Biography
Dr. Siqing Wei is an Assistant Professor at the Youngstown State University. He received a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Engineering Education program at Purdue University as a triple boiler. He was a postdoc fellow at the University of Cincinnati under the supervision of Dr. David Reeping. His research interests span several major research topics, which are teamwork, AI in education, cultural diversity, and international and Asian/ Asian American student experiences. He utilizes innovative and cutting-edge methods, such as person-centered approaches, NLP, ML, and Social Relation Models. He studies and promotes multicultural teaming experiences to promote an inclusive and welcoming learning space for all to thrive in engineering. Particularly, he aims to help students improve intercultural competency and teamwork competency through interventions, counseling, pedagogy, and mentoring. Dr. Wei received the 2024 FIE New Faculty Fellow Award and recently received an NSF grant as a Co-PI for proposing a set of design principles for Generative AI based educational tool creation.
Degrees Earned
B.S. Electrical and Computer Engineering, 2017 M.S. Electrical and Computer Engineering, 2019 Ph.D. Engineering Education, 2024
Research Areas
Engineering; Machine Learning/AI
Research Interests
Dr. Wei's research interests span several major research topics, which are teamwork, AI in education, cultural diversity, and international and Asian/ Asian American student experiences. He utilizes innovative and cutting-edge methods, such as person-centered approaches, NLP, ML, and Social Relation Models. He studies and promotes multicultural teaming experiences to promote an inclusive and welcoming learning space for all to thrive in engineering. Particularly, he aims to help students improve intercultural competency and teamwork competency through interventions, counseling, pedagogy, and mentoring. Recently, he is about to kick off a NSF-funded project to investigate the design principles for GAI educational tool creation.
Topical Areas
Applied Computer Science; Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Systems; Educational Sciences; Informatics, Analytics and Information Science; Psychology Sociology; Organization
Research Synergy
With technical training background in ECE and topic training in engineering education, my research bridges the application of cutting edge computational methods, like GAI, in educational research settings. In my major research topic, student teamwork, I would like to try out methods to enable large-scale investigation as both numerical and textual data mining. Furthermore, one of my recently funded project aims to develop and test design principles for developing AI-empowered educational tools, focusing on providing personalized and humanized interactions and feedback grounded in learning theories and HCI theories.
Motivation
The biggest motivation is to engage with a wide range of academics and students, who might develop different AI-empowered tools in their research and teaching use, where I would like to seek more of their first-hand experiences of their design and implementation, which will fuel our funded projects to better proposed the appropriate design principles for AI-based educational tool creation. Furthermore, I am currently in a primary teaching institute with limited research infrastructure and capability, where very few graduate programs existed. I would like to further build academic network for shared research collaboration opportunity.
Supervising Students Plan
With Yunmeng, a graduate student I formerly mentored during my immediate-past postdoc period, we will engage in literature review prior to the onset of the ten-week events. During the events, we plan to host on-site interview for relevant scholars who had or will have the experiences of creating AI-based tools (preferred education related) about their experiences on tool creation and any lessons learned.
Student Merit
I have worked with this selected students pretty closely during my one-year postdoc period. We worked along very well and was very productive. With shared and similar minds, Yunmeng was not only able to complete assigned tasks on time, but also inspired further thoughts on our projects, which either deepened in our analysis for the existing data, or ignited future research direction.
Lightning Talk Title
Principles of Educational GenAI Tool Creation
Keywords
educational research; engineering design; design principles; GenAI