A team from Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence(MBZUAI) receives a Google Academic Research Award to further research educational foundation models and dialogue-based intelligent tutoring systems. The award was granted to Dr. Ekaterina Kochmar, assistant professor of natural language processing, and Kaushal Kumar Maurya, postdoctoral researcher in the disciplines of NLP and large language models for education. This funding will support their continuing work on these ground-breaking themes.
Kochmar and Maurya were the only team from the Middle East honored in the inaugural Google Academic Research Awards and were recognized in the category 'making education equitable, accessible and effective using AI'.
Their research project, titled “2σ-ITS: A Pedagogical Intelligent Tutoring System Grounded in Learning Science Principles”, focuses on developing educational foundation models and building a new generation of dialogue-based intelligent tutoring systems that are powered by generative AI to assist students across a range of subjects, including STEM and language learning.
“It is a true honor to receive this award, and we are grateful to Google Academic Research Awards for supporting our work in this field”, said Kochmar. “Our project’s aim is to ensure that students around the world can use NLP-driven technology to access education and help tutors reach students, who may be unable to access mainstream education services. We are excited to develop advanced AI solutions with the potential to improve people’s lives, and we appreciate this recognition from Google to support our endeavors".
“Modern technologies like state-of-the-art AI models and LLMs already exhibit impressive capabilities, so it’s time to look into how they can be used for impactful applications. I would like to see this being used in real life, to the benefit of the educational system at large, but specifically the teachers and students: helping them learn better, faster, more efficiently and more effectively”, she added.
Kochmar and Maurya emphasized that their system is designed to help teachers, not replace them, giving the example of a busy classroom.
“If you don’t have time to address everybody in the class, you can provide students with a personalized tablet that adapts to their needs. It knows what they know and don’t know and explains the learning in a way that is specific to them”, explained Kochmar. “In this scenario, the final goal for all students to gain the same expertise, but the way each person gets there may be different. That’s where the system would help”.
“Much like calculators and computers in the past, we see such tutoring systems becoming an embedded part of the educational system not replacing human teachers, but assisting them”, said Maurya.
The Google Academic Research Awards offers research and collaboration by providing resources to researchers, which helps to eventually conduct impact-driven research with real-life applications. The six themes covered by the 2024 awards included developing machine learning benchmarks for climate-related challenges, the use of AI to make education more equitable, accessible, and effective, advancements in quantum transduction and networking for scalable computing, application of Gemini and Google's open model family to systems and infrastructure issues, society-centered AI, and trust and safety in AI systems.
