Kimberly Ferguson-Walter
Intern
612-339-SIFT(7438)
kwalter at sift dot info
Before joining SIFT, Ms. Ferguson-Walter earned a specialization in artificial intelligence from the University of California-Irvine and graduated from the honors program in the School of Information & Computer Science. Her undergraduate thesis in bioinformatics earned her an honorable mention for the Computing Research Association's (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Award. Ms. Ferguson-Walter then continued her studies of AI during her graduate work at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is currently pursuing her PhD as part of the autonomous learning laboratory where her research involves evolving machine learning techniques for reinforcement learning and intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) domains. Her masters thesis was partially funded by the National Science Foundation Research On Learning and Education (ROLE) program and was accomplished as part of an interdisciplinary collaborative group on problems within the ITS domain. Much of her research involves manipulation of large matrices and is coded in Matlab.
Ms. Ferguson-Walter is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Honors Society and a 3rd degree black belt. She was a teaching assistant for Java II and worked as a computer science summer camp instructor for the non-profit organization Girls Incorporated. Her research interests revolve around combining human psychology and artificial intelligence including transfer learning, reinforcement learning, machine learning, and intelligent tutoring systems.
Educational Background
In Progress
UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS, Amherst, MA
Doctorate in Computer Science
2008
UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS, Amherst, MA
Master of Science in Computer Science
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Masters Thesis: Improving Intelligent Tutoring Systems: Using Expectation Maximization To Learn Student Skill Levels
2003
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-IRVINE, Irvine, CA
Bachelor of Science in Information and Computer Science, specialization in Artificial Intelligence
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Honors Thesis: Discovery of Transcription Factor Binding Sites in Yeast by Computational Analysis
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Graduated Cum Laude
Publications
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Kimberly Ferguson, Beverly Park Woolf, Sridhar Mahadevan. Transfer Learning and Representation Discovery in Intelligent Tutoring Systems. International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED09), Brighton, July 2009.
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Peggy Wu, Tammy Ott, Christopher Miller, Kimberly Ferguson-Walter. Utilizing Human Computer Etiquette to Encourage Human-Machine Therapeutic Alliance. Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI09), San Diego, July 2009.
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Sridhar Mahadevan, Sarah Osentoski, Jeff Johns, Kimberly Ferguson, Chang Wang. Learning to Plan using Harmonic Analysis of Diffusion Models. Proceedings of International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), Providence, RI, 2007.
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Ivon Arroyo, Kimberly Ferguson, Jeff Johns, Toby Dragon, Hasmik Meheranian, Don Fisher, Andrew G. Barto, Sridhar Mahadevan, Beverly P. Woolf. Remediating disengagement with non-invasive interventions. Proceedings of 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED), Marina Del Rey, CA, 2007.
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Sridhar Mahadevan, Mauro Maggioni, Kimberly Ferguson, Sarah Osentoski. Learning Representation and Control in Continuous Markov Decision Processes. Proceedings of 21st National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Boston, MA, 2006.
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Kimberly Ferguson, Ivon Arroyo, Sridhar Mahadevan, Beverly P. Woolf, Andrew G. Barto. Improving Intelligent Tutoring Systems: Using EM to Learn Student Skill Levels. Proceedings of 8th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), Jhongli, Taiwan, 2006. Lecture notes featured in Computer Science, No. 4053: 453-462, 2006.
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Kimberly Ferguson and Sridhar Mahadevan, Proto-Transfer Learning in Markov Decision Processes using Spectral Methods. Proceedings of ICML-06 Workshop on Structural Knowledge Transfer for Machine Learning, Pittsburgh, PA, 2006. in Computer Science, No. 4053: 453-462, 2006.
