Cognitive Computing: Theory and Applications

Education and learning stand out among many application areas of cognitive computing due to their practical appeal as well as their research challenge. We can gauge the level of research challenge once we recognize the broad spectrum of human learning, the complex and not fully understood human learning process, and various influencing factors of learning, such as pedagogy, technology, and social elements. We survey some of the key research problems and recent efforts to solve them. In particular, we examine the important roles played by the Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics communities in these research efforts. We find evidence of significant progress over the last few years. We also find evidence of concerted efforts by academia and industry in bringing some of these research results to the public in the form of learning and educational software.