Recent activities

• In fall 2023, developed a Wordle-inspired game for teaching Intro Psych concepts, with Britt and Noel from NIU. Extending it in Winter 2024 with Warren.
• My student, Keith Cochran and I presented paper, "Improving Automated Evaluation of Student Text Responses using GPT-3.5 for Text Data Augmentation," at Artificial Intelligence in Education, 2023 in Tokyo. It was nominated for the Best Paper Award.
• My student, Daneih and I presented the poster, "Emotionally Adaptive Intelligent Tutoring System to Reduce Foreign Language Anxiety," at Artificial Intelligence in Education, 2023 in Tokyo. It was nominated for the Best Poster Award.
• Published the article, "Using BERT to Identify Causal Structure in Students' Explanatory Explanations" in the International Journal for Artificial Intelligence in Education
• Published article, "Improving Automated Evaluation of Formative Assessments with Text Data Augmentation," Cochran, Cohn, Hutchins, Biswas, and Hastings, in AIED 2022, at University of Durham, England.
• Gave invited talk at AI and Adaptive Education Conference in Beijing, May 2019.
• Awarded CDM summer faculty research grant for FakeNews game.
• Sabbatical, Fall 2018, Winter 2019! Working on computational neuroscience modeling (with Rachelle Jacobs), deep learning for tracking animal movements (with Doug Wallace, NIU), intelligent tutoring for source evaluation with Jean-François Rouet (U. Poitiers, France) and M.A.Britt (NIU).
• Published chapter: "Computational analysis of explanatory essay structure" in Multi-Disciplinary Approaches to Deep Learning
• Published chapter: "Computer-based assessment of essays based on multiple documents" in Handbook of Multiple Source Use
• Presented paper: "Active Learning for Improving Machine Learning of Student Explanatory Essays" at AIED 2018 in London.
• Attended the NSF-sponsored workshop: Experiments and Models for Teaching Undergraduate Neuroscience at the University of Missouri in July, 2017.
• Developed and taught Computational Neuroscience class, Winter 2018.
• Helped develop the new Bachelors degree in Neuroscience at DePaul.
• Gave an invited talk on "Identifying causal structure in student essays" at Valtech, and at the DePaul CDM Research Colloquium.
• At the Intelligent Tutoring Systems conference in Zagreb, Croatia, presented the paper, "Stratified learning for reducing training set size", exploring one way to improve a machine learning approach to identifying structure in student causal essays.
• Received a DePaul Quality of Instruction Council Collaborative Instruction grant to develop the Introduction to Computational Neuroscience course along with Eric Norstrom from Biology, and Sandra Virtue from Psychology.
• Taught Foundations of HCI and Learner-Centered Design in Spring 2016.
• Served as a Senior Program Committee for Intelligent Tutoring Systems 2016.
• Invitee to the 2015 Neuromorphic Natural Language Processing workshop in Telluride.