Michael D. Wallis

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. Since 2002, I have been with Applied Research Associates, Inc., primarily focusing on XML-driven, object-oriented database systems.

Education

M.S., Computer Science (anticipated Spring 2010)
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.

Papers

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. To appear in Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED '09), Brighton, U.K., 2009.

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.

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.

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.