Kurt Vanlehn
Professor of Computer Science and Engineering
Arizona State University
Phone: 480-727-6348 Email:
Biography/Research
Kurt VanLehn is a Professor in the School of Computing, Informatics and Decision Science Engineering at Arizona State University. He received a Ph. D. from MIT in 1983 in Computer Science, was a post-doc at BBN and Xerox PARC, joined the faculty of Carnegie-Mellon University in 1985, moved to the University of Pittsburgh in 1990 and joined ASU in 2008. He founded and co-directed two large NSF research centers (Circle; the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center). He has published over 125 peer-reviewed publications, is a fellow in the Cognitive Science Society, and is on the editorial boards of Cognition and Instruction, and the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education. Dr. VanLehn's research focuses on applications of artificial intelligence to education. Some of his projects are, starting from the most recent ones: LAITS, a system to help student learn by authoring intelligent tutoring systems; AMT, a meta-tutoring system combined with an affective learning companion; Why2-Atlas and Cordillera, two intelligent tutoring systems that pioneered the use of natural language dialogues for science teaching and have been shown to be just as effective as expert human tutors; Pyrenees, an intelligent tutoring system that successfully caused inter-domain transfer by implicitly teaching a meta-cognitive strategy; Andes, an intelligent tutoring system for a full year of college/high school physics that improves students grades by approximate a letter grade and is in daily use around the world; and Cascade, a highly accurate cognitive model of human students learning physics that accounts for the interaction of self-explanation and analogy.
Education
B. S. Mathematics, Stanford University, 1974
M. S. Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1978.
Ph. D. Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1983.
