Yuan earns prestigious award
April 7, 2010
“Explanation, Decision Making and Learning in Graphical Models” is the research project that may help distance-learning students improve comprehension and enhance interactive learning while taking online classes.
Changhe Yuan, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering, has been awarded one of the highly competitive National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER grants. The five-year $455,233 funding will enable Yuan to develop fundamental algorithms to help educational and interactive designers develop online knowledge systems that promote student learning.
“The distance educator has few, if any, visual cues from their online students that reveal who is attentively taking notes, pondering a difficult concept, or is frustrated and confused,” explained Yuan. “We hope to develop more intelligent online educational systems that automatically monitor and promote student learning.”
The project is expected to significantly improve approaches within reasoning and decision making disciplines. This has the potential to provide professionals who evaluate problematic risks in the areas of medicine, computer security, and supply-chain planning with clearer choices.
For instance, another application may help American doctors solve medical cases that no one else can. Yuan’s work may help doctors automatically generate hypothesis and diagnosis for diseases that have many variables and matching symptoms.
“When doctors are uncertain about a diagnosis for an ill patient because the symptoms mimic many diseases, we hope to help the medical profession recognize, reason and make quicker decisions by using computerized graphical models that incorporate new and improved algorithms,” explained Yuan.
Yuan, a native of Ghanzhou, a Jiangxi Province of China, received his master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of Pittsburgh. He joined the Bagley College of Engineering’s computer science and engineering team in 2006.
“Thousands of good research proposals are submitted to the National Science Foundation each year and only a small percentage of young professors’ research projects are selected for funding,” said Sarah Rajala, dean of the Bagley College of Engineering. “We are extremely proud of Dr. Yuan’s accomplishments. His technical excellence and creativity are examples of the many characteristics we look for when inviting faculty to join the college.”
The NSF Web site states that the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization. Such activities should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education.