Research Connections with Sankalan Pal Chowdhury & Tabitha Edith Lee

​Every two months, we host experienced researchers who share with us their visions for promising research ideas or directions in 5 minute pitches. After pitches, a 1 hour social starts where everyone engages with each speaker in a break out room, to discuss ideas further, share experience, and potentially explore avenues for collaboration.

Sankalan is a doctoral student currently working on improving the tutoring abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in order for them to fill in gaps in education systems across the world. He primarily focuses on high school math education but is also open to other subjects. He did his Bachelor's Thesis on Masked Adverserial Auto Encoders supervised by Arnab Kumar Mondal and Prof. Prathosh AP and his Master's Thesis on Collecting High Quality Tutoring Conversations supervised by Nico Daheim and Prof. Mrinmaya Sachan. His Master's Thesis won the Fitz Kutter Award for best Industrially Oriented Thesis in Switzerland.

Tabitha Edith Lee is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Université de Montréal and Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, where she is grateful to be advised by Prof. Glen Berseth and Prof. Yoshua Bengio. Her research investigates how robots and embodied artificial intelligence can safely learn what to learn: understanding and utilizing the principles, organization, and objects that govern learning while avoiding harm. Her research vision is to develop safe, human-centric embodied artificial general intelligence that augments and empowers humanity within our open world. She completed a Ph.D. in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University with Prof. Oliver Kroemer and has over six years of industry experience in robotics research and engineering. She is also an IVADO Postdoctoral Research Funding Program recipient, an RSS Pioneer, an NCWIT Collegiate Award Honorable Mention recipient, and a Siebel Scholar in Computer Science.