SOSE Professor Maria Mercedes Rodrigo’s opinion piece ‘Is the AIED Conundrum a First-World Problem?’ published in international journal

The School of Science and Engineering congratulates Dr. Maria Mercedes Rodrigo on the publication of her opinion piece titled "Is the AIED Conundrum a First-World Problem?" in the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education. This piece is a result of her participation in a panel discussion at the 2022 Artificial Intelligence in Education Conference, where she shared her insights on the challenges and opportunities of AIED in low-resource contexts.

The panel discussion, entitled “AIED: Coming of Age”, was held at Durham University in the UK and featured Ben du Boulay (University of Sussex, UK), Art Graesser (University of Memphis, USA), Ken Koedinger (Carnegie Mellon University, USA), Danielle McNamara (Arizona State University, USA), and Dr. Rodrigo. The panelists were asked for their perspectives about an industry that has multimillion-dollar funded projects and a market potential of $6 billion by 2024, and at the same time has perpetuated ineffective methods of teaching and learning and datafication of the learning experience. How should AIED advance in a world where it has both enormous market value and significant educational limitations?

As a response to this prompt, the editors of the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education gathered opinion pieces by the AIED 2022 panelists and other invited contributors from inside and outside the AIED community and published these pieces in a special issue. Dr. Rodrigo was one of the contributors. In her article, Dr. Rodrigo discusses how the under-resourced schools in the Philippines inhibit their use of AIED. At the same time, it is in these contexts that the benefits of AIED are most needed. She argues that there is still value in participating in AIED research. The research performed today offers the promise of inclusion and representation in AIED system design and implementation, which, with luck, will lead to better learning and learning experiences.

Dr. Rodrigo is a Professor at the Department of Information Systems and Computer Science of the Ateneo de Manila University. Her opinion piece can be accessed through this link.