Above the barbecue and the glitter of the inauguration of theFedEx Institute of Technology, there is a room on the top floor ofthis new building that strives to bind different disciplines withadvanced technology.
The Institute for Intelligent Systems (IIS) brings togethereducation, science, technology and psychology, and currently has 15projects underway.
"Here we have a good example of (coupling) business with othertechnology," said University of Memphis economics professor RoseRubin.
Some projects that are helpful to students are the AutoTutor, acomputer program that tries to mimic an ideal human tutor.
"There are a lot of touring programs out there," said ZhiqiangChai, a programmer for IIS, but this one is different in that ittries to understand and use natural language.
An animated three-dimensional agent that holds a conversationwith a student uses natural language, the language students use intheir day-to-day lives.
The AutoTutor program uses pressure and eye-tracking sensors tosense the mood of the student and respond and react to itaccordingly.
"With eye tracking, we can tell if a student is bored or tired,"said Jeremiah Sullins, senior psychology major. "Plus it implementsbody pressure. If you are slouching, it can sense boredom."
Along with these two features, the program also analyzes thelanguage used by the students to interact with AutoTutor.
While designers admit that none of these technologies alone cangive an accurate picture of a mood, all of these put together can.Tutoring would be of no help if the text and the understanding ofthese were difficult.
Two projects study how students learn from text by helpingreader comprehension and actually tailoring the text itself toindividual students, said Danielle McNamara, associate professor ofpsychology.
The Interactive Strategy Trainer for Active Reading and Thinkingis a virtual trainer designed to teach students how to get the mostout of their reading. By using the most up to date research incomprehension and learning strategies the program help studentsunderstand text better.
The Coh-Metrix is a system for measuring text difficulty andadjusting that text according to the audience. It gives users atool to design text specifically for a target audience.
The merging of technology and different fields by IIS is asdiverse as the disciplines they involve, including a computernetwork that diagnoses appendicitis in children, by analyzingmedical text and symptoms.
