Drs. Renu Balyan and Shebuti Rayana from the Mathematics, Computer & Information Systems Department were both awarded grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for three-year projects.
Dr. Balyan’s grant titled "Privacy Preserving Tutoring System for Health Education of Low Literacy Hispanic Populations,” will focus on two critical research areas, health education and privacy preservation. The project's first task is to develop a framework for an intelligent tutoring system that delivers instructions related to cancer to low literacy Hispanic breast cancer survivors. Breast cancer survivors (BCSs) often experience symptoms, including fatigue, depressive symptoms, and changes in sleep and sexual function that negatively impact their health-related quality of life. The second task relates to protecting their identifiable health information and medical records.
“Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths in the Hispanic population, and to the best of our knowledge there are no tutoring systems that are aimed at breast cancer survivorship or that target the non-college low-literacy population" explains Dr. Balyan. "The health content delivered is rarely at a reading level that is recommended by the National Institute of Health or the American Medical Association, so providing such an intervention through this NSF grant will help serve the underserved minority populations, and improve health-related quality of life in particular the post-treatment survivorship phase for the breast cancer survivors."
Dr. Rayana’s grant titled "ACOSUS: An AI-driven Counseling System for Underrepresented Transfer Students,” aims to develop an AI-driven student counseling system (ACOSUS) to aid university counseling by providing personalized readiness and success prediction and suggestions, primarily focusing on underrepresented transfer students in STEM majors. The new framework will take into account cognitive and behavioral data as well as social media impact on top of student academic performance. It will exploit techniques from natural language processing, machine learning, and recommender systems. The project will also build research capacity by establishing a sustainable faculty collaboration network, creating regular workshops, and providing underrepresented students with research-oriented training opportunities.
“In this research, we propose a novel AI-driven counseling system that extends traditional decision support systems primarily in two aspects,’ said Dr. Rayana. “One that it integrates personal, behavioral, and environmental factors in addition to academic performance data and second that it can make personalized assessment for individual students with respect to their readiness of transfer for upskilling and job market success. The research will open new doors in higher education student counseling by understanding how an AI-enabled information system could intervene and assist underrepresented college students in making informed transfer decisions that will enable them to upskill and succeed in the job market following graduation."
The National Science Foundation is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all non-medical fields of science and engineering.