Dr. Collin F. Lynch is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University. His primary research is focused on the development of robust intelligent tutoring systems and adaptive educational systems for Ill-Defined domains such as scientific writing, law, and software development. He completed his doctoral research in Intelligent Systems at the University of Pittsburgh where he was affiliated with the Learning Research and Development Centre. His doctoral dissertation work focused on the use of argument diagrams to teach and diagnose student-produced arguments. For that work he developed a novel Augmented Graph Grammar system and applied it to the analysis of student-produced argument diagrams and the prediction of subsequent essay grades. He is presently working on extending this work to develop novel algorithms for the automatic induction of tutorial grammars from existing student data via Evolutionary Computation. Dr. Lynch completed his post-doctoral work at NCSU where he worked on the development of Intelligent Tutoring Systems for Logic and Probability, studied new algorithms for student modelling and hint provision, and examined the impact of social networks on student performance.
Dr. Lynch has also made contributions to AI and Law where he has focused on argument representation and reasoning. He co-founded a series of workshops on Artificial Intelligence, Education, and Ill-Defined domains and co-edited a journal on the same topic. He is also a charter member of the Educational Data Mining Society and has co-organized workshops on graph-based educational data mining. He has made contributions to educational practice by studying the use of formative feedback in legal education. Dr. Lynch has also contributed to tutoring systems in other domains through his work on the Andes ITS for Physics, the SWoRD system for peer review in writing, and the Cognitive Tutor Architecture Tools project at Carnegie Mellon University.
Dr. Lynch also has also been active at the intersection of computer technology and public policy having served as the President of VoteAllegheny a non-partisan group focused on election technology and security and as an appointed member of the Citizens’ Advisory Panel on Election Systems and Software in Allegheny County Pennsylvania.