Innovative Educational Computing Laboratory

6/04/2024 We are hiring two GRA (PhD students only) for Fall 2024.  See details here.

3/14/2024 Tasmia Shahriar has a paper accepted for AIED 2024

past news archive

As a special focused group at the Center for Educational Informatics, we are interested in building innovative advanced learning technologies.  Our technology innovation focuses on artificial intelligence such as new machine learning algorithms and new big data mining methods.  We are also interested in studying innovative applications of existing technologies. 

Our central mission is to advance a theory of advanced educational computing for practical and theoretical purposes: (1) To provide better learning and instructional opportunities for students and teachers, and (2) to advance theories of how people learn.  We conjecture that adaptive learning technologies, that are capable of building a model of individual students' competency and dynamically change their instructions based on students' needs, have a great potential to implement a next-generation learning. We also suppose that data showing students' activity logs, collected while students are using our innovation, provides us great potential to understand how people learn when data mining techniques are applied appropriately (aka Educational Data Mining).  We develop our innovation with evidence-based techniques through data analysis and often have the machine learn to perform better through its interaction with students (aka self-improving teaching machine). 

We apply human-centered research methods and iterative design-engineering techniques.  We start with understanding what students and teachers need.  We often conduct contextual inquiry and customer interviews to identify pain points.  Lessons learned from such customer research will give us insight into a design for the desired technology.  We develop prototypes that will be iteratively improved through multiple user tests.  For a summative evaluation, we conduct field studies to test our invention in the authentic learning settings, known as "in-vivo" study.   The field study provides us with legitimate knowledge and insights on how students learn with the proposed technology. 

We dream to change the world with technology innovation.  Everybody should have equal opportunity to receive a high-quality education and a need-based assistance.  We spend our entire professional career to make this dream come true.