Hi all,
This week at the Applied Statistics workshop we will be welcoming Joseph Jay Williams, a
Research Fellow in the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning Research Group at Harvard
University. He will be presenting work entitled "Perpetually enhancing human
learning through dynamic, personalized, collaborative experimentation." Please find
the abstract below and on the website.
We will meet in CGIS Knafel Room 354 at noon and lunch will be provided.
Best,
Pam
Title: Perpetually enhancing human learning through dynamic, personalized, collaborative
experimentation
Abstract: There is a proliferation of websites and mobile apps for helping people learn
new concepts (e.g. online courses), and learn how to change health habits and behavior
(e.g. websites for reducing depression, apps for quitting smoking). How can we use data
from real-world users to rapidly enhance and personalize these technologies? I show how we
can build self-improving systems by reimagining randomized A/B experimentation as an
engine for collaboration, dynamic enhancement, and personalization. I present a novel
system that enhanced learning from math problems, through crowdsourcing explanations and
automatically experimenting to discover the best. My second application boosted responses
to an email campaign, by experimentally discovering how to personalize motivational
messages to a user's activity level. These self-improving systems use experiments as
a bridge between designers, social-behavioral scientists and researchers in statistical
machine learning.
Show replies by date