Research
My research is in the area of artificial intelligence, and includes contributions in the areas of artificial intelligence and education, computational linguistics, knowledge representation and reasoning, 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:
- (CourseMIRROR) Enhancing Undergraduate STEM Education by Integrating Mobile Learning Technologies with Natural Language Processing
- (Teams) Entrainment and Task Success in Team Conversations
- (ArgRewrite) Development of Human Language Technologies to Improve Disciplinary Writing and Learning through Self-Regulated Revising
- (Discussion Tracker) Development of Human Language Technologies to Improve the Teaching of Collaborative Argumentation in High School English Classrooms
- (RTA) 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
Brief Biography
I am Professor of Computer Science, and a Senior Scientist with the Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC), at the University of Pittsburgh. 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.
Recent News
- October 2018: 39 women doing amazing research in computational social science, Pittwire
- July 2018: New IES and new NSF grants awarded (on summarization and collaborative argumentation, respectively)
- May 2018: Invitee, AI for Good Global Summit organized by the United Nation's ITU
- February 2018: Panelist, Next Big Steps in AI for Education, 8th Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence
- December 2017: Selected as Fellow, Association for Computational Linguistics
- October 2017: Elected to the Executive Committee of the International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society
- August 2017: ArgRewrite Corpus (annotated revisions for studying argumentative writing) is now available for scientific purposes (download)
- April 2017: Wencan Luo, Huy Nguyen, and Fan Zhang all defend their dissertations! (commencement)
- January 2017: Member of LRDC delegation to NERCEL, Wuhan, China
- November 2016: Teams Corpus (multi-party and multi-modal dialogue entrainment) is now available for scientific purposes (download)
- Archived News
2018 Activities
- Program Co-Chair, 19th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL)
- Program Committee, Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Senior Member Track)
- Program Committee, 13th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (NAACL Workshop)
- Program Committee, 7th International Conference on Computational Models of Argument
- Organizing Committee, 5th Workshop on Argument Mining (at EMNLP)
- Scientific Committee, International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems Technology
- Program Committee, NAACL Student Research Workshop
- Advisory Committee, Young Researchers' Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems
Professor
