February 21, 2008

Representatives from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) visited the Workforce Advanced Distributed Learning (WADL) Co-Lab in Memphis, Tennessee 30-31 January 2008. The representatives were Dr. Paul Mayberry, Deputy under Secretary of Defense, Mr. Dan Gardner, Director of Readiness and Training Policy and Program, Mr. Joe Camacho, Program Manager for the Joint Knowledge Development and Distribution Capability (JKDDC), and Dr. Robert Wisher, Director of the ADL Initiative for the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD).

The purpose if the visit was to explore new avenues of collaboration between the DoD and the WADL Co-Lab and Institute for Intelligent Systems (IIS) at the University of Memphis. Close collaborations have the potential to dramatically advance workforce training and readiness initiatives in DoD. The IIS, which is part of the FedEx Institute of Technology in Memphis, is a leading research center for learning, language, and communication technologies. The WADL Co-Lab was established by researchers in the IIS.

The DoD delegation spent the day interacting with dozens of WADL faculty, staff, and graduate students. The researchers described and demoed their recent implementations of learning technologies (such as AutoTutor, MetaTutor, ARIES, and iSTART) which use animated pedagogical agents to promote deep learning and reasoning about science and technology. There were demos of automated tools for language and text analysis (Coh-Metrix), multi-channel communication (iMAP), eye tracking, and detection of emotions from dialogue, facial expressions, speech parameters, and body posture.

Mr. Camacho introduced JKDDC and JKO to the researchers during the visit. Dr. Graesser and Dr. Hu presented research, development, and services capabilities of the WADL Co-Lab. The visitors also met with President Raines of the University of Memphis, the Provost, the Vice Provost of Research, and the Director of the FedEx Institute of Technology. The delegation took a tour of the FedEx Hub sorting facility. Dr. Mayberry exchanged ideas with the FedEx executives about workforce training issues.