July 2024: Team won the 2024 Learning Engineering Tools Competition
July 2024: Student Alex won Best Student Paper Award at AIED 2024
April 2024: Awarded a $90M NSF Mid-scale Research Infrastructure-2 (MSRI-2) grant for SafeInsights—the first MSRI-2 project for the NSF EDU Directorate
November 2023: Selected as the LLM Methodology Hub in the Learning Engineering Virtual Institute (LEVI) Program, supported by Schmidt Futures
September 2023: Grand prize winner in the NAEP Math Automated Scoring Challenge
Background
Associate Professor at the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Research focuses on AI, especially NLP, for scalable and effective personalized learning in education
Research areas include learner modeling, personalization, content generation, and human-in-the-loop AI
Vision: build ML systems enabling every learner to access high-quality, affordable, and personalized education
Also interested in convex/nonconvex optimization, Bayesian inference, deep learning, and the future of work
Co-organized a series of workshops on machine learning for education (ml4ed)