Ilya M. Goldin

I'm a PhD candidate in the Intelligent Systems Program at Pitt, working with my advisor Kevin Ashley at the Learning Research & Development Center. My dissertation examines how students learn when they give feedback to each other in peer review. This project, "A Peer-Review-Based Student Model for Ill-Defined Problem-solving", has won support [PDF, see p. 12] from the Provost's Advisory Council on Instructional Excellence.

Since 2006, I've also worked as a researcher at JustSystems Evans Research (formerly Clairvoyance Corp.), a CMU spin-off.

Visit me on LinkedIn.

Say 'hi' to my Mom! She is a piano teacher in Germantown, MD.

In my dissertation, I seek to build a student model that can be used by an intelligent tutoring system aimed at students analyzing cases. Existing intelligent tutoring systems address well-defined problem-solving, such as in arithmetic and geometry, but not written case analysis, such as in law or ethics. My approach is to shift the learning process from the one-on-one paradigm used in intelligent tutoring systems to a many-to-many paradigm, such as in peer review. This shift not only affords a computational model; it also allows us to evaluate learning from peer reviewing, which has not been studied widely before. This research builds on ideas from ill-defined domains and computer-supported collaborative learning.

Previously, I collaborated with Kevin Ashley and Rosa Pinkus on an assessment of an evaluation tool for case analysis in bioengineering ethics. Engineers, and bioengineers in particular, must know how to address ethical problems that arise in their work, and must therefore be trained in ethics case analysis. Assessment of learning outcomes in this context must be flexible enough to allow for the wide variety of ways in which students can frame the cases they analyze. I led the evaluation of an assessment tool that addresses this need, partially supported by the National Science Foundation (award #0203307).

Before that, I worked on PETE, the Professional Ethics Tutoring Environment. PETE is a web application aimed at helping bioengineering students practice ethics case analysis. When it was developed, PETE was unique among software for ethics pedagogy thanks to its combination of features:

• availability over the Web
• focus on a formal method of ethics case analysis
• allowing students to compare their work to the work of their peers

Due to technical reasons, PETE is no longer available online. NSF also funded this research (award #9720341).

Goldin, Ilya M., Rosa L. Pinkus, Kevin D. Ashley. (under review) "Validity and Reliability of an Instrument for Assessing Case Analyses in Bioengineering Ethics Education". [PDF available by request before publication]

Goldin, Ilya M., Kevin D. Ashley, Rosa L. Pinkus. (2006) "Assessing Case Analyses in Bioengineering Ethics Education: Reliability and Training." Proceedings of the International Conference on Engineering Education. San Juan, Puerto Rico. [PDF]

Goldin, Ilya M., Kevin D. Ashley, Rosa L. Pinkus. (2006) "Teaching Case Analysis through Framing: Prospects for an ITS in an ill-defined domain." Proceedings of the Workshop on Intelligent Tutoring Systems for Ill-Defined Domains, 8th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Jhongli, Taiwan. [PDF]

Goldin, Ilya M., Wendy W. Chapman. "Learning to Detect Negation with 'Not' in Medical Texts." Proceedings of the Workshop on Text Analysis and Search for Bioinformatics at the 26th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference (SIGIR-2003). Eds. Eric Brown, William Hersh and Alfonso Valencia. [PDF]

Goldin, Ilya M., Kevin D. Ashley, Rosa L. Pinkus. "Introducing PETE: Computer Support for Teaching Ethics." Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence & Law (ICAIL-2001). Eds. Henry Prakken and Ronald P. Loui. Association of Computing Machinery, New York. ©Copyright 2001 by ACM, Inc. [PDF]

Evans, David A.; Bennett, Jeffrey; Hull, David; Cheng, Hua; Qu, Yan; Tenny, Carol; Montgomery, Jesse; Goldin, Ilya. "Method and Apparatus for Anchoring Expressions Based on an Ontological Model of Semantic Information." U.S. Patent Application 20080294426

Hull, David; Evans, David A.; Bennett, Jeffrey; Cheng, Hua; Qu, Yan; Tenny, Carol; Montgomery, Jesse; Goldin, Ilya. "Method and Apparatus for Performing Semantic Update and Replace Operations." U.S. Patent Application 20080294425

Evans, David A.; Bennett, Jeffrey; Hull, David; Cheng, Hua; Qu, Yan; Tenny, Carol; Montgomery, Jesse; Goldin, Ilya. "Method and Apparatus for Performing Semantically Informed Text Operations." U.S. Patent Application 20080295013

Cheng, Hua; Evans, David A.; Bennett, Jeffrey; Hull, David; Qu, Yan; Tenny, Carol; Montgomery, Jesse; Goldin, Ilya. "Method and Apparatus for Performing a Semantically Informed Merge Operation." U.S. Patent Application 20080294427

Qu, Yan; Evans, David A.; Goldin, Ilya. "Method and Apparatus for the Automated Construction of Models of Activities from Textual Descriptions of the Activities." U.S. Patent Application 20080294398

"A Peer Review-Based Student Model for Ill-Defined Problem-Solving". Provost's Advisory Council on Instructional Excellence, 2009

"Assessing Case Analyses in Bioengineering Ethics". Outstanding Paper Presentation Award, University of Pittsburgh Grad Expo 2006.

"Introducing PETE: Computer Support for Teaching Ethics". Outstanding Paper Presentation Award, University of Pittsburgh Grad Expo 2001.

Faculty of Arts and Sciences Fellowship, University of Pittsburgh, 1999-2000.

President's Award, Villa Julie College, 1999.

Outstanding Scholar Award, Villa Julie College, 1999.

First place, Computer Scholarship Competition, Villa Julie College, 1996.

Reviewer, International Conference on Computers and Education (ICCE), 2009

Reviewer, Conference of the Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society (FLAIRS), 2008, 2009

Grant application reviewer, Economic and Social Research Council, UK, 2008

Undergraduate Student Researcher, Center for Research in Information Access, Columbia University, summer of 1999. Natural Language Processing work with Dr Nina Wacholder and Dr Judith Klavans.

BS Magna Cum Laude, Liberal Arts and Technology, Computer Information Systems, Villa Julie College, 1996-1999.

Vice-President, Villa Julie College Chapter of the Association of Information Technology Professionals, 1998-1999 (when I founded the Chapter Scholarship).

Intern, Research and Development, McCabe & Associates, 1997-1998.