Zhongkai Shangguan, Ph.D. candidate

Bio: Zhongkai Shangguan, Ph.D. candidate, specializes in computer vision, natural language processing, data mining, and reinforcement learning. His research interests are generally in machine learning for assistive technology, focusing on developing personalized AI-driven technologies to enhance accessibility and processes for individuals, especially those with disabilities.

Project Title: Promoting Educational Agency with Reinforcement Learning from Student Feedback

Project Summary: Toward the overarching goal of developing an interactive AI tutor that provides adaptive instructional support to meet specific students’ needs and facilitate active engagement, the project will construct a suitable benchmark and baseline for Reinforcement Learning from Student Feedback (RLSF) for the research community. Shangguan will tailor open-source audio-visual-language models for speech and video input and build an instructional-based interactive agent. Through iterative optimization based on student feedback, this agent will adeptly recognize and adjust to diverse educational settings and requirements. Shangguan will benchmark state-of-the-art RLSF methods and release open-source tools and models for characterizing model adaptation performance, first for reading literacy, and subsequently for additional educational contexts.

Research Mentorship Team:

Eshed Ohn-Bar, Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Boston University College of Engineering

Jessica Markham-Anderson, Ph.D. Student, Education Studies, Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development

Hank Fien, Nancy H. Roberts Professor of Educational Innovation, Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development

Nivi Obla, Program Manager, AI, Meta’s Open Innovation AI Research Community

Joshua Peterson, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences, Boston University 

Kate Saenko, Professor of Computer Science, and Founder and Co-Director of Artificial Intelligence Research (AIR) lab at Boston University Hariri Institute for Computing