Industry Panel

July 16, 2024

The EDM industry track includes key members from various organizations leading the work on AI in education with a focus on LLM-augmented systems. The goal of the panel is to discuss opportunities and challenges with the increased usage of AI and LLMs in education. This discussion ranges from current implementations, current concerns/challenges with these implementations, broader challenges for educational contexts and predictions for the future.

Panelists

Bibi Groot

Head of Behavioral Science at Eedi

Dr. Bibi Groot is a Behavioral Scientist with a PhD in Behavioral Public Policy, specializing in the application of behavioral insights to education. At Eedi, they specialize in designing engaging and motivating learning experiences that drive meaningful behavior change. With experience leading experiments and conducting mixed-methods evaluations, Bibi brings a rigorous, data-driven approach to improving education through technology.

Diego Zapata-Rivera

Distinguished Presidential Appointee at ETS Research Institute

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.

Kristen DiCerbo

Chief Learning Officer at Khan Academy

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.

W. Lewis Johnson

President and CEO at Alelo Inc.

Dr. Lewis Johnson is President and CEO of Alelo, which develops AI-powered training technology for soft skills. He co-founded Alelo as a spinout of USC’s Information Sciences Institute. Dr. Johnson won DARPA’s Significant Technical Achievement Award and was co-winner of the 2017 Autonomous Agents Influential Paper Award. Team Alelo was a winner in the XPRIZE Rapid Reskilling Competition, and was runner-up in the International E-Learning Awards Competition. His current work centers on developing pedagogical agents that are powered by generative AI, making their behavior reliable and trustworthy, and using them for practice and assessment. He is also interested in tools for user authoring and customization of pedagogical agent models. Dr. Johnson is a past President of the International AI in Education Society. He graduated summa cum laude in Linguistics from Princeton University, and received a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence at Yale University.