My main research interests are in the design of intelligent user interfaces. I'm involved in several projects in the area of educational technology, adaptive hypermedia and interfaces for the tax law. In the past, I also did research on integrated learning environments including McBagel and SMILE, visual programming languages, heuristic search methods, and music and computers. On this page, only the current projects are described but some of the publications refer to earlier research.

This project is a collaboration with Sadhana Puntambekar (U. of Wisconsin) funded by NSF's Interagency Education Research Initiative (IERI). CoMPASS is an educational hypermedia environment providing a wide range of descriptions of science and math concepts to middle school students. We are studying whether and how teachers can use the existing digital libraries to reuse the content in these libraries for use in CoMPASS.

This project is a collaboration with Sadhana Puntambekar (U. of Wisconsin) and Sanjay Rebello (Kansas State U.) funded by NSF's National Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Digital Library (NSDL) Program. We are studying the impact of an educational hypermedia system with concept maps as navigation support on the science and math understanding of middle school students. We are especially interested in helping students to bridge the gap between abstract concepts and their application in the real world.

This is a collaboration with Brigitte Muehlmann (Bentley College). We are studying why tax professionals have problems using the original tax code (IRC) with the goal of providing an intelligent user interface for the IRC.