Carnegie Mellon University
April 24, 2019

Ken Koedinger Among Four to Receive Google Faculty Research Awards in HCI

Four faculty members from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute have received 2018 Google Faculty Research Awards.

Google seeks to identify and strengthen long-term collaborative relationships with world-class computer science faculty researchers in areas of mutual interest. The goal of these collaborations is to impact how future generations use technology.

Ken Koedinger, CMNI affiliate, is one of this year's receipients for his project, “Scaling Expertise Transfer: Teachers create intelligent tutors by tutoring”

How can it be easier for experts in some domain to help others to become experts? Koedinger proposes a method for scaling this expertise transfer.

“The idea is that one expert tutors a computer in the domain and then that computer can tutor an unlimited number of students. Our prior research and development has demonstrated the core functionality needed to acquire (and teach) symbolic expertise within domains of math, science, and language. Two major R&D goals are to develop a tablet-based application that is natural and easy enough for non-programmer experts to tutor the computer and to extend our machine methods to learning diagrammatic skills, as in geometry. We propose to pursue these ambitious goals by developing a demonstration system, SmartSheet, whereby teachers can easily build electronic math worksheets that provide students with adaptive tutoring support on their homework or in class activities. To create this tutoring support, teachers need only engage in a bit more effort than writing problems on a tablet and way less effort than they usually spend on grading.”

First year Ph.D. student Danny Weitekamp will be collaborating with Koedinger on this work.

Read more