Education

August 2009
University of Illinois at Chicago
PhD, Computer Science.
Research: Educational Technology, Natural Language Processing.
Thesis: Automatic Modeling of Procedural Knowledge and Feedback Generation in a Computer Science Tutoring System.
Advisor: Dr. Barbara Di Eugenio.
PhD GPA: 4.00/4.00. Cumulative GPA: 3.92/4.00.
April 2004
Politecnico di Milano, Italy
MSc, Computer Engineering.
Final grade: 93/100.
July 2003
University of Illinois at Chicago
MSc, Computer Science.
Thesis: DIAG-NLP: Improving Intelligent Tutoring Systems with Natural Language Generation Technology.
Advisor: Dr. Barbara Di Eugenio.
GPA: 3.86/4.00.

Work Experience

August 2010 - Present
Carnegie Mellon University
Assistant Teaching Professor of Computer Science

Designing and teaching Computer Science courses. Performing research on Educational Technology, Educational Assessment, and Computer Science Education.
August 2009 - July 2010
Georgia Institute of Technology
Computing Innovation Research Fellow

Performed research on Educational Technology, Educational Assessment, and Computer Science Education. This work was supported by the Computing Research Association, the Computing Community Consortium, and the National Science Foundation in the context of the Computing Innovation Fellows initiative (http://cifellows.org).
Fellowship mentor: Dr. Mark Guzdial.
January 2005 - August 2009
University of Illinois at Chicago
Teaching Assistant and Research Assistant

Taught in undergraduate and graduate level courses:

  • CS 202 - Algorithms and Data structures II.
  • CS 421 - Natural Language Processing.
  • CS 476 - Programming Language Design.

Performed research on Educational Technology and Natural Language Processing.
May 2008 - August 2008
Campus Recreation, University of Illinois at Chicago
Rock Climbing Instructor

Taught introductory rock climbing class. Assisted climbers and performed maintenance at the UIC Student Recreation Facility rock climbing wall.
May 2004 - December 2004
Reply @logistics, Milan, Italy
Consultant

Analyzed, developed, configured, and deployed Information Systems for Warehouse Management. Customized and deployed Click Reply WMS on two paper mills in The Netherlands (Favini Apeldoorn and Favini Meerssen mills).
January 2004 - April 2004
Accenture, Milan, Italy
Intern

Developed a Human Resources Information System for an international retailer (Metro). Built a prototype based on SAP CRM 4.0 for an international food producing company (Ferrero).
January 2003 - June 2003
Elementary School of Gaggiano (Milano), Italy
Teacher

Taught a basic Computer Science course for Grade School children.
August 2001 - July 2002
University of Illinois at Chicago
Teaching Assistant and Research Assistant

Taught in undergraduate and graduate level courses:

  • CS 102 - Introduction to Programming.
  • CS 202 - Algorithms and Data Structures II.
  • CS 421 - Natural Language Processing.

Performed research on Natural Language Generation for Intelligent Tutoring Systems.

Languages

  • Italian (Native language)
  • English (Fluent)
  • French (Intermediate)
  • Spanish (Beginner)

Publications

  1. Davide Fossati, Barbara Di Eugenio, Stellan Ohlsson, Christopher Brown, Lin Chen, and David Cosejo. I learn from you, you learn from me: How to make iList learn from students. AIED 2009, The 14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education. Brighton, UK. July 2009. Download PDF
  2. Davide Fossati, Barbara Di Eugenio, Christopher Brown, Stellan Ohlsson, David Cosejo, and Lin Chen. Supporting Computer Science curriculum: Exploring and learning linked lists with iList. IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, Special Issue on Real-World Applications of Intelligent Tutoring Systems, vol. 2 no. 2, pp. 107-120. April-June 2009. Download PDF
  3. Barbara Di Eugenio, Davide Fossati, Stellan Ohlsson, and David Cosejo. Towards explaining effective tutorial dialogues. CogSci 2009, The Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Amsterdam, The Netherlands. July 2009. Download PDF
  4. Barbara Di Eugenio, Davide Fossati, Susan Haller, Dan Yu, and Michael Glass. Be brief, and they shall learn: Generating Concise Language Feedback for a Computer Tutor. International Journal of AI in Education, 18(4). 2008. Download PDF
  5. Davide Fossati, Barbara Di Eugenio, Christopher Brown, and Stellan Ohlsson. Learning Linked Lists: Experiments with the iList System. ITS 2008, The 9th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems. Montreal, Canada. June 2008. Nominated for best paper award. Download PDF
  6. Davide Fossati. The role of positive feedback in Intelligent Tutoring Systems. ACL 2008, The 46th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Student Research Workshop. Columbus, OH. June 2008. Download PDF
  7. Xin Lu, Barbara Di Eugenio, Stellan Ohlsson, and Davide Fossati. Simple but effective feedback generation to tutor abstract problem solving. INLG 2008, 5th International Natural Language Generation Conference. Salt Fork, Ohio. June 2008. Download PDF
  8. Davide Fossati and Barbara Di Eugenio. I saw TREE trees in the park: How to correct real-word spelling mistakes. LREC 2008, Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. Marrakech, Morocco. May 2008. Download PDF
  9. Stellan Ohlsson, Barbara Di Eugenio, Bettina Chow, Davide Fossati, Xin Lu, and Trina C. Kershaw. Beyond the code-and-count analysis of tutoring dialogues. The 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education. Marina Del Rey, CA. July 2007. Download PDF
  10. Davide Fossati and Barbara Di Eugenio. A mixed trigrams approach for context sensitive spell checking. CICLing-2007, Eighth International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics. Mexico City, Mexico. February 2007. Download PDF
  11. Davide Fossati, Gabriele Ghidoni, Barbara Di Eugenio, Isabel Cruz, Huiyong Xiao, and Rajen Subba. The problem of ontology alignment on the web: A first report. EACL 2006, 11th conference of the European Association of Computational Linguistics, Workshop on Web as Corpus. Trento, Italy. April 2006. Download PDF
  12. Barbara Di Eugenio, Davide Fossati, Dan Yu, Susan Haller, and Michael Glass. Natural language generation for intelligent tutoring systems: A case study. AIED 2005, Artificial Intelligence in Education. Amsterdam, The Netherlands. July 2005. Nominated for best paper award. Download PDF
  13. Barbara Di Eugenio, Davide Fossati, Dan Yu, Susan Haller, and Michael Glass. Aggregation improves learning: Experiments in natural language generation for intelligent tutoring systems. ACL 2005, The 43rd annual meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics. Ann Arbor, MI. June 2005. Download PDF

Volunteer, Service, and Other Activities

2007 - 2009 Treasurer, Graduate Student Council, University of Illinois at Chicago.
2006 - 2009 Vice-President and President, Computer Science Graduate Student Association, University of Illinois at Chicago.
2009 Reviewer for AIED 2009, International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education.
2009 Reviewer for a chapter in the book "Intelligent tutoring systems in E-Learning Environments: Design, Implementation and Evaluation" (Slavomir Stankov, Editor).
2005 - 2008 Member and Treasurer (2006 - 2008), Engineers Without Borders, University of Illinois at Chicago student chapter.
2008 Judge for the 2008 Chicago Public Schools Student Science Fair.
2006 - 2007 Reviewer for CICLing-2006, CICLing-2007, and CICLing-2008: International Conferences on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics.
2005 Italian as a Second Language instructor at the Shrine of our Lady of Pompeii, Chicago.
1993 - 2001 Guitar teacher for children and teenagers. Educator in Summer vacation programs for children and teenagers. Private tutor in Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry for High School students.
1992 - Present Instrument player, singer, and music composer. Entry-level choir director.

Awards

2009 - 2010 Computing Innovation Fellows Award, sponsored by the Computing Research Association, the Computing Community Consortium, and the National Science Foundation. http://cifellows.org
2009 50 for the Future Award, Illinois Technology Foundation. Honoring Illinois' most promising technology students. http://www.50forthefuture.org
2009 Chancellor's Student Service and Leadership Award, University of Illinois at Chicago.
2008 - 2009 Dean's Scholar Award and Fellowship, Graduate College, University of Illinois at Chicago.
2008 Leadership and Service Award, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago.
2007 - 2008 As an officer of Engineers Without Borders, I contributed to the achievement of the Student Organization of the Year Award (2007), and a formal recognition from the University of Illinois Board of Trustees (2008).
2007 Chancellor's Student Service Award, University of Illinois at Chicago.
2006 Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago.