TY - JOUR AU - Ondula, Elizabeth Akinyi AU - Krishnamachari, Bhaskar PY - 2022/06/28 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Using Reinforcement Learning for Operating Educational Campuses Safely during a Pandemic (Student Abstract) JF - Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence JA - AAAI VL - 36 IS - 11 SE - AAAI Student Abstract and Poster Program DO - 10.1609/aaai.v36i11.21649 UR - https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/21649 SP - 13025-13026 AB - The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a significant disruption not only on how schools operate but also affected student sentiments on learning and adoption to different learning strategies. We propose CampusPandemicPlanR, a reinforcement learning-based simulation tool that could be applied to suggest to campus operators how many students from each course to allow on a campus classroom each week. The tool aims to strike a balance between the conflicting goals of keeping students from getting infected, on one hand, and allowing more students to come into campus to allow them to benefit from in-person classes, on the other. Our preliminary results show that reinforcement learning is able to learn better policies over iterations, and that different Pareto-optimal tradeoffs between these conflicting goals could be obtained by varying the reward weight parameter. ER -