CAP: Support for Young Researchers to attend the IITS Conference 2012

PI: Beverly Woolf
University of Massachusetts Amherst

The International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) provides a forum for interchange of ideas around the applications of computer science to education and human learning. Presentations at the conference focus on developments and rigorous research around the design and use of interactive and adaptive learning technologies for learners of all ages, for subject matters that span the school curriculum, and for professional applications in industry, the military, and medicine. The conferences promotes cross-fertilization of information and ideas from several cyberlearning related fields: artificial intelligence, cognitive science, education, learning sciences, human-computer interaction, educational technology, psychology, and STEM disciplines.

This project will support travel for advanced graduate students from US universities to attend the 11th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), to be held in Chania, Crete, in Greece, from June 15 to 18, 2012 (http://its2012.teicrete.gr). Those advanced graduate students will participate in the Young Research Track at the conference. That track is designed to provide young researchers with mentoring beyond what they get at their home institutions that will help them transition from graduate school to a fruitful research career. Young Researcher activities include structured poster sessions in which students present their work and one-on-one mentoring throughout the conference from a senior member of the ITS community who shares research interests with a young researcher and who comes from a different university and has a different approach than the young researcher experiences in his/her home institution. It is expected that conversations between peers and between mentors and mentees will continue throughout each young researcher’s career.

This activity supports the mission of NSF to train more advanced professionals in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. This conference is unique in its synthesis and cross-fertilization across three STEM capacities: building cutting-edge learning technologies, investigating pedagogical methods that are theoretically grounded in the cognitive, social, and learning sciences, and rigorously testing the learning environments for their effectiveness at promoting learning (in STEM disciplines and other disciplines) among K-12, college, and workplace populations.