Postdoc in Dynamic Enhancement & Personalization of Educational Technology: National University of Singapore

Multiple postdoctoral positions are immediately available for a broad range of educational research that designs interventions and experiments to dynamically enhance and personalize real-world educational technologies, from K12 to university courses and MOOCs. The postdoc can set the agenda for research questions, as the focus on dynamic experiments in technology is amenable to candidates with backgrounds in any of the following: human-computer interaction, psychology, education, applied reinforcement learning and natural language processing.
The postdoc will be based at the National University of Singapore's Institute for the Application of Learning Sciences and Educational Technology (ALSET) and the School of Computing, working with Joseph Jay Williams and Min Yen Kan. ALSET provides unique access to data about university students, and opportunities to run large-scale personalized interventions on-campus and in MOOCs. There will be opportunities to work with and visit close collaborators at other universities (Carnegie Mellon, as well as Harvard University and KAIST).
The postdoc will play a key role in which projects are pursued, but illustrative examples of potential research directions are:
> A human-computer interaction focus on developing systems for crowdsourcing the design of online math problems, and discovering how to personalize delivery of problems to university students. Example Publication venues: CHI, IUI, HCOMP, ACM Learning at Scale.
> A data mining and applied machine learning focus on methods for dynamically enhancing and personalizing instruction, especially from the perspective of techniques from multi-armed bandits/reinforcement learning, Bayesian optimization, applied deep learning research in natural language processing. Publication venues: EDM, AIED, ACM Learning at Scale, ACL, EMNLP, KDD, WWW, ICML, IJCAI, AAAI.
> A cognitive or social psychology focus on investigating why and when prompting students to explain text/video lectures promotes learning, and how generating explanations interacts with prior knowledge, teaching metacognitive skills and self-regulated learning of study behaviors, social-psychological interventions for enhancing motivation such as Growth Mindset and Wise Feedback. Publication venues: Psychological Science, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Cognitive Science.
> An education focus on investigating effective instructional principles for different subgroups of learners, developing technology that discovers how to tailor and personalize motivational interventions. Publication venues: LAK, CSCL/ICLS, AERA, Instructional Science, Journal of Educational Psychology, Computers & Human Behavior.
Application Instructions
To apply for the position, please email Joseph Jay Williams (williams-AT-comp.nus.edu.sg) and Min Yen Kan (kanmy-AT-comp.nus.edu.sg) with the subject line "Postdoc in Dynamically Enhancing & Personalizing Educational Technology" and your name, with the following as attachments:
(1) Curriculum Vitae (Complete).
(2) Names and contact information of 3 references who are familiar with your research. We will follow up with your references to secure their recommendation letters on your behalf.
In your email application, please include a brief explanation of your research interests and how they fit with this position (in lieu of a formal cover letter). Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis until the position is filled.