Gloria Ashiya Katuka, Ph.D. Email and Phone Number

InTECHgrate is a a non-profit organization leading the cause for the integration of information technology in the public schools curriculum from elementary to high schools. InTECHgrate is primary aimed at inspiring students in the Gainesville community to expand their thirst for technical knowledge. Our mission is to fill the gap in the education system by providing students with a full IT package including a sustainable curriculum with which they can acquire technical skills while building lasting relationships with successful members of their community. With limited or no IT specific curriculum in many elementary, middle and high schools, especially public schools, there is a huge deficit in fulfilling the needs of hundreds and thousands of jobs in the IT industry. InTECHgrate is solving the problems of both educational and professional aspects of IT, using a community development centric initiative. Through the InTECHgrate platform, college students majoring in Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Information Systems, work together will professional developers, programmers, data scientists and other IT professionals, to design a curriculum that reflects the real time need of the industry in terms of coding, engineering, business and managerial roles. The curriculum are project-based and provide the students with necessary skills to develop mobile applications, web applications, and artificial intelligence.

My research intersects the use of NLP techniques for analyzing dialogue in computer science (CS) and artificial intelligence (AI) learning. I plan to develop a good partner agent for a mobile, game-based CS/AI educational application that will foster an engaging and interacting learning experience for young learners. I intend to apply NLP approaches to analyze human-human collaborative dialogue during CS/AI learning activities, evaluate effective collaboration between human- (partner) agent in a mobile educational application and combine rule-based and machine learning approaches to implement a trainable dialogue system for natural language generation. My goal is to intersect my interests in NLP with my passion for CS/AI learning to explore ways to provide a better learning experience for young learners and to foster their pursuit of CS/AI careers.

Worked on dialogue design and implementation for the Co-creative Artificial Intelligence (CAI) Agent for EarSketch

Graduate Technical Intern with the Datacenter and AI Platforms Group. My Intern project was to design and develop a Design Change Request (DCR) Automation Tool to reduce the time it takes product architects create a DCR. I was also a member of the pilot class for the Intel’s Develop, Retain, InnoVate and Engage (DRIVE) program.