Diane Litman

Scholar in residence February-August 2022

Diane Litman is a Professor of Computer Science, Senior Scientist with the Learning Research and Development Center, and Past (Co-)Director of the Graduate Program in Intelligent Systems, all at the University of Pittsburgh. Her interdisciplinary research spans multiple areas of Artificial Intelligence, with a current focus on enhancing the effectiveness of educational technology through the use of spoken and natural language processing techniques such as multi-party dialogue systems, argument mining, and summarization. Emerging research directions include social robotics and issues of fairness in educational technologies.

She is a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics as well as a Senior Member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.  She was twice elected Chair of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, is currently an elected member of the Executive Committee of the International Society for Artificial Intelligence in Education and is currently an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education. Her research has resulted in multiple papers winning best paper awards and has led to the development of deployed educational technologies including the eRevise automated writing evaluation system for upper elementary students, and the CourseMirror student reflection mobile app for university students.

Advances in spoken dialogue systems (SDS) and educational technology, as well as the availability of increasing amounts of educationally-relevant dialogue data and increasing calls for the application of AI for social good, have led to an interest in using SDS to address the needs of teachers and students.

Litman’s will join forces with Professor Joakim Gustafson and Gabriel Skantze to examine how the use of a physical social robot rather than an SDS might improve the ways in which students interact both with a computer system and with each other, and ultimately to improve their learning.

Contact: dlitman@pitt.edu