The Human Race Into Space Requires Kidneys, and Other Important Topics
A research and discussion group
Agenda and Minutes
0. Our next meeting will be Jan. 8, 2025.
1. Reviewing discussion updates: MDPI said to reapply in 2026. DB turned down a review but it wasn't in VJB's area of expertise. We can still recommend him for specific papers that we cannot review.
2. AGFS issues: what is VJB's status? Currently at the GC or maybe beyond, can't tell until the Faculty Senate minutes for their Dec. 6 meeting become available (https://ualr.edu/facultysenate/) with a link to the GC minutes. They are still not posted yet but will probably have to be posted in time for the Jan. meeting. So, keep checking.
3. VJB noticed positions at Jonesboro, U. Ozarks, and a couple others in AR.
4. AI, how is it affecting education, how AI could be used to enhance teaching, etc.?
- Automating the Socratic method of teaching.
- TE is leaning toward this for a dissertation.
- See research at https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.13919
- We finished section 2 (12/18/24).
- RAG: Retrieval Augmented Generation - is a type of intelligent tutoring system. VJB has a senior capstone project student working on this next semester.
- Consider this prompt to an AI:
- Teach me about an article using Socratic questioning. You ask me questions to guide my learning. Here is the article. <copy paste an article about something here.>
- See research at https://s3.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/assets.jmir.org/assets/preprints/preprint-57995-submitted.pdf
3. We could discuss space research such as something new from V's dissertation. For example, the graphs showing what fraction of satellites last at least a given number of years might be publishable. R suggests there might be other results in the dissertation that could also be valuable. V will plan to show us the graphs that would be useful in our next meeting.