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Panel discussion on minimizing bias in machine learning in education
Neil Heffernan · Osonde A. Osoba · Emma Brunskill · Kathi Fisler

Fri Dec 11 01:00 PM -- 02:00 PM (PST) @
in Advances and Opportunities: Machine Learning for Education »

Moderator: Neil Heffernan, William Smith Dean's Professor of Computer Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Co-Founder of ASSISTments

Panelists: Osonde Osoba, Senior Information Scientist, RAND Corporation Emma Brunskill, Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department, Stanford University Kathi Fisler, Research Professor, Brown University

Author Information

Neil Heffernan (Worcester Polytechnic Institute)

Dr. Neil Heffernan Biography Dr. Heffernan is a Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Learning Sciences and Technologies program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Before entering academia, Neil taught middle school math and science in the Teach for America program in Baltimore, where he met his wife Cristina. While completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Neil incorporated his passion for education and focused on educational technologies. In 1997, Neil had a seizure and was told he had brain cancer and two years to live. This traumatic event helped Neil and Cristina learn what was important to them: making the world a better place. helped motivate Dr. Heffernan to make this platform a free public service. Neil and Cristina created the ASSISTments platform as a free service that is used by 50,000 across the United States for daily classwork and nightly homework. In October, 2016 Dr. Heffernan was asked to present at the White House on the reproducibility crisis in educational research and the need for pre-registration and open-data. In December 2016, the Heffernans presented at the White House for a second time on the SRI evaluation that found ASSISTments doubled student learning). He has received national press from U.S. News, Scientific American, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and NPR. Dr. Heffernan has written 60+ papers on learning analytics and over two dozen papers on the results of randomized controlled trials.

Osonde A. Osoba (RAND Corporation)
Emma Brunskill (Stanford University)
Kathi Fisler (Brown University)

I'm a Research Professor and Associate Director of the Computer Science Undergraduate Program at Brown. I'm also co-director of Bootstrap, a national-scale outreach program specializing in integrating computing into existing subjects (such as math, social studies, and science) in grades 5-12. My research focuses on computing education, including cognitive aspects of learning to design programs, the influence of programming language features on learning in computing, and teacher professional-development in interdisciplinary contexts.

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