Renu Balyan

Renu Balyan
Position/Role
Assistant Professor
Department
Mathematics, Computer & Information Science
School
School of Arts and Sciences
Building
New Academic Building
Room
1012
E-mail
Email
Courses Taught
  • CS 6120 - Data Analytics -II - Fall 2020-25
  • CS 6110 - Data Analytics - I  - Spring 2021-25
  • CS 5910 - System Design and Implementation (Capstone) - Spring 2023-25
  • CS 4720 - Internet and Web Tech - Spring 2025; Fall 2025
  • CS 4550 - Database Management Systems - Spring 2022; Fall 2022-25
  • CS 3911 - C++ in Object Oriented Design - Fall 2022-24; Spring 2023
  • CS 2521 - Scientific Computing using Python - Spring 2022
  • CS 2511 - CS Programming II (Java) - Fall 2020-21; Spring 2021-22
Honors & Awards
Awards
  • SUNY AI for Public Good Fellow (2025-2026)
Grants

  • Grow with Google - Faculty Innovator: Embedding Industry Certificates into Credit Courses (Jan 2025 – Dec 2025): $50,000.

  • NSF Collaborative Grant: Orchestration of Network Slicing for 5G-Enabled IoT Devices Using Reinforcement Learning (Oct 2023 - Sept 2025): $399,897 (SUNY OW: $122, 598)
  • NSF Collaborative Grant: Privacy Preserving Tutoring System for Health Education of Low Literacy Hispanic Populations (Sept 2022 - Aug 2026): $598,925 (SUNY OW: $140,215)
  • ASEE Summer Mini Grant: Investigating NLP and ML techniques for developing a secure and privacy-preserving health-centric Intelligent Tutoring System (May 2022 - Sept 2022): $10,000
  • NSF Grant: StEM: Stimulate, Engage and Motivate student research by enhancing the research capacity (Oct 2021 - Sept 2024) : $299, 498

  • IES Summer Grant (ASU sub-award): Precision Education: The Virtual Learning Lab (May 2021 - June 2021): $35,000

Student/College Service
  • IRB Committee (Chair)
  • ARPT (Member)
  • TLRC (Member)
  • ITGAC Presidential committee (Member)
  • Faculty Research Advisory Council (Member)
  • Department Senator
  • Department Academic Coordinator for CSTEP
  • Department Web Editor & Publisher
Research Interests
  • Natural Language Processing (Machine Translation, summarization, Question-asking, named entity recognition)
  • Machine Learning, Health Literacy
  • Data Mining (Health and Education data)
Publications

2025

  • Potter, A., Tian, Y., Balyan, R., Watanabe, M. & McNamara, D.S. (2025, In press). Revising with Generative AI: Supporting Writing Instruction Through Validated Cohesion Metrics. AI Literacy: Foundations, Practices, and Innovations in Education! Routledge.
  • Sherlock, L.*, Shahid, R.*, Balyan, R. (2025, In press). Reinforcement Learning Environment for 5G-Enabled IoT Devices Resource Management. Proc. of the 6thInternational Conference on Electrical, Communication and Computer Engineering(ICECCE). 27-28 August 2025, Istanbul, Turkey. (* student authors).
  • Verma, T.*, Balyan, R. (2025, In press). Conversational AI for Healthcare: A Smart Chatbot for Breast Cancer Awareness. The 27th Int'l Conf on Artificial Intelligence (ICAI’25). The 2025 World Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Applied Computing (CSCE'25). Las Vegas. July 21-24, 2025. (* student author).
  • Shahid, R.*, Sherlock, L.*, Ghosh, S., Kaur, K. and Balyan, R. (2025, In press). Deep Reinforcement Learning for Resource Management in 5G-Enabled IoT Networks: A Comprehensive Survey. The 26th Int'l Conf on Internet Computing and Internet of Things (ICOMP’25). The 2025 World Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Applied Computing(CSCE'25). Las Vegas. July 21-24, 2025. (* student authors).
  • Rivera, A.*, Iacobelli, F., Balyan, R. (2025). A code-switched corpus for intelligent tutoring systems in breast cancer education. In the 17th Annual International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies (EDULearn25). Palma, Spain. June 30 – July 02, 2025. (* student author).
  • Balyan, R., Thompson, K.*, Iacobelli, F. (2025). LLMs for Question-Answer and Synthetic Data Generation and Evaluation. In: Graf, S., Markos, A. (eds) Generative Systems and Intelligent Tutoring Systems. ITS 2025. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15724. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-98284-2_2 (* student author).

2024

  • Sonbuchner, T. M., Villa-Cuesta, E., Dores, M. R., Denton, R. W., Nissen, J. C., Balyan, R., & Ross, M. ( 2024). Leveraging Micro-Credentialing to Foster Interdisciplinary Learning in First-Year Biology and Chemistry Lab Courses: The DUCKs Approach. Journal of College Science Teaching, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1080/0047231X.2024.2416471
  • Shin, J., B, Balyan, R., Banawan, M., Arner, T., Leite, W. L., & McNamara, D. S. (2024). Analyzing interaction patterns and content dynamics in an Online mathematics discussion board. Interactive Learning Environments. https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2024.2392619
  • E. Adegbegha*, A. Rivera*, F. Iacobelli, R. Balyan (2024). Towards Developing an ASR Evaluation Metric for Code-Switching. In the 17th annual International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation (ICERI), Seville, Spain (Nov, 2024), pp. 10114-10122.  https://doi.org/10.21125/iceri.2024.2554 (* student authors).
  • Mohamed Jemmali*, Ginger Dragon*, Raelyn M Mendoza*, Daniel Stille*, Patrick Poinar*, Aditya Ojha*, Kevin Baez*, Sooyeon Jeong*, Renu Balyan and Francisco Iacobelli (2024). Sorting Pauses in Speech Based Dialog Systems: Effects of Knowing Whether Pauses in Speech are Mid-Turn or At the End of The Turn (October 2024). Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW). (* student authors).
  • Cao, Z., & Zavala Villafuerte, G.*, & Jalooli, A., & Balyan, R., & Moosavi, S. R., & Iacobelli, F. (2024), Board 209: Bridging Language Barriers in Healthcare Education: An Approach for Intelligent Tutoring Systems with Code-Switching Adaptation. ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon (June 2024). (*student authors).
  • Khalefa, M., Rayana, S., Poon, K., Noutsos, C. & Balyan, R. (2024). Managing HPC Cluster for Research and Teaching Workload. International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI). Las Vegas. 

2023

  • Nicula B., Dascalu M., Arner T., Balyan R., McNamara DS. (2023). Automated Assessment of Comprehension Strategies from Self-Explanations Using LLMs. Information. 2023; 14(10):567. https://doi.org/10.3390/info14100567
  • Shin, J., Balyan, R., Banawan, M., Arner, T., Leite, W., & McNamara, D. (2023) Pedagogical Discourse Markers in Online Algebra learning: Unraveling Instructor's Communication using Natural Language Processing. Computers and Education. Volume 205, 104897, ISSN 0360-1315, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2023.104897
  • Roscoe, R., Balyan, R., Banawan, M., Schillinger, D., McNamara, D. (2023). Automated Strategy Feedback Can Improve the Readability of Physicians’ Electronic Communications to Simulated Patients. International Journal of Human - Computer Studies. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2023.103059
  • Banawan MP, Shin J, Arner T, Balyan R, Leite WL, McNamara DS. Shared Language: Linguistic Similarity in an Algebra Discussion Forum. Computers. 2023. 12(3):53. https://doi.org/10.3390/computers12030053
  • Ackerman, R.* and Balyan, R. (2023, Aug). Automatic Multilingual Question Generation for Health Data using LLMs. Proceedings of the International Conference on AI Generated Content (AIGC 2023). (* student author).
  • Yetunde E. A*., Minocha, A.*, and Balyan, R. (2023, Aug). Analyzing Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition Systems Performance. Proceedings of the International Conference on AI Generated Content (AIGC 2023). (* student authors).
  • Kinning Poon, Solomon T. C. Chak, Mohamed Khalefa, Christos Noutsos, Shebuti Rayana and Renu Balyan (July 2023). Undergraduate Student Motivation in Research, Science, and Post-Bachelor Education. Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC) 2023. Portland, Oregon.
  • Bogdan Nicula, Marilena Panaite, Tracy Arner, Renu Balyan, Mihai Dascalu, and Danielle S. McNamara. (July 2023). Automated Assessment of Comprehension Strategies from Self-Explanations using Transformers and Multi-Task Learning. 24th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, AIED 2023, July 3-7, 2023. Tokyo, Japan.
  • Amanda Jensen, Kyle Stagnaro, Ali Fulsher, Tracy Arner, Zeinab Serhan, Tong Li, Renu Balyan, Danielle McNamara, Panayiota Kendeou (June, 2023). Reinventing the Think-Aloud: A Study Exploring Alternative Delivery Methods for the Traditional Think-Aloud Protocol. The 33rd Annual Meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse (ST&D).  June 28 -30, 2023. Oslo, Norway.

2022

  • Ackerman, R*., Balyan, R. & Icobelli, F. (2022). Intelligent Tutoring Systems in Healthcare for Low Literacy Population: A Concise survey and the next steps. International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI'22). Dec 14-16, 2022. Las Vegas. (* student author).
  • Balyan, R.,  T. Arner, K. Taylor, J. Shin, M. Banawan, W. Leite, and D. McNamara. (2022). Modeling one-on-one online tutoring discourse using an accountable talk framework. In A. Mitrovic and N. Bosch, editors, Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Educational Data Mining, pages 477–483, Durham, United Kingdom, July 2022. International Educational Data Mining Society.
  • Balyan, R., Arner, T., Li, T., Orcutt, E., Butterfuss, R., Kendeou, P., & McNamara, D. (2022). Integrating Speech Technology into the iSTART-Early Intelligent Tutoring System. In International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (pp. 362-370). Springer, Cham.
  • Kendeou, P., Orcutt, E., Arner, T., Li, T., Balyan, R., Butterfuss, R., ... & McNamara, D. (2022). iSTART-Early: Interactive Strategy Training for Early Readers. In International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (pp. 371-379). Springer, Cham.
  • Banawan, M., Shin, J., Balyan, R., Leite, W. L., & McNamara, D. S. (2022). Math Discourse Linguistic Components (Cohesive Cues within a Math Discussion Board Discourse). In Proceedings of the Ninth ACM Conference on Learning@ Scale (pp. 389-394).

2021

  • Schillinger, D., Duran, N. D., McNamara, D. S., Crossley, S. A., Balyan, R., & Karter, A. J. (2021). Precision communication: Physicians’ linguistic adaptation to patients’ health literacy. Science advances, 7(51), eabj2836.
  • Schillinger, D*, Balyan, R*, Crossley, SA, McNamara, DS, Liu, JY, & Karter, AJ. (2021) Employing Computational Linguistics Techniques to Estimate Patient Health Literacy: Findings from the ECLIPPSE Study. Health Services Research. Volume 56, Issue 1:132-144. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6773.13560 (* first co-authors)
  • Schillinger, D., Balyan, R., Crossley, S.A., McNamara, D.S., & Karter, A.J. (2021). Validity of a Computational Linguistics-Derived Automated Health Literacy Measure Across Race/Ethnicity: Findings from The ECLIPPSE Project. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved (JHCPU) 32 (2021): 347-365. doi:10.1353/hpu.2021.0067.
  • Brown, W., Balyan, R., Crossley, S., ….., Schillinger, D. (2021). Challenges and Solutions to Employing Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to Measure Patients' Health Literacy and Physician Writing Complexity: The ECLIPPSE Study. Journal of Biomedical Informatics. Volume 113, 103658, ISSN 1532-0464, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbi.2020.103658
  • Banawan, M., Balyan, R., Shin, J., Leite, W., & McNamara, D. (2021). Linguistic Features of Discourse within an Algebra Online Discussion Board. Proceedings in the International Conference on Education in Data Mining (EDM, 2021). June 29-July 2, 2021. Paris.
  • Wan, Q., Crossley, S. A., Banawan, M., Balyan, R., McNamara, D. S., & Allen, L. (2021). Automated Claim Identification Using NLP Features in Student Argumentative Essays. In. F. Bouchet, J. Vie, S. Hsiao, & S. Sahebi (Eds.), Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM-2021): International Education Data Mining Society.
  • Shin, J., Balyan, R., Banawan, M., Leite, W., & McNamara, D. (2021). Pedagogical Communication Language in Video Lectures: Empirical Findings from Algebra Nation. International Society of Learning Sciences (ISLS).

2020

  • Crossley, S. A., Balyan, R., Liu, J. Y., Schillinger, D., Karter, A. J., McNamara, D. S. (2020). Predicting the readability of physicians’ secure messages to improve health communication using novel linguistic features: Findings from the ECLIPPSE study. Journal of Communication in Healthcare: 344-356.  https://doi.org/10.1080/17538068.2020.1822726
  • Balyan, R., McCarthy, K.S. & McNamara, D.S. Applying Natural Language Processing and Hierarchical Machine Learning Approaches to Text Difficulty Classification. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40593-020-00201-7
  • Scott A. Crossley, Renu Balyan, Jennifer Liu, Andrew J. Karter, Danielle McNamara & Dean Schillinger (2020): Developing and Testing Automatic Models of Patient Communicative Health Literacy Using Linguistic Features: Findings from the ECLIPPSE study, Health Communication, https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2020.1731781
Presentations
  • Balyan, R., Thompson, K.*, Iacobelli, F. (2025). LLMs for Question-Answer and Synthetic Data Generation and Evaluation. International Conference on Tutoring Systems (ITS 2025). (* student author).
  • K. Thompson*, F. Iacobelli, R. Balyan (2024). Leveraging Large Language Models for QA Generation and Evaluation. In the 17th annual International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation (ICERI 2024), Seville, Spain (Nov, 2024). (* student author).
  • Stille, Daniel*, Abhay Paidipalli*, Benjamin Caulfield*, Kevin Rueda*, Raquel Saldivar*, Sooyeon Jeong*, Renu Balyan and Francisco Iacobelli (2023, October). Intelligent Tutoring System for Breast Cancer Survivors. in SACNAS NDiSTEM 2023. October 26-28. Portland, OR. (* student authors).
  • Ackerman, R.* and Balyan, R. (2023, August). Automatic Multilingual Question Generation for Health Data using LLMs. Proceedings of the International Conference on AI Generated Content (AIGC 2023). (* student author).
  • Yetunde E. A*., Minocha, A.*, and Balyan, R. (2023, August). Analyzing Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition Systems Performance. Proceedings of the International Conference on AI Generated Content (AIGC 2023). (* student authors).
  • Vladislav Yashaev*, Mohamed Khalefa, & Renu Balyan. (2023, April) Streamlining Literature Review with Machine Learning. SUNY Graduate Research Conference (GradCon), 11 April 2023 (* student presenter)
  • Balyan, R.,  T. Arner, K. Taylor, J. Shin, M. Banawan, W. Leite, and D. McNamara. (July 2022). Modeling one-on-one online tutoring discourse using an accountable talk framework. International Conference on Educational Data Mining, Durham, United Kingdom, July 24-27, 2022.
  • Balyan, R., Arner, T., Li, T., Orcutt, E., Butterfuss, R., Kendeou, P., & McNamara, D. (June 2022). Integrating Speech Technology into the iSTART-Early Intelligent Tutoring System. International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, Bucharest, Romania, June 29- July 01, 2022.
  • Joy, L. Lee, Balyan, R., McNamara, D., & Schillinger, D. (June 2022). Acceptability of an Automated Intervention to DEcrease the Complexity of Physicians' Secure Messages. AcademyHealth ARM, Washington DC, June 2022.
  • Balyan, R., McCarthy, K.S. & McNamara, D.S. Applying Natural Language Processing and Hierarchical Machine Learning Approaches to Text Difficulty Classification. Journal Presentation for Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED – June 2021)
  • Shin, J., Balyan, R., Banawan, M., Walter, L. & McNamara, D.S. (2021). Discovering Pedagogical Communication Strategies with Algebra Tutoring videos with a Theory-based NLP Approach. To be presented at American Educational Research Association (AERA: April 2021)
  • Balyan, R., McNamara, D. S., Crossley, S. A., Liu, J. Y, Karter, A. J., & Schillinger, D. (2020). Reducing Computational Complexity and Enhancing Transportability in Machine Learning: Findings from The ECLIPPSE Project. Presented as oral abstract at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Computers in Psychology (SCiP, 19 Nov 2020).
  • Shin, J., Balyan, R., Banawan, M., Walter, L. & McNamara, D.S. (2020). Combining Discourse Analysis and Natural Language Processing: Revealing Patterns of Pedagogical Communication in Algebra Tutoring. Presented as oral abstract at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Computers in Psychology (SCiP, 19 Nov 2020).
  • Dean Schillinger, Renu Balyan, Scott Crossley, Danielle McNamara, Andrew J. Karter. Validity of a Computational Linguistics-Derived Automated Health Literacy Measure Across Race/Ethnicity: Findings from The ECLIPPSE Project. Presented as Oral Abstract at the Health Literacy Research Conference (HARC). Online event. October 21, 2020.