Arjun Vinayak Chikkankod

Title: Modeling cognitive load with EEG and deep learning for human computer interaction and instructional design

Supervision Team: Luca Longo, TU Dublin / Ann Devitt, TCD

Description: This project will focus on multi-disciplinary research in the area of Cognitive Load (CL) modeling. It aims at constructing an interpretable/explainable model of CL for real-time prediction of task performance. It will allow human-centred designers in HCI and Education to develop, personalize and rapidly test their interfaces, instructional material and procedures in a way they are aligned to the limitation of the human mental capacity, maximising human performance. The novelty lies in the use of Deep Learning methods to automatically learn complex non-linear representations from EEG, moving beyond the knowledge-driven approaches that have produced hand-crafted deductive knowledge. A challenging task is to translate these representations into human-interpretable forms, a well-known issue in Explainable Artificial Intelligence. To tackle this, modern methods for automatic rules extraction from deep-learning models will be employed, with symbolic, argumentative reasoning methods, to bring these rules together in a highly accessible, explainable/interpretable model of CL.