General Information

I am currently a Masters student at NCSU working with Dr. James Lester in the IntelliMedia research group. I graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and then spent one year of post-baccalaureate study at Columbia University working with Professor Steven Feiner. I then accepted a position in North Carolina at Numerical Design Ltd. While there, I worked extensively in the fields of real-time and photo-realistic computer graphics. After ten years at NDL, I started my own computer graphics consulting firm (Mindworks Software, LLC) but after two years I returned to the more typical corporate world and accepted a position at Applied Research Associates in Raleigh. While at ARA, I have worked primarily in the field of Scientific Visualization.

Education

M.S. Computer Science (currently enrolled)
North Carolina State University

A.B. Computer Science (1990)
Harvard University

Research

My research interests are: computer graphics, computer animation, artificial intelligence/machine learning, computer-aided software engineering and spoken dialog systems. The first three of my interests cluster together in that I am interested in how AI techniques can be brought to bear on computer graphics and animation. The latter three also cluster together in that I am interested in how AI and Human Language Technology methods can be applied to make programming easier, more efficient and less error-prone.

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. To Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2010, 55-64. (Best Student Paper Award Nominee.)

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.  

Refereed 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.