Research Interest

I am an associate professor of computer science and the director of the Innovative Educational Computing Laboratory at North Carolina State University. I am also an affiliate of the Center for Educational Informatics and a member of the Digital Transformation of Education cluster at the NCSU Chancellor's Faculty Excellence Program.

My primary research focus is on the technology innovation and integration to advance the sciences of computing and human/machine learning.

To make a breakthrough innovation, I value mathematics principles behind the machine learning technologies and AI in general. I am interested in understanding the underlying computation to realize desired technologies to improve the future of education. On that account, I am an AI tech-engineer to build transformative educational technologies.

I am interested in innovating cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies for students to learn, teachers to teach, and researchers to understand how people learn (and, more importantly, fail to learn!). I study the transformative theory of learning and teaching to understand how people learn and how people should be taught. I am therefore a computer scientist acting as a learning scientist working on the empirical data collected from field studies conducted with the learning technologies that I invent. I also recognize myself as a lifelong practitioner to improve education.

My scholarly expertise thus spans computer science, learning science, cognitive science, and education. Follow this link for an extended research statement (PDF)

Projects

See our lab page for full descriptions of current and past projects: The Innovative Educational Computing Lab