Industry Panel

Dr. Diego Zapata-Rivera is a Distinguished Presidential Appointee at ETS in Princeton, NJ. He earned a Ph.D. in computer science (with a focus on artificial intelligence in education) from the University of Saskatchewan in 2003. His research at ETS has focused on the areas of innovations in communicating assessment results to various audiences and technology-enhanced assessment including work on personalized learning and assessment environments, conversation-based assessment, caring assessment, and game-based assessment.  His research interests also include Bayesian student modeling, open student models, conversation-based tasks, virtual environments, authoring tools, and program evaluation. Zapata-Rivera has produced more than 150 publications including edited volumes, journal articles, book chapters, and technical papers. Dr. Zapata-Rivera was elected as a member of the International AI in Education Society Executive Committee (2022-2027). He is a Co-PI and research co-director of the NSF AI Institute – the INVITE institute (invite.illinois.edu). He is a member of the Editorial Board of User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, Associate Editor for IJAIED, AI for Human Learning and Behavior Change, and former Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies Journal. He is a 2024 IEEE Education Society Distinguished Lecturer. Dr. Zapata-Rivera has been invited to contribute his expertise to projects sponsored by the National Research Council, the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Education Sciences, AERDF, NASA and the US Army Research Laboratory.

Dr. Kristen DiCerbo is the Chief Learning Officer at Khan Academy, a nonprofit dedicated to providing a free world class education to anyone, anywhere. In this role, she is responsible for the research-based teaching and learning strategy for Khan Academy’s offerings. She leads the content, design, product management, and community support teams. Dr. DiCerbo’s work has consistently been focused on embedding what we know from education research about how people learn into digital learning experiences. Prior to her role at Khan Academy, she was Vice-President of Learning Research and Design at Pearson, served as a research scientist supporting the Cisco Networking Academies, and worked as a school psychologist in an Arizona school district. Kristen received her Bachelor’s Degree from Hamilton College and Master’s Degree and Ph.D. in Educational Psychology at Arizona State University.