Dr. Boonthum earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Old Dominion University in 2007. Since 2001 as a research assistant, she has been working on two research projects, iSTART and RSAT (funded by NSF and IES), collaborating with Old Dominion University, University of Memphis, and Northern Illinois University.

Research Interests: Artificial Intelligence (Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics), Cognitive Robotics.

Recent Publications:

• Boonthum, C., Levinstein, I.B, & McNamara, D. S. (2006) Evaluating Self-Explanations in iSTART: Word Matching, Latent Semantic Analysis, and Topic Models. In A. Kao & S. Poteet (Eds.), Text Mining and Natural Language Processing, Springer. 91-106.
• McNamara, D. S., Boonthum, C., Levinstein, I. B. & Millis, K. (2007). Evaluating Self-Explanations in iSTART: Comparing Word-based and LSA Systems. In T. Landauer, D. S. McNamara, S. Dennis, & W. Kintsch (Eds.), LSA: A Road to Meaning. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. 227-241.
• Boonthum, C., Wang, L., Olariu, S., and Zomaya, A.  (2007). Wireless Networks: Opportunities for Infrastructure-related Optimization.  UNESCO-EOLSS (Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems).
• McNamara, D. S., O’Reilly, T., Rowe, M., Boonthum, C., & Levinstein, I. B. (2007). iSTART: A Web-Based Tutor that Teaches Self-Explanation and Metacognitive Reading Strategies. In D. S. McNamara (Ed.), Reading Comprehension Strategies: Theories, Interventions, and Technologies.  397-420
• Boonthum, C., Levinstein, I.B., Olariu, S., Pigli, E., Shurkova, E., and Zomaya, A.Y. (2007). Mobile computing: Opportunities for optimization research. Computer Communications 30 (4), 670-684.
• Levinstein, I.B., Boonthum, C., Pillarisetti, S.P., and McNamara, D.S.  (2007). iSTART 2: Improvements for Efficiency and Effectiveness.  Behavior Research Methods Instruments and Computers.
• Gilliam, S., Magliano, J.P., Millis, K.K., Levinstein, I.B., and Boonthum, C.  (2007).  Assessing the format of the presentation of text in developing a Reading Strategy Assessment Tool (R-SAT).  Behavior Research Methods Instruments and Computers.
• Boonthum, C., Levinstein, I.B., McNamara, D.S., Magliano, J.P., and Millis, K.K. (in press). NLP Techniques in Intelligence Tutoring Systems.  In J. Rabunal, J. Dorado, & A. Pazos (Eds), Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence. Idea Group Publishing: PA.
• Williams, A.B., Touretzky, D.S, Tira-Thompson, E.J., Manning, L., Boonthum, C., & Allen, C.S. (2008) Introducing an Experimental Cognitive Robotics Curriculum at Historically Black Colleges. The ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE-2008).
• Williams, A.B., Touretzky, D.S., Manning, L., Walker, J.J., Boonthum, C., Forbes, J., and Doswell, J.T. (2008) The ARTSI Alliance: Recruiting Underrepresented Students to Computer Science and Robotics to Improve Society. The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2008) Spring Symposia.