Shamya Karumbaiah

I am an assistant professor in Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Previously, I was a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute working with Dr. Vincent Aleven and Dr. Nikol Rummel. I earned my PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021 working as a research fellow in the Penn Center for Learning Analytics with Dr. Ryan Baker.

I study ways to promote student engagement and learning in adaptive and artificially intelligent educational systems in a fair and equitable manner. My research is at the intersection of machine learning and learning sciences. My work often involves:

1. Building statistical and machine learning models to understand complex educational constructs such as affect, cognition, motivation, self-identity, help-seeking, and persistence.
2. Methodological innovations in learning analytics to overcome the challenges in applying current methods to education data.
3. And more importantly, constructing scientific and critical approaches to identifying biases and mitigating them for equitable student outcomes.

Previously, I earned an MS in computer science from UMass Amherst with an emphasis in machine learning, where I worked with Dr. Beverly P. Woolf and Dr. Ivon Arroyo. In 2016 I was a visiting researcher in learning sciences at USC ICT (Institute for Creative Technologies) working with Dr. Benjamin Nye and Dr. Mark Core. In summer 2017 I interned as a data scientist with Dr. Antonio Nucci at the Advanced Technologies and AI lab at Cisco. Between 2011-2015 after earning a BE in Computer Science from SJCE India, I worked as a software engineer at Cisco.