Rafael A. Calvo

Teaching - Research - Professional Community - Publications - Projects - Bio

Teaching

Research

I am interested in Learning: how machines learn and how people can learn better with the support of technology

The technical side of our work consists in bringing machine learning algorithms to real systems, and see how they can be used to change the way we work and the way we learn. I am particularly interested in using these techniques in e-learning systems. We have built several of these "Intelligent Information systems", with a number of partners:

1. Faculty of Education, and funding from the Australian Research Council (Discovery Projects) we are developing textual data mining tools data will provide feedback to students in writing essays, and to their teachers who have to assess them. See the Glosser Project.
   

2. New South Wales Institute of Sports and dotLRN consortium, developing Beehive, an e-learning framework for synchronous collaboration.

3. Australian Biosecurity CRC developing mobile applications for the training of Veterinarians, and the early detection of infectious disease in Australian cattle farms.

4. With the Capital Markets Collaborative Research Centre we developed systems to manage textual information used by financial analysts and advisors.

The less technical side involves studying how the conceptions that students have, the approaches they take, and their learning outcomes all correlate. We have focused on two aspects of this line of research: e-learning and Engineering education.

In a new line of research, we are working on Brain Computer Interfaces (how brain signals can be recognized and used to control computer devices). We have developed technology for dry electrodes, and we are studying machine learning algorithms for classification and clustering.

I am looking for students that want to do a thesis on one of these projects

You can have a look at some of my publications and grants.

Professional Community

• Co-chair for the 2008 "Web Intelligence & Intelligent Agent Technology in eLearning" [site] workshop in IEEE / ACM Web Intelligence 2008. I am also in the Program Committee for IDEA 2008, CLEI 2008, dotLRN 2008. Reviewer for ICCE 2008.
  
• Reviewer for: IEEE Internet Computing, ACM Transactions on Information Systems, Australia Research Council, Neural Processing Letters, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence
• Associate Editor for Journal of Digital Information (2006-2007)
  

• Co-Chair for Workshop on "Intelligent Learning Management Systems" at AIED 2003.
• Program Committee Member / Reviewer for:

  IDEA (2007, 2008), ARC (2003-2008), ascilite (2006, 2007), World Wide Web Conference 2007 (WWW2007), Ausweb, ICWE (2005).

I work closely with industry, particularly in e-learning. I am involved in a number of non-profit and professional organizations:

• Senior Member of IEEE
• Founder and Board member of the dotLRN Consortium,
  
• Founder and Board Member of Elnet, the first professional association for eLearning in Australasia.

I also provide consulting services to local and overseas companies. My consulting is strongly related to my research interests, so I develop advanced web applications for corporate and university clients.

For more information read my Bio.