Since August 2011 I have been in the Computer Science Department of North Carolina State University seeking my PhD degree. I am a member of the IntelliMedia group, now a part of the Center for Educational Informatics (CEI) led by Dr. James Lester, who is also my graduate advisor.
Before joining North Carolina State University, I earned my bachelor’s in Computer Science with a minor in Japanese Language and Linguistics at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. In my time at Earlham I became a member of what is now known as the Blue Waters Student Internship Program in which I worked to develop tools and curricula for teaching parallel computing. Completing my studies in 2010, I worked at The Shodor Foundation in Durham, North Carolina for a year designing, developing, and marketing educational apps for the iPad as well as continuing to develop parallel computing software and curricula until I left for NCSU where my focus is in Natural Language Processing and Text Analytics.
Education
Ph.D. Computer Science (currently enrolled)
North Carolina State University
Bachelor of Arts: Computer Science, minor Japanese Language and Linguistics (2010)
Earlham College
Honors
Presidential Honors Scholarship (2006-2010)
Wilkinson Award (2006-2010)
TeraGrid ’09 Parallel Programming Competition – First Place (part of team) (2009)
National Cyber Defense Competition – Third Place (part of team) (2009)
Research
My interests include natural language processing, text analytics and the use of deep learning to advance the state-of-the-art in these fields. My current research centers around robustness to moderate and severe disfluency in the analysis of text generated by elementary school age students for content knowledge at both the answer-level and at the level of individual concepts. My interests include incorporating my high performance computing experience into solutions to problems in these areas.
Refereed Conference Papers
Samuel Leeman-Munk, Angela Shelton, Eric Wiebe, James Lester. “Towards Domain-Independent Assessment of Elementary Students’ Science Competency using Soft Cardinality.” Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, Baltimore Maryland, 2014, pp. 61-67.
Samuel Leeman-Munk, Eric Wiebe, James Lester. “Assessing Elementary Students’ Science Competency with Text Analytics” Proceedings of The 4th International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge, Indianapolis, Indiana, 2014, pp. 143-147.
Symposium Presentations
Samuel Leeman-Munk, Eric Wiebe, and James Lester. Mining Student Science Argumentation Text To Inform An Intelligent Tutoring System. American Educational Research Symposium for Educational Data Mining, San Francisco, CA, 2013.
Journal Articles
Samuel Leeman-Munk, Aaron Weeden. An Automated Approach to Multidimensional Benchmarking on Large-scale Systems. Journal of Computer Science Education, 2010. (pdf) (website)