Special issue on Artificial Intelligence in Engineering Education

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be defined as the intelligence exhibited by machines and computers in accomplishing desired tasks in a similar way to how normal human beings think and act. Hence AI is also termed machine intelligence. For a computational system to be artificially intelligent, the system should possess the ability to understand the surrounding environment, make proper assumptions, and based on the circumstances make judicious decisions that maximize the possibilities of accomplishing goals most of the time. These AI‐enabled devices are also called Intelligent Agents. These intelligent agents use some mapping functions also termed cognitive functions, which take these environmental parameters and contextual information as inputs along with the goal to be accomplished and manipulate the right means to accomplish the targeted goal. AI can also be considered inter‐ disciplinary as it involves several other disciplines such as Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Cognitive Science, Neural Networks, Data Mining, Natural Language Processing (NLP), robotics, and mathematics. All these disciplines are related, and thereby intelligent agents are trained to understand and adapt to the surrounding environment according to the context. The use of AI spans across several applications such as Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) based smart agent development, devising smart surveillance solutions using computer vision, creating robust and stable decision making systems that can understand, evaluate, manipulate, analyze, and predict several novel patterns by processing large volumes of application data, development of multilingual systems that uses NLP to understand the language features used across the context and aid decision making and so on. Also, since its inception as an academic discipline in the 1950s, AI has grown leaps and bounds as a discipline, and its applications have stretched across several domains such as Retail and Business solutions, Manufacturing and Logistics, Automobiles, Business Analytics and Market predictions, Healthcare, Security Systems, and Education. One of the key emerging areas where extensive efforts are spent towards developing smart applications and agents is the educational domain. Gone are the days where the educational system was completely driven by humans, and the growth of AI‐enabled intelligent agents has set the tone by replacing most human work with that of smart agents. Educational systems use AI‐based agents to study the behavior of students and suggest suitable courses for them. Smart agents are nowadays deployed in classrooms for complete classroom monitoring that includes tracking attendance, monitoring classroom activities, student and staff behavior monitoring, and so on. Similarly, smart agents are deployed to scan through the contents available online and suggest suitable content to students according to the course and also according to the different levels of understanding of student fraternity. Also, computer vision‐based smart agents are deployed to study the state of mind of students when they undergo different courses and provide insightful information about their likeness towards a subject or course. This agent‐based information serves as useful information in deciding the teaching methodology and also framing of course contents. Also, smart systems play a vital role in analyzing student results and providing insightful information about student performance. Thus, it is imperative that AI has become an indispensable force to reckon with in the future forward across the educational domain. However, the major drawback in these artificially intelligent systems is that they are not always accurate with decision making and at times predict otherwise. Also, training the AI‐based agent to understand the contextual paradigm and surrounding environment is a challenge. This special issue on “Artificial Intelligence In Education” is focused on drawing original studies related to the development and refinement of smart agents that can be applied across the educational domain.