Experience

Cognitive Scientist, Carnegie Learning

  • Created a plurality of the company’s current portfolio of Cognitive Tutors (artificially intelligent tutoring software), teaching ~10 million students in thousands of schools.
  • Led Cognitive Tutor implementations, including researching best teaching practices, designing user interfaces, creating cognitive models, integrating code, and creating hundreds of problems.
  • Rapidly created prototypes and led in-school testing.
  • Data mined to detect student pain points, then redesigned selected Cognitive Tutors to slash student errors and time on task by as much as an order of magnitude.
  • Refined the Bayesian network algorithm used by all Cognitive Tutors to track individual students’ knowledge on thousands of skills over millions of problem steps.
  • Made Cognitive Tutors ADA-compliant and coordinated translating them to Spanish.
  • First place in Carnegie Learning’s Hackathon, 2018.
  • Best Paper Award as co-author, Educational Data Mining, 2nd International Conference.

Research Associate, Learning Research & Development Center

Selected Projects:

  • DT Tutor: Created and evaluated the first decision-theoretic tutor. Selects optimal tutorial actions considering discourse state, task progress, and student knowledge, affect, & focus of attention.
  • Decision Systems Laboratory: Implemented the first algorithm to support decision network inference for the SMILE Bayesian reasoning engine used in both academia and business.
  • LISTEN. Created a prototype decision-theoretic tutoring engine for a Reading Tutor that uses automatic speech recognition and speech generation to teach children to read.

Senior Systems Analyst & VP, NationsBank

  • Regularly assumed first-line 24-hour responsibility for all issues affecting ATMs, online banking, telephone banking, and point-of-sale (POS) systems for the 4th largest bank in the country.
  • Key author of a funding proposal to handle all ATM, POS, online banking, and telephone banking in-house, prevailing over the bids of 3 major competitors in the electronic banking industry.
  • Led development for many applications, including one of the early online banking interfaces and the debit card interface with Visa.
  • Programmed numerous platforms from mainframes to ATM and POS systems.