Brusilovsky wins Army Contract to develop social personalized learning architecture

05/01/2013

Peter Brusilovsky, Professor at the iSchool, has been awarded a contract by the United States Army Contracting Command to participate in the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative. Brusilovsky’ s contract, for $623,005 over a three-year period, will support his work on the architecture, algorithms, and interfaces for a Personal Assistant for Learning (PAL), one of the major endeavors undertaken by the ADL Initiative. Through a PAL, the Initiative will provide state of the art education and training -- using technology and innovative learning methodologies -- for workforce members in the Department of Defense and the federal government. Specifically, Brusilovsky will explore the benefits of open social learner modeling and adaptive navigation support to PAL users; he will then develop the infrastructure and algorithms necessary to implement social personalized learning over multiple domains as part of the ADL. This project leverages Brusilovsky’s vast experience in adaptive navigation, personalized learning, e-learning, and visualization tools and interfaces.

Introduced in 1999, the ADL Initiative is part of the Department of Defense (DoD) Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (Readiness). Its mission is to employ learning and information technologies to standardize and enhance learning and training in the government. The ADL’s goals are to identify and recommend training software and educational services standards, foster development of technical training standards, and develop guidelines for the development, implementation and assessment of learning systems.

Brusilovsky’s work on the PAL educational interfaces, intelligent guidance algorithms, and architectural solutions will be based on his prior work on adaptive navigation support for e-learning including design and development of domain-independent tools and architectures. He has developed InterBook, a tool for building adaptive e-books; QuizGuide, a collection of interactive self-assessment questions in C Programming; and Progressor, an interface to provide efficient access to educational content supported by a combination of social visualization and open student modeling.

Brusilovsky has earned an outstanding international reputation for his work in the areas of adaptive Web-based systems, adaptive hypermedia, intelligent tutoring systems, human-computer interaction, and adaptive interfaces. Here at the iSchool, he has led the development of two significant research and educational efforts: the Personalized Adaptive Web Systems (PAWS) Lab and the Teaching and Learning Research Lab (TALER).

In 2012, Brusilovsky was the recipient of a Google Research Award for his project on "Personalized Social Systems for Local Communities," to support efforts to increase user participation in social systems designed for local communities. In 2005, he won the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his work on “Personalized Access to Open Corpus Educational Resources through Adaptive Navigation Support and Adaptive Visualization.” He was a recipient of the E.T.S. Walton Visitor Award sponsored by the Science Foundation Ireland as well as several fellowships including the James S. McDonnell Fellowship (US), the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (Germany), and the Royal Society Ex-Quota Fellowship (UK).

Brusilovsky is Professor and Chair of the Graduate Information Science and Technology Program at the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences.