Michael Heilman, LTI
3rd  yr PIER-5th  yr LTI
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mheilman/
Advisor, Noah Smith
Michael spent four glorious years at the University of Notre Dame studying Computer Science and Japanese Language, in the end receiving Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Arts degrees in those two subjects, respectively.  As an undergraduate, he spent a semester in London.  He also spent two summers participating in intensive home-stay study-abroad programs for Japanese language.  While in Japan, in addition to practicing Japanese pretty much all the time, he also learned to cook.  In a class on psycholinguistics in his senior year, Michael met the love of his life Laura.  They were married July 2006.
         Michael then spent the next two years of his academic career in Pittsburgh earning a Master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University in Language Technologies—the discipline in which he is currently pursuing a doctoral degree.  He spent a substantial portion of that time working on the REAP tutoring system for English as a Second Language vocabulary.  He learned a great deal about intelligent tutoring systems and educational technology from colleagues in the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center.

His long-term research goal is to apply empirical methods for natural language processing to intelligent tutoring systems.  Slightly more generally, he hopes to create better education technologies by using language technologies.  Michael frequently deals with the challenge of integrating knowledge from various fields including computational linguistics, machine learning, software engineering, educational psychology, applied linguistics, second language pedagogy, and whatever else he finds useful for his research.  He is excited about further expanding and deepening his knowledge as a PIER student.