Developing A Hidden Domain for Human and Electronic Students

One objective of DARPA's Bootstrapped Learning (BL) program is to develop a general electronic student (e-student) that makes use of machine learning algorithms to learn from the kind of fo-cused instruction typically provided by a human teacher. Over the course of the program, such a student was developed and trained against a number of learning challenges codified in electronic curricula spanning disparate domains of interest. In order to test the capabilities of this e-student, a " hidden domain " curriculum was created. An electronic version of this curriculum was used to test the e-student by an independent research group. Additionally, university undergraduate and graduate students were trained and tested using a human-accessible version of this same " hidden domain " curriculum, allowing researchers to gauge the performance of humans on the curriculum and use that performance as a benchmark against which to evaluate the e-student. This paper provides details on the hidden domain curriculum, which teaches a procedure for the diagnosis and repair of a satellite ground control station. We also present as a summary of the available human and e-student results.