Visiting Brazilian PhD student, Bruno Rosa, to join AI education collaboration in CIS

We are delighted to welcome visiting PhD student, Bruno Rosa from CESAR School in Brazil who will be working in the field of AI in education with Eduardo de Oliveira in CIS and his distinguished international collaborators, Professor Rafael Ferreira Mello from Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco, and Professor Hilario Thomaz from the Instituto Federal do Espírito Santo.

Bruno’s research focuses on automated scoring of cohesion in essays using item response theory (IRT). Cohesion is key in establishing meaning in writing, and automated scoring of this aspect represents a significant challenge in educational AI. While current machine learning algorithms don’t typically consider individual characteristics of texts, IRT can help by introducing new ways to model factors like ability, difficulty, and discrimination. 

During Bruno’s stay, Eduardo and his Brazilian-based colleagues will be diving deeper into how IRT can be used to adjust machine learning models’ predictions for more accurate cohesion scoring. The team are excited to explore these ideas and to share their findings soon. Bruno brings extensive professional experience, including managing public education in Rio de Janeiro, where he led IT projects impacting over 1,200 schools and 700,000 students. You can learn more about his current research here:  https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-64312-5_48