Last Monday (August 18, 2014) we released our online course on Knowledge-Based AI through Udacity as part of the Georgia Tech OMS in CS program. David Joyner, a learning scientist, is the course developer and TA for the course, and I am the course creator and instructor. The course is presently being taken by some 200 professionals.

The course is organized around a sequence of ambitious design and programming projects. It extensively uses problem-based learning, learning by example, learning by doing, and affords considerable opportunities for collaboration, reflection, and personalization. We think
of it as the first iteration in our program for design-based research on online learning.

Creating this course has been a lot of work. I must have put in >200 hours into it. David probably has put in >800 hours. Yet, I am excited about it. In the first five days, we received >800 postings on the collaboration forum for the course, indicating deep engagement. Many of the discussions are of high quality; Some are also quite intense. I expect to learn a lot from the course.

Welcome to the DILab blog. This is a blog for members of Georgia Institute of Technology’s Design & Intelligence Laboratory to share their musings as “public intellectuals.” As its name suggests, DILab conducts research at the union of design and intelligence, in the sense of designing intelligent systems as well as intelligent system design. As of today, we are preparing an online course on knowledge-based AI, building intelligent agents that can learn by imitating humans, publishing a paper on fractal reasoning in visual analogy in the Artificial Intelligence Journal, consolidating a partnership with Biomimicry 3.8 on biologically inspired design, launching new collaborations on discovery informatics and computational thinking with the Smithsonian Institution and Vanderbilt University respectively, and getting ready to host the Third Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems, among many other things. The blog posts too may cover a wide variety of topics and themes. As usual, the blog posts represent the individuals posting them, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of DILab or Georgia Tech.