August 18, 2026
Recent PhD Graduate Deniz Sonmez-Unal and SCI Professor Erin Walker received the best paper award at the 2026 Educational Data Mining Conference (EDM) for their paper “Leveraging Privileged Multimodal Data to Model Cognitive States in an Interactive Learning Platform.”
The EDM Conference recognizes research that uses data-driven approaches to better understand and improve learning and teaching. This year’s conference, located in Seoul, South Korea, focused on connecting research across disciplines, cultures and, contexts to address challenges in education.
Their co-authors include Theresa Mowad (a Cognitive Psychology PhD Student at Lehigh University), Catherine M. Arrington (professor, Lehigh University), and Erin Solovey (associate professor, Worcester Polytechnic Institute). Sonmez-Unal led the work, which was based on the last chapter of her dissertation.
The paper focused on improving how intelligent tutoring systems understand students’ cognitive states. These systems typically rely on behavioral data, such as whether a student answers correctly or how long they take to respond, which provides only an indirect view of their thinking. The researchers used a framework called Learning Using Privileged Information (LUPI), which allows models to learn from richer data, such as student think-alouds and written descriptions, during training while relying only on behavioral data when deployed.
The researchers tested their approach by modeling rule learning, a framework for understanding how students develop concepts while solving problems. Their results showed that using richer information during training improved the model’s ability to predict students’ cognitive states, particularly nuanced states that are difficult to identify from behavioral data alone. The research was recognized for offering a practical way to make intelligent tutoring systems more accurate and better able to understand how students learn, without requiring extensive multimodal data from every student.
Join us in congratulating Deniz Sonmez-Unal and Dr. Walker on this achievement!