Symbiotic AI for Personalized Learning in Astronomy A Visual Tool to Support Exploration and Analysis of Asteroids

The spreading of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is impacting many fields, changing the way individuals interact with technology. The growing integration of AI in astronomy brings many benefits, specifically in the learning process. Nevertheless, it raises many challenges when it comes to developing systems that enable personalized learning based on individuals’ needs and capabilities. The article presents a visual tool called “Visual Exploration and Graphical Analysis of Asteroids” (VEGA), designed to provide an intuitive and comprehensive instrument for the exploration, comparison, and visual understanding of data related to potentially hazardous asteroids. For the design of the system, requirements were gathered both from a sample of non-expert users, including astronomy amateurs and people new to the field, and from a sample of experts, including astrophysicists, researchers, astronomers, and professors with experience in observational astronomy. VEGA allows its end users to create personalized educational content accompanied by quizzes. This turns out to be possible through the use of LLMs, such as Gemini, which grants free access to some of its features. It is also possible to request revisions to the systems and/or in-depth analyses of the generated content by creating sub-versions of the educational material. This tool was designed considering humans’ needs and characteristics as the core to create a human-AI bidirectional relationship fostering symbiosis.