Featured Research Projects
AI-assisted Co-design of Culturally Engaging Educational Materials
This project focuses on co-designing culturally sustaining educational materials that reflect students’ diverse backgrounds with community members. It explores using generative AI to support teachers and families to efficiently develop these tailored materials, blending AI’s generative capabilities with their cultural assests to produce inclusive, high-quality content for diverse classrooms and families.
Bilingual Conversational Agents for Parent-Child Shared Reading
In collaboration with the Sesame Workshop, we developed a bilingual conversational agent embodied in the Sesame Street character, Rosita, along with a shared reading interface. Unlike most existing conversational agents that only supports one-to-one dialogue with individual children, our conversational agent, Rosita, not only engages children in back-and-forth conversations about the story plots but also facilitates parental involvement by providing discussion prompts that connect the story to children’s lived experience.
Children’s Learning and Engagement with Conversational Agents
This project is part of a larger study on using conversational AI to suppport children’s science learning. We partnered with PBS KIDS to develop interactive science video programs in which the main character, powered by artificial intelligence, engaged children in conversations by asking them questions and providing responsive feedback. As part of the study, I analyzed children’s verbal engagement with the conversational agent, including the relevance, accuracy, response rate, and response latency of their responses to the agent’s questions and how it was related to children’s science learning.
