Kurt VanLehn
Professor of Computer Science
5101 SENSQ
740 LRDC
412-624-7458
Dr. VanLehn is as a Professor of Computer Science, a Senior Scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center, and Director of CIRCLE, an NSF Center.
He received a BS from Stanford (Mathematics, 1974) and a PhD from MIT (Computer Science, 1983). He was a Research Associate at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center until 1985, when he joined Carnegie-Mellon University as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Psychology. He moved to the University of Pittsburgh in 1990.
Dr. VanLehn's research interests focus on applications of artificial intelligence to education and cognitive modeling. At this writing, he is engaged in 3 research projects.
Circle is an NSF-supported research center that is finding out why human tutoring is so effective and building computer tutors that will equal or even exceed their effectiveness. Circle is a collaborative effort involving 9 professors from CMU and Pitt.
The Andes project is developing an intelligent tutoring system that helps college students learn physics. It features 3 novel help systems and a student modeling component based on Bayesian networks.
The Why2000 project is developing a natural-language based tutoring system for help student learn how to explain "why" physical systems work the way they do.