Published: Jan. 5, 2022

Build the System is a new cross-strand group focused on designing the software components and architecture for the AI Partner. The group convened over the fall to identify and design individual software components (e.g., Speech Recognition, Diarization, Automated Tagging) and the technical infrastructure that will enable the different components to interact with each other in real-time and offline. This work includes considering what kinds of training data we’ll need to collect in to build machine learning-based models and how it can be securely stored and processed with an emphasis on privacy and access controls.

The group also works to identify and share expertise as well as establish development best practices that can be used across the organization. Over the last three months, the group has:

• Began an inventory of existing components and code across iSAT.
• Created Guidelines for including repositories in the iSAT Organization on GitHub.
• Began collecting code repositories in the iSAT Organization on GitHub.
• Identified strategies for structuring GitHub code repositories: Submodules.
• Refined a series of diagrams to describe the iSAT Architecture and Timeline.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Schematic of iSAT’s Technical Architecture.

Schematic of iSAT’s Technical Architecture.

The work will continue to create a roadmap and implement an initial MVP which connects multiple components in the architecture to take classroom data as input, process it through intelligent services, and produce output for students or teachers. The group will continue to coordinate with the strands on design input in order to ensure that iSAT has a flexible technical architecture that can support both research and implementation for analyzing classroom interactions offline and ultimately real-time classroom interactions.