Address any questions to robert.a.sottilare.civ@mail.mil.

Attendance instructions:
Just like GIFT, GIFTSym5 is free to participants. However, space will be limited so please let us know if you are planning to attend by contacting: Kat Amaya at katherine.amaya.ctr@mail.mil to reserve a space. Parking is available near the Partnership III building. Information on local hotels will be provided later.

Important Dates

GIFTSym5 abstract submissions via EasyChair............................................................ 2016-12-16 - 2017-01-13
Authors notified of abstract acceptance................................................................ 2017-01-20 - 2017-01-20
GIFTSym5 paper submissions via EasyChair............................................................... 2017-01-21 - 2017-03-17
Authors notified of paper acceptance................................................................... 2017-03-24 - 2017-03-24
Camera-ready paper submissions (comments addressed and in final format)................................ 2017-03-25 - 2017-04-14
GIFTSym5 presentations (ppt or pptx format) emailed to Dr. Sottilare (robert.a.sottilare.civ@mail.mil). 2017-05-01
GIFTSym5 - Orlando, Florida............................................................................ 2017-05-10 - 2017-05-11

The GIFT Portal will be down for maintenance at 1:00 EST on Monday 10/3/2016. This maintenance is to facilitate an upgrade, and is anticipated to last <2 hours.

GIFT 2016-1 Cloud with new authoring experience is now available for immediate use at https://cloud.gifttutoring.org .

Just like the Local version, the GIFT Cloud (Virtual Open Campus) showcases the new user experience and features which allow you to:
- Develop GIFT Courses more intuitively with a drag-and-drop interface
- Create survey content more efficiently with a redesigned survey authoring system
- Personalize content for learners with branching courseflow via automatic branching and automatically generated quiz/assessment/remediation
- Create branching conversational agents with a new dialogue authoring tool
- Author GIFT content rapidly, directly alongside external training environments with the all new GIFT Wrap tool
- Create and deliver adaptive courses within a web-browser, no computer programming necessary!

The GIFTSym4 Proceedings are now available. See https://gifttutoring.org/projects/gift/documents for more information.

GIFT 2016-1 is now available for download on the GIFT Portal at http://gifttutoring.org

Download GIFT 2016-1 directly here: https://gifttutoring.org/projects/gift/files

Free GIFT Account registration required to download GIFT; GIFT is available at no cost

The new user experience and features allow you to:

- Develop GIFT Courses more intuitively with a drag-and-drop interface
- Create survey content more efficiently with a redesigned survey authoring system
- Personalize content for learners with branching courseflow via automatic branching and automatically generated quiz/assessment/remediation
- Create branching conversational agents with a new dialogue authoring tool
- Author GIFT content rapidly, directly alongside external training environments with the all new GIFT Wrap tool
- Create and deliver adaptive courses within a web-browser, no computer programming necessary!
- and more...

The fourth book in the adaptive tutoring series, "Design Recommendations for Intelligent Tutoring Systems - Volume 4 - Domain" is now available under the documents tab.

Volume 4 is now available free in pdf format. This book is a collaboration between ARL, the University of Memphis, and scores of government, industry, and academic partners to provide a ready reference for researchers and ITS developers. Download it now at https://gifttutoring.org/projects/gift/documents