Friday, April 11, 2008, Volen 101, 2:00-3.00 pm
Project LISTEN's automated Reading Tutor uses speech recognition to listen to children read aloud, and helps them learn to read. It provides spoken and graphical assistance based on reading research and expert practice, but adapted to the affordances and limitations of the technology. Successive versions of the Reading Tutor have been used at schools by hundreds of children in controlled comparisons to independent practice, classroom instruction, and human tutors.
The Reading Tutor is a unique distributed research platform. It conducts randomized controlled trials to test how different tutorial actions affect student learning. It has logged many thousands of tutoring sessions, including millions of read words. By mining this data, we are learning about how children learn to read, and how to help them.
Bio:
Jack Mostow is a Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Robotics, Machine Learning, Language Technologies, and Human-Computer Interaction, and serves on the Steering Committee for the doctoral Program in Interdisciplinary Educational Research. In 1992 he founded Project LISTEN (www.cs.cmu.edu/~listen) to develop an automated Reading Tutor that listens to children read aloud. Project LISTEN won the Outstanding Paper Award at the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence in August 1994, a United States patent in 1998, inclusion in the National Science Foundation's "Nifty Fifty" research projects in 2000, and the Allen Newell Medal of Research Excellence in 2003.
After earning his A.B. cum laude in Applied Mathematics at Harvard and his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon, Dr. Mostow held faculty positions at Stanford, University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, and Rutgers. He has served as an Editor of Machine Learning Journal and of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, as Program Co-chair of the 1998 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, and as invited keynote speaker at the 2004 meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. In 2007 he was elected to the Executive Committee of the International Society for Artificial Intelligence in Education.
Host: Jordan Pollack