Dr. Theeraphat Serirangsan (left), Prime Minister's Office presents
Inventor’s award to AIT alumnus Dr. Siriwan Suebnukarn
(right).
Dr. Siriwan Suebnukarn , an
alumnus of AIT's Computer Science and Information Management program,
School of Engineering and Technology, received the Thai Inventor’s
Award on February 2, 2007 at the BITEC Exhibition and Convention Hall,
Bangkok. The award is for her work on COMET: A collaborative
intelligent tutoring system for medical problem-based learning.
The system was developed by Dr. Siriwan during her doctoral study at
AIT under the supervision of Prof.
Peter Haddawy. Now that Dr. Siriwan has returned to her
faculty position at Thammasat University’s School of Dentistry, work is
continuing as a collaboration between AIT and Thammasat.
The COMET system is designed to provide an experience that emulates
that of live human-tutored medical problem-based learning sessions as
much as possible while at the same time permitting the students to
participate collaboratively from disparate locations. COMET uses
generic tutoring algorithms applied to models of student understanding
to generate tutorial hints to guide problem solving activity.
Comparison of learning outcomes shows that student clinical reasoning
gains from COMET are significantly higher than those obtained from
human tutored sessions. Results of the research have been
published in several top journals including Artificial Intelligence in
Medicine in which the paper was the most downloaded article for the
period July-Sept 2006.