Abstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been adopted in a wide range of domains. This shows the imperative need to contribute to making citizens insightful actors in debates and decisions involving the adoption of AI mechanisms. Currently, existing approaches to the teaching of basic AI concepts through programming treat machine intelligence as an external element/module. After being trained, that external module is coupled to the main application. Combining block-based programming and WiSARD weightless artificial neural networks, this article presents the conceptualization and design of a new methodology, AI from concrete to abstract (AIcon2abs), to endow general people (including children) with a minimum understanding of what AI means. The main strategy adopted was to include AI training and classification primitives as blocks that compose an otherwise conventional computer program. This way, the programmer can use these blocks as he/she uses other programming constructs. In order to achieve this purpose, we also propose BlockWiSARD, a block-based programming environment designed to promote the demystification of artificial intelligence via practical activities related to the development of learning machines, as well as through the observation of their learning process. As a beneficial side effect of BlockWiSARD, the difference between a program capable of learning from data and a conventional computer program becomes more evident. In addition, the simplicity of the WiSARD weightless artificial neural network model enables easy visualization and understanding of training and classification tasks internal realization.
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The source code and instructions for installation are available at: http://ginape.nce.ufrj.br/LIVRE/BlockWiSARD.
Notes
Transfer learning is the use of part of a model trained for a specific task to accelerate the learning of a different but related one (Pratt and Jennings 1996).
Periódicos Capes is a Brazilian search engine that searches for papers in many international scientific databases such as SprigerLink, ACM Digital Library, IEEE explore, Scopus, ScienceDirect, SciELO and Google Scholar. http://www.periodicos.capes.gov.br.
STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.
Arduino is a low-cost, open-source electronic prototyping platform that is simple to use for any student, including children. http://www.arduino.cc/.
Actually, the draw is pseudo-random, because computers are not able to generate truly random numbers (Budach 1991).
Python is a programming language https://www.python.org/. BlockWiSARD converts the block program created by the user into a program in that programming language.
Raspberry Pi is a low-cost single-board computer provided with a set of General-Purpose Input/Output pins where one can connect robotics devices. https://www.raspberrypi.org/.
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Acknowledgements
This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior—Brasil (CAPES)—Finance Code 001. A preliminary version of this paper was published in arXiv:2006.04013.
Funding
Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior—Brasil (CAPES)—Finance Code 001. (Graduate Fellowship).
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A wheeled robot made from simple robotics that can be programmed with BlockWiSARD (mp4 38842 kb)
A robot (made from simple robotics) sensing, learning, and acting through a program developed with BlockWiSARD (mp4 41596 kb)
BlockWiSARD working alongside an Arduino board (mp4 35351 kb)
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A ludic interactive activity about the training and classification processes of the original WiSARD model (sb3 27965 kb)
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A ludic interactive activity about the training and classification processes of the WiSARD model with bleaching (sb3 33422 kb)
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Lacerda Queiroz, R., Ferrentini Sampaio, F., Lima, C. et al. AI from Concrete to Abstract. AI & Soc 36, 877–893 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01151-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01151-x