The MiGen team (January 2008)
Project Leaders
Richard Noss is Professor of Mathematics Education at the Institute of Education, University of London, and co-director of the London Knowledge Lab. He has directed a series of research projects on the design and evaluation of mathematical microworlds. Since September 2007, he holds the post of Associate Director (Technology Enhanced Learning) of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme. In 2003, he co-founded the Kaleidoscope network of excellence, and was deputy director until the end of 2005. Richard was editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Computers for Mathematical Learning until 2005.
Alex Poulovassilis is
Professor of Computer Science, in the School of Computer Science and Information Systems at Birkbeck. She is interested in techniques for organising, accessing, integrating and personalising information so as to improve its usefulness to the people who need it. Her current areas of research include:
- Information personalisation: tools for faciliting the formation of learning communities and the personalised discovery and assimilation of knowledge.
- Information integration: data transformation/integration; heterogenous query processing; semantic web; data integration in Grid and P2P environments.
- Database languages: query languages, query processing, event-condition-action (ECA) rules.
Project Staff
Celia Hoyles is Professor of Mathematics Education at the London Knowledge Lab, the Institute of Education, University of London. She has directed over 20 research projects concerned with mathematics at all levels and in a variety of contexts. She was awarded an OBE for services to mathematics education and the Hans Freudenthal medal in recognition of her cumulative programme of research. Between 2004 and 2007 she was the Government’s Chief Adviser for Mathematics. She is also a member of the Executive Committee of the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction (ICMI).
George Magoulas is Reader in Computer Science and Programme Director of the MSc Advanced Information Systems at the School of Computer Science, Birkbeck College. He holds a BEng/MEng (Systems & Control) and PhD (Neural Networks Learning) in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece, and a PGCE (Higher Education) from Brunel University. George has received awards for his research work from the Greek State Scholarships Foundation (1999), the IEEE (2000), the EUNITE (2001 and 2004) and the IADIS (2006), and has secured grants from the EPSRC, the ESRC, the AHRC, and the JISC. He is perhaps best recognised for his work in learning and adaptation algorithms with improved characteristics for artificial neural networks; (ii) an understanding of convergence behaviour of some popular learning algorithms; (iii) the design of user modelling and adaptation techniques within the framework of Computation Intelligence. His current research interests are in learning, adaptation and evolution in complex environments with applications in user modelling, temporal sequence processing, adaptive systems and personalised learning environments. He has extensively published in these areas and currently serves at the boards of several journals.
Niall Winters is a Research Councils UK Academic Fellow at the London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education, University of London. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Dublin, Trinity College (2002) and has been a visiting researcher at Media Lab Europe and the Technical Univerisyt of Lisbon (IST). His main reserach interests are: (i) the interdisciplinary design and development of technology enhanced learning environments, with a particular focus on emerging technologies and (ii) participatory technologies for development. He is currently Principal Investigator on the CoMo project, a Co-Investigator on the MiGen and ReMath projects and a collaborator on the VeSel project. he leads the LKL’s research on the OLPC initiative and in 2006, co-directed the Learning patterns for the design and deployment of mathematical games project.
Ken Kahn earned his doctorate in computer science from MIT. He has spent over 30 years as a researcher in programming languages, computer animation, and programming systems for children. He has been a faculty member at MIT, University of Stockholm, and Uppsala University. For over eight years he was a researcher at Xerox PARC. In 1992, Ken founded Animated Programs whose mission is to make computer programming child’s play. He received a patent covering the underlying technology of ToonTalk (US Patent Number 5,517,663). At the London Knowledge Lab he recently worked on WebLabs and the BBC Digital Curriculum Project. He is also the principal investigator in two higher education technology projects at
the University of Oxford.
Research Officers
Eirini Geraniou is working as a full time research officer at the London Knowledge Lab. Before joining the MiGen team in January 2008, she worked as a mathematics teacher at Trinity Catholic School in Leamington Spa. She has also worked as a sessional lecturer at the Maths Support Centre at Aston University in Birmingham helping undergraduate students in mathematics. She completed her PhD in mathematics education at the University of Warwick in 2006. Her research focused on the transition from undergraduate to graduate studies in mathematics. She has also completed an MSc in mathematics education at the University of Warwick in 2001 and a first degree in pure mathematics at the University of Crete, Greece in 2000. Her research interests include advanced mathematical thinking, students’ motivation in learning mathematics, learning styles and understanding formal definitions and proofs in mathematics.
Sergio Gutiérrez Santos received his PhD from University Carlos III of Madrid in 2007. The title of his doctoral dissertation was “Sequencing of learning activities oriented towards reuse and auto-organization for intelligent tutoring systems”. He has worked at the Intel IT Innovation Centre (Leixlip, Ireland) and the French company Paraschool (Paris, France). He has also been invited to collaborate as a research assistant in both University of Piraeus (Greece) and University Cote d’Opal (Calais, France). When he is not travelling for work, he tries to travel for fun. His research interests lie where learning technologies, complex systems and swarm intelligence behaviours meet. He had been involved in several projects with both Spanish and European funding before joining the MiGen team in 2007.
Manolis Mavrikis successfully defended his PhD in 2007 at the University of Edinburgh from where he also holds an MSc in Artificial Intelligence. He received his BSc in Applied Mathematics from the University of Athens. During his part-time PhD studies he was the main developer for WaLLiS, a web-based Intelligent Learning Environment for Mathematics. He was employed as research assistant for the EU project LeActiveMath to conduct empirical studies to inform the design of ActiveMath (2005) and to develop content (2006). His primary interests lie around the design and development of Interactive Learning Environments for mathematics, their enhancement with intelligent feedback capabilities, and applying statistical and machine learning techniques for analysing students behaviours while interacting with them.
Darren Pearce is a full-time postdoctoral researcher on the MiGen Project having previously worked at the lab as a Research Officer in Learner-Centred Educational Technology. He is also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Ideas Lab at the University of Sussex. During his time at Sussex, he was a full-time Research Fellow on the EPSRC-funded Riddles Project. Much of his current research interests followed from this project. In particular, he is interested in the ways in which it is possible to collaborate on a task (in the most general sense of both ‘collaborate’ and ‘task’). He is also interested in task state-space navigation, especially in combination with sophisticated approaches to collaboration. He is currently correcting his DPhil in Natural Language Processing in Informatics (at Sussex). It is entitled ‘Collocation Extraction: A Generic Substitution-Based Approach’.
PhD Student
Mihaela Cocea is a PhD student in the School of Computer Science and Information Systems at Birkbeck College, University of London. She received her BSc in Computer Science from “Al.I.Cuza” University of Iasi, Romania in 2003 and completed her MSc in Learning Technologies at National College of Ireland in 2007. Her interests lie in the areas of intelligent learning environments, artificial intelligence, user modelling and adaptive feedback.
Other team members
José Armando Valente was Rio Branco Visiting Scholar from Brazil, at the London Knowledge Lab for several months in 2007-08. He is professor of the Multimedia Department at the Art Institute and Researcher of the Nucleus of Informatics Applied to Education, (Nied) both at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp), and collaborating Professor in the Graduate Program in Education: Curriculum at the Pontificia Universidade Católica, (Puc-SP). He holds a PhD in Use of ICT in Special Education from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Valente coordinated several nationwide programs for preparing educators to use ICT in their school activities. He is a member of the Federal Government task force to design the “One laptop per student” program in Brazil.
John Mason is Professor of Mathematics Education at the Open University and a consultant on the project. He led the Centre for Mathematics Education in OU in various capacities for fifteen years, which produced the influential Routes-to Roots-of Algebra, and numerous collections of materials for teachers at every level. His principal focus is thinking about mathematical problems, and supporting others who wish to foster and sustain their own thinking and the thinking of others. Other interests include the study of how authors have expressed to students their awareness of generality, especially in textbooks on the boundary between arithmetic and algebra, and ways of working on and with mental imagery in teaching mathematics.
