List of Projects by Yuya Asano

Collaborative Learning with Nao Robots

This project investigates how to support dyads of middle school learners who interact to teach a robot about mathematics. We are particularly interested in how the robot can use dialogue, gaze, and gesture to facilitate the interactions between the two students and between the robot and the students.

ISABEL: IncluSive And collaBorativE aLexa

Our team ISABEL employs context-aware, multi-modal communication using state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to enable flexible and human-like collaboration. Our TaskBot will tailor interactions to users with different preferences and capabilities so that it will be more accessible to diverse groups and ultimately reach more users.

Personalized Explanation

We design randomized experiments to examine what educators should tell students in what context to improve their learning and engagement. We then apply contextual bandits to tailor students’ experience on online education systems. We embed this system in the University of Toronto’s PCRS online learning system.

Reflection Summarization

We propose a novel way to extract actionable insights that instructors can use to improve their teahcing from a massive text data of student reflections. They can see what topics their students are talking about and how they feel about those topics through clustering of reflecitons and their summaries.