MBZUAI team receives Google Academic Research Award

ABU DHABI, 13th November, 2024 (WAM) -- The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) announced that one of its teams has received the Google Academic Research Award.

With this award, the team will expand its research on educational foundation models and dialogue-based intelligent tutoring systems

Google presented the award to MBZUAI's Ekaterina Kochmar, assistant professor of natural language processing (NLP), and researcher Kaushal Kumar Maurya, a postdoctoral researcher specialising in NLP and large language models (LLMs) for education.

Kochmar and Maurya were the only team from the Middle East honoured in the inaugural Google Academic Research Awards and were recognised in the category "making education equitable, accessible and effective using AI".

Their research project, titled "2-ITS: A Pedagogical Intelligent Tutoring System Grounded in Learning Science Principles", focuses on developing educational foundation models and building a new generation of dialogue-based intelligent tutoring systems that are powered by generative AI to assist students across a range of subjects, including STEM and language learning.

"It is a true honour to receive this award, and we are grateful to Google Academic Research Awards for supporting our work in this field," said Kochmar. "Our project's aim is to ensure that students around the world can use NLP-driven technology to access education and help tutors reach students, who may be unable to access mainstream education services. We are excited to develop advanced AI solutions with the potential to improve people's lives, and we appreciate this recognition from Google to support our endeavours."

"Modern technologies like state-of-the-art AI models and LLMs already exhibit impressive capabilities, so it's time to look into how they can be used for impactful applications. I would like to see this being used in real life, to the benefit of the educational system at large, but specifically the teachers and students: helping them learn better, faster, more efficiently and more effectively," she added.

Kochmar and Maurya emphasised that their system is designed to help teachers, not replace them, giving the example of a busy classroom.

"If you don't have time to address everybody in the class, you can provide students with a personalised tablet that adapts to their needs. It knows what they know and don't know and explains the learning in a way that is specific to them," explained Kochmar. "In this scenario, the final goal for all students to gain the same expertise, but the way each person gets there may be different. That's where the system would help."

"Much like calculators and computers in the past, we see such tutoring systems becoming an embedded part of the educational system - not replacing human teachers, but assisting them," said Maurya.

The Google Academic Research Awards provide funding and collaboration opportunities for researchers, fostering an ecosystem that generates impactful research with real-world applications.

The 2024 awards covered six categories: creating ML benchmarks for climate problems; making education equitable, accessible and effective using AI; quantum transduction and networking for scalable computing applications; using Gemini and Google's open model family to solve systems and infrastructure problems; society-centred AI; and trust & safety.