Research shows that emotions play an important role in learning. Human tutors are capable of identifying and responding to the affective states of their students; therefore, for ITSs to be truly affective, they should also be capable of tracking and appropriately responding to the emotional state of their users. We report on a project aimed at developing an affect-aware pedagogical agent persona for an ITS for teaching database design skills. We use the dimensional approach to affective modeling, and track the users' affective state along the valence dimension as identified from tracking the users' facial features. We describe the facial-feature tracking application we developed, as well as the set of rules that control the agent's behavior. The agent's response to the student's action depends on the student's cognitive state (as determined from the session history) as well as on the student's affective state. The experimental study of the agent shows the general preference towards the affective agent over the non-affective agent.
This paper presents a project the goal of which is to develop ASPIRE, a complete authoring and deployment environment for constraintbased intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs). ASPIRE is based on our previous work on constraint-based tutors and WETAS, the tutoring shell. ASPIRE consists of the authoring server (ASPIRE-Author), which enables domain experts to easily develop new constraint-base tutors, and a tutoring server (ASPIRE-Tutor), which deploys the developed systems. Preliminary evaluation shows that ASPIRE is successful in producing domain models, but more thorough evaluation is planned.
Women who inject drugs require gender-specific approaches to drug rehabilitation, modification of risk behaviors, and psychosocial adaptation. Improved outcomes have been demonstrated when the specific needs of women's subpopulations have been addressed. Special services for women include prenatal care, child care, women-only programs, supplemental workshops on women-focused topics, mental health services, and comprehensive programs that include several of the above components. To address the special needs of women injecting drug user (IDU) subpopulations, such as HIV-positive pregnant women and women with young children, recently released female prisoners, and street-involved girls and young women, HealthRight International and its local partners in Russia and Ukraine have developed innovative service models. This paper presents each of these models and discusses their effectiveness and implementation challenges specific to local contexts in Russia and Ukraine.
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