Biography

Beverly Park Woolf, Ph.D., Ed.D.,is a Research Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences, UMass-Amherst. She develops intelligent tutors that model a student’s affective and cognitive characteristics and combine an analysis of learning with artificial intelligence, network technology and multimedia. These tutors represent the knowledge taught, recognize learners’ skills and behavior, use sensors and machine learning to model student affect, and adapt problems and messages to an individual student’s needs. Dr. Woolf has developed tutors for education and industry and in a variety of disciplines (e.g., chemistry, psychology, physics, geology, art history, mathematics and economics). Some tutors enable students to pass standard exams at a 10-15% higher rate and one system is used by more than 150,000 students per semester across hundreds of colleges.  Dr. Woolf published the book Building Intelligent Interactive Tutorsalong with over 250 articles. She is lead author on the NSF report Roadmap to Education Technology in whichforty experts and visionaries identified the next big computing ideas for education technology and developed a vision of how technology can incorporate deeper knowledge about human cognition.  Dr. Woolf has delivered keynote addresses, panels and tutorials in more than 25 foreign countries and is a fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence.