Background and training. Computer scientist and linguist.
Research and teaching interests. Natural language processing and computer-assisted learning, driven by and applied to literacy and new literacies. I have a particular interest in computer-assisted learning embedded in authentic contexts such as school or work, and especially in human-computer spoken dialogue to support learning in those contexts. Besides teaching in my research areas, I have an interest in curriculum design, especially in the areas of computer literacy, computational thinking, and research methods.
Research projects and software systems. Specific research projects have ranged from automated tutoring for reading (at Carnegie Mellon) to emotions in learning (at MIT) to spoken dialogue systems (at Rochester) to training systems for astronauts and fighter pilots (at NASA Ames and the Air Force Research Laboratory respectively) to new media and virtual reality (at Arizona State).
My connections to Carnegie Mellon. I completed my Ph.D. in 2000 in Language and Information Technologies and am also currently visting faculty at the Language Technologies Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon.
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