General Information

I am currently a Masters student in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University, working with Dr. James Lester in the IntelliMedia research group. My thesis work will focus on intelligent tutorial dialogue systems.

Being originally from Fayetteville, North Carolina, I migrated to the Raleigh area in 1997, in order to attend NCSU for my undergraduate degree in Computer Science. During this time, I provided tutorial instruction for students in introductory C++ courses. Since graduating, I have been actively pursing a Masters degree on a part-time basis (due to working full time).

As for my industry experience, in August 2000, I accepted a position at Stingray Software, a division of Roguewave software, where I developed a variety of Windows-based developer tools. From 2001 through mid-2002, I moved into a web-based systems environment at Peopleclick, where I quickly gained exposure to large-scale database management systems. From July 2002 to July 2010, I was with Applied Research Associates, Inc., primarily focusing on XML-driven, object-oriented database systems. Following this, I was employed with Cyberspace Solutions LLC, working as a contractor out of the Fort Bragg, NC area. In December 2010 and up to current day, I have been working with Northrop Grumman in their Information Systems division.

Education

M.S., Computer Science (anticipated Fall 2011)
North Carolina State University

B.S., Computer Science (2002)
North Carolina State University

Research

My research interests include database systems, artificial intelligence, particularly the areas of machine learning and natural language processing, and knowledge representation and reasoning (includes operating under uncertainty and temporal constraints). Of these areas, I have a strong interest in data mining and information extraction.

Journal Articles

Investigating the Role of Motivation in Computer Science Education through One-on-One Tutoring. Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, Robert Phillips, Michael D. Wallis, Mladen A. Vouk, and James C. Lester. In Computer Science Education, Vol. 19 No. 2, 2009, 111-136.

Conference Papers

Dialogue Act Modeling in a Complex Task-Oriented Domain. Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, Eun Young Ha, Robert Phillips, Michael D. Wallis, Mladen A. Vouk and James C. Lester. To appear in Proceedings of the 11th Annual SIGDIAL Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, Tokyo, Japan, 2010.

Characterizing the Effectiveness of Tutorial Dialogue with Hidden Markov Models. Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, Robert Phillips, Amy Ingram, Eun Young Ha, Michael D. Wallis, Mladen A. Vouk, and James C. Lester. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2010, 55-64.

A Preliminary Investigation of Hierarchical Hidden Markov Models for Tutorial Planning. Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, Robert Phillips, Eun Young Ha, Michael D. Wallis, Mladen A. Vouk and James C. Lester. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Educational Data Mining, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2010, 285-286.

Principles of Asking Effective Questions to Improve Student Problem Solving. Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, William Lahti, Robert Phillips, Michael D. Wallis, Mladen A. Vouk, and James C. Lester. In Proceedings of the 41st SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '10), Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2010, 460-464.

Discovering Tutorial Dialogue Strategies with Hidden Markov Models. Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, Eun Young Ha, Michael D. Wallis, Robert Phillips, Mladen A. Vouk, and James C. Lester. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED '09), Brighton, U.K., 2009, 141-148.

Modeling Dialogue Structure with Adjacency Pair Analysis and Hidden Markov Models. Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, Robert Phillips, Eun Young Ha, Michael D. Wallis, Mladen A. Vouk, and James C. Lester. In Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies Conference (NAACL HLT) Companion Volume, Boulder, Colorado, 2009, 49-52.

The Impact of Instructor Initiative on Student Learning: A Tutoring Study. Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, Robert Phillips, Michael D. Wallis, Mladen A. Vouk, and James C. Lester. In Proceedings of the 40th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '09), Chattanooga, Tennessee, 2009, 14-18.

Balancing Cognitive and Motivational Scaffolding in Tutorial Dialogue. Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, Robert Phillips, Michael Wallis, Mladen Vouk, and James Lester. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS '08), Montreal, Canada, 2008, 239-249.

Symposium and Workshop Papers

Leveraging Hidden Dialogue State to Select Tutorial Moves. Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, Robert Phillips, Eun Young Ha, Michael D. Wallis, Mladen A. Vouk, James C. Lester. In Proceedings of the Fifth NAACL HLT Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, Los Angeles, California, 2010, 66-73.

An Empirically Derived Question Taxonomy for Task-Oriented Tutorial Dialogue. Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, William J. Lahti, Robert Phillips, Michael D. Wallis, Mladen A. Vouk, James C. Lester. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Question Generation, Brighton, U.K., 2009, 9-16.

Inferring Tutorial Dialogue Structure with Hidden Markov Modeling. Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, Eun Young Ha, Robert Phillips, Michael D. Wallis, Mladen A. Vouk, James C. Lester. In Proceedings of the Fourth NAACL HLT Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (EducationNLP), Boulder, Colorado, 2009, 19-26.

Learner Characteristics and Feedback in Tutorial Dialogue. Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, Robert Phillips, Michael D. Wallis, Mladen A. Vouk, and James C. Lester. In Proceedings of the Third ACL Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, Columbus, Ohio, 2008, 53-61.

Projects

I have taken part in the JavaTutor project by providing develompent and logistical support.

I served as a student mentory for the STARS Alliance, a National Science Foundation Alliance for Broadening Participation in Computing.