Research
My research is in the area of artificial intelligence, and includes contributions in the areas of artificial intelligence and education, computational linguistics, spoken language, and user modeling. My work has included both fundamental research and applied research resulting in technology transfer and patents. My most recent research has been in the area of Speech and Natural Language Technology for Educational Applications. Currently funded projects include:
- (Automated Assessment of Classroom Discussion Quality) Web-Based App to Advance Learning Science Research
- (CourseMIRROR) Enhancing Undergraduate STEM Education by Integrating Mobile Learning Technologies with Natural Language Processing
- (Discussion Tracker) Development of Human Language Technologies to Improve the Teaching of Collaborative Argumentation in High School English Classrooms
- (eRevise) Response-to-Text Tasks to Assess Students' Use of Evidence and Organization in Writing: Using Natural Language Processing for Scoring Writing and Providing Feedback At-Scale
- (NRI) Studying Collaborative Dialogue with a Teachable Robot in a Mathematics Domain
- (FAI) Using AI to Increase Fairness by Improving Access to Justice
Brief Biography
I am Professor of Computer Science (CS), a Senior Scientist with the Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC), and Faculty of the Intelligent Systems Program (ISP), all at the University of Pittsburgh. CS and ISP are part of Pitt's School of Computing and Information (SCI). I moved here from the Garden State (aka New Jersey), where from 1985-2001 I was a member of the Artificial Intelligence Principles Research Department, AT&T Labs - Research (formerly Bell Laboratories); From 1990-1992, I was also an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. I received my Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Rochester, and my A.B. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the College of William and Mary in Virginia. Here are my informal and more formal versions of my academic geneology.
News
- March 2024: Pitt Cyber Accelerator Grant on "Building Socially Responsible Machine Writing Tutors"
- January 2024: Panelist, Generative AI and Teaching: Uses in Evaluation of Learning
- December 2023: Joined Duolingo's English Test Technical Advisory Board
- December 2023: Panelist, Celebration of the 10th Anniversary of the Argument Mining Workshop Series
- September 2023: Appointed as first Associate Dean for Mentoring and Development in the School of Computing and Information
- August 2023: New NSF grant on learning technologies
- July 2023: Best Poster Award at AIED for "Impact of Experiencing Misrecognition by Teachable Agents on Learning and Rapport" by Yuya Asano, Diane Litman, Mingzhi Yu, Nikki Lobczowski, Timothy Nokes-Malach, Adriana Kovashka, and Erin Walker
- June 2023: New internal grant on Using ChatGPT to Analyze Classroom Discussions
- May 2023: Launch of ImageArg Shared Task 2023: The First Shared Task in Multimodal Argument Mining
- April 2023: Panelist, ChatGPT Wrote this Title: Exploring the Impact of AI on Our Minds and Society
- March 2023: Panelist, SheLeads Women's Forum
- February 2023: Panelist, ChatNexus: Discussing the State of AI in Education and What's Next
- February 2023: Speaker, ChatGPT: The Evolution of Generative AI Tools and Implications for Teaching
- Archived News
Editorial
- Associate Editor, International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education
- Editorial Board, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
- Editorial Board, Argument and Computation
PC Activities 2023
- The 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- 9th Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education