MEng alumnus Andy Spezzatti speaks at SIGKDD 2019

Andy Spezzatti, MEng ’19 (IEOR), was a speaker at the 25th SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining in Anchorage, Alaska on August 7th, 2019. The annual Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD) Conference is the premier international forum for data mining researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to share ideas, research results and experiences.

He presented a project on how to make education more broadly available in isolated and underdeveloped areas as well as how to make it more efficient. The solution is at the intersection of cognitive sciences and state of the art Natural Language Processing (NLP) and leverage our individual differences.

“It was with pleasure that I was invited to give a talk during the Social Impact Workshop at SIGKDD2019. The KDD was a great experience where I could learn from top researchers in the data space around the world and be inspired by the cutting-edge projects of different labs and innovative companies. I had the opportunity to meet and discuss with very interesting people to exchange ideas, explore the future of big data, question how can we have a more meaningful impact and experience the beauty of Alaska.” — Andy Spezzatti

The solution takes the form of a mobile application that uses tests to learn the learning preferences and the cognitive skills of each student in order to provide customized learning material recommendations with a web-scrapping algorithm. Using techniques inspired by recent researches, like bag of concepts and customized named entity recognition models, it performs several clustering of the space and use it to analyze the academic articles and courses available on the web. In order to make the integration with current education institutions smoother, a web dashboard was also created and gives teachers access to current and past statistics about students.

This project was developed during the Master of Engineering program.

“The MEng was a great experience that taught me the diverse skills necessary to succeed in launching your own project, shared Andy. “I was interested in socially impacting projects, so I spent most of my time developing those ideas to transform them into real products. It finally gave me the opportunity to work with AI for Good and to came up with SciKid-Learn.”

The mission of this project is to make education more inclusive at a global scale and to leverage most of the learning abilities of each individual. Could we convey the taste of learning for young students by making things easier and more fun?

This new technology is open sourced and can be found on Github (SciKid-Learn).

Connect with Andy Spezzatti.