Recent ISE doctoral graduate selected for Innovation Grant Award

Erhan Karakaya, a 2020 doctoral graduate of the Auburn University Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, was recently selected for an Innovation Grant Award at Purdue University, where he is a visiting assistant professor.

Along with Hua Cai, associate professor of industrial engineering at Purdue, Karakaya is working to offer students more timely feedback and customized learning assistance through an artificial intelligence teaching assistant (TA). 

The project uses Gradescope data to predict causes of incorrect answers and provide feedback. In addition to this, a website interface has been developed to gather student submission information as well as feedback in order to continuously improve this tool. The tool is being tested during the fall semester in the hopes that it can be scaled for use in other areas.

“I have been teaching large classes of about 115 to 160 students both at Auburn and Purdue for Engineering Economy along with other IE classes,” said Karakaya. “My colleague, Hua Cai, and I usually get feedback to provide more practice questions from students. However, it is sometimes difficult to provide extra questions and give feedback to a large number of students. Thus, we came up with an idea that we can develop an AI-powered TA tool to provide more timely feedback and real-time customized learning assistance to students.”

For more complex problems, the tool can also direct students to examples in course slides or in the textbook that covers the building blocks for solving the problem. The tool is a machine learning-based classification algorithm that is trained based on historical assignment feedback and common mistakes identified by the instructors.

“I am extremely happy to get the award and also be part of a team that works on such a project,” said Karakaya. “We believe and plan to transform the idea into other large classes to provide more help for the students.”

Karakaya credits the Auburn University Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering in helping him achieve his current career goals.

“I had a chance to teach a class for a large number of students at Auburn, which gave me tremendous experience,” he said. “This helped me to get my current job at Purdue which has a very large industrial engineering undergraduate program and also the number two ranking in the nation among IE programs. I am thankful to the Auburn ISE family and Dr. Alice Smith as my advisor to help me to get all the experience and knowledge that I got during my time at Auburn.”